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dr. K.P. Truong (Khiet)

Associate Professor

About Me

How people talk and understand each other has always fascinated me. The big question for me is how to develop technology that understands spoken language: how can we make automatic speech recognition more intelligent?. Besides what is said, there is also a lot of information in how something is said: aspects of physical, emotional, and mental states resonate in the voice, both consciously and unconsciously. I am particularly interested in the automatic interpretation of this implicit information, with the aim of, for example, enabling conversational agents (such as Siri) to respond more appropriately to children or older adults, or to develop apps that offer remote support to people suffering from depression.

After studying Linguistics (specialisation Language and Speech Technology) in Utrecht, I ended up at TNO where I investigated automatic emotion recognition in speech. Then I went to the University of Twente, Human Media Interaction where I am still working on the automatic analysis of nonverbal aspects in speech communication (e.g. laughing, backchanneling) in human-human, and human-machine interaction. Besides doing research I also teach speech processing, affective computing, and interaction technology.

Expertise

Engineering & Materials Science
# Audiovisual
# Robots
# Speech Recognition
Medicine & Life Sciences
# Laughter
Social Sciences
# Acoustics
# Dementia
# Humor
# Reminiscence

Organisations

Research

My research mainly focuses on automatically analyzing and interpreting nonverbal aspects in speech communication that say something about how the conversation is going, and what someone's physical, socio-emotional, and mental state is. My goal is to make automatic speech recognition more intelligent. Among other things, I have worked on automatic detection of laughter, automatic emotion recognition in speech, and automatic generation of backchannels for artificial agents. Currently, I am supervising a number of PhD students who are researching multimodal emotion expression in older adults, and responsible design for child-robot interaction. I am also supervising master students in their research on technology for vulnerable people (e.g. people with dementia, people with multiple disabilities), and human-robot interaction.

You can also read more about my research here https://www.utwente.nl/en/research/researchers/featured-scientists/truong/index/ and on my personal website http://khiettruong.space/ 

Publications

Recent
Beelen, T. , Ordelman, R. , Truong, K. P. , Evers, V. , & Huibers, T. (2024). A Conversational Robot for Children’s Access to a Cultural Heritage Multimedia Archive. In N. Goharian, N. Tonellotto, Y. He, A. Lipani, G. McDonald, C. Macdonald, & I. Ounis (Eds.), Advances in Information Retrieval: 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2024, Glasgow, UK, March 24–28, 2024, Proceedings, Part V (pp. 144–151). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 14612). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_11
Corona Hernández, H., Corcoran, C., Achim, A. M., De Boer, J. N., Boerma, T., Brederoo, S. G., Cecchi, G. A., Ciampelli, S., Elvevåg, B., Fusaroli, R., Giordano, S., Hauglid, M. , van Hessen, A., Hinzen, W., Homan, P., de Kloet, S. F., Koops, S., Kuperberg, G. R., Maheshwari, K., ... Palaniyappan, L. (2023). Natural Language Processing Markers for Psychosis and Other Psychiatric Disorders: Emerging Themes and Research Agenda From a Cross-Linguistic Workshop. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 49(Supplement 2), S86-S92. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac215
Mijnders, C., Janse, E., Naarding, P. , & Truong, K. P. (2023). Acoustic characteristics of depression in older adults’ speech: The role of covariates. In N. Harte, J. Carson-Berndsen, & G. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023 (pp. 4159-4163). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2023-839
Branco, C., Trancoso, I., Infante, P. , & Truong, K. P. (2023). Laughter in task-based settings: Whom we talk to affects how, when, and how often we laugh. In N. Harte, J. Carson-Berndsen, & G. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023 (pp. 3622-3626). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1914
Arts, J. , & Truong, K. P. (2023). Effects of perceived gender on the perceived social function of laughter. In N. Harte, J. Carson-Berndsen, & G. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023 (pp. 1878-1882). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2023-846
Beelen, T. H. J. , Velner, E. , Truong, K. P. , Ordelman, R. J. F. , Huibers, T. W. C. , & Evers, V. (2023). Children’s Trust in Robots and the Information They Provide. In CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7). Article 66 ACM Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585801
Sharma, S. , Beelen, T. , & Truong, K. P. (2023). Robot-Supported Information Search: Which Conversational Interaction Style do Children Prefer? In HRI '23: Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 466–470). ACM Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580128
de Boer, J. N., Voppel, A. E., Brederoo, S. G., Schnack, H. G. , Truong, K. P., Wijnen, F. N. K., & Sommer, I. E. C. (2023). Acoustic speech markers for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: A diagnostic and symptom-recognition tool. Psychological medicine, 53(4), 1302-1312. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291721002804
Trouvain, J., Werner, R. , & Truong, K. P. (2022). Inhalation Noises as Endings of Laughs in Conversational Speech. In C. Mazzocconi, K. El Haddad, C. Pelachaud, & G. McKeown (Eds.), Smiling and Laughter across Contexts and the Life-span (SmiLa2022) (pp. 28-29). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/workshops/SmiLa/index.html

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Visiting Address

University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Citadel (building no. 09), room H235
Hallenweg 15
7522NH  Enschede
The Netherlands

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University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Citadel  H235
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands

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University of Twente Drienerlolaan 5
7522 NB Enschede
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