Agustín Gravano

I am a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Buenos Aires. I am also a Researcher at CONICET and a member of the Laboratory of Sensory Research. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University (New York) in May 2009.

My main research topic is the representation of prosodic variation in spoken dialogue, aimed at improving the models used in spoken dialogue systems, both for understanding the user's input and for generating natural responses.

Download my full CV (PDF file).

E-mail: gravanoxx[at]xxdc.uba.ar
Mailing address: Departamento de Computación, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Pabellón I, Ciudad Universitaria. (C1428EGA) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA - (Google Maps)
Phone: (+54) 11 4576-3390 - ext. 717

Teaching

Publications

Check out my citations on Google Scholar.

• Spoken Language Processing

A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, S. Benus, “Affirmative cue words in task-oriented dialogue”. Computational Linguistics. Vol. 38(1), pages 1-39, March 2012.
S. Benus, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Pragmatic aspects of temporal accommodation in turn-taking”. Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 43(12), pages 3001-3027, September 2011.
A. Gravano, R. Levitan, L. Willson, S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, A. Nenkova, “Acoustic and prosodic correlates of social behavior”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2011, pages 97-100. Florence, Italy, August 2011.
L. Dolberg, A. Gravano, “Asignación automática de entonación para un sistema de síntesis del habla”, 2nd Argentinian Workshop on NLP. Córdoba, Argentina, August 2011.
A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Turn-taking cues in task-oriented dialogue”. Computer Speech and Language. Vol. 25(3), pages 601-634, July 2011.
R. Levitan, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Entrainment in speech preceding backchannels”, in Proceedings of ACL/HLT 2011 (short paper), pages 113-117. Portland, OR, June 2011.
J. Edlund, M. Heldner, S. Al Moubayed, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Very short utterances in conversation”, in Proceedings of Fonetik 2010. Lund, Sweden, June 2010.
A. Gravano, “Modelado de la mimetización entre interlocutores para mejorar la naturalidad de sistemas de diálogo hablado”. Subjetividad y Procesos Cognitivos, Vol. 14(2), pages 79-88, May 2010.
A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Turn-yielding cues in task-oriented dialogue”, in Proceedings of SigDial 2009, pages 253-261. London, U.K., September 2009.
A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, pages 1019-1022. Brighton, U.K., September 2009.
A. Gravano, M. Jansche, M. Bacchiani, “Restoring punctuation and capitalization in transcribed speech”, in Proceedings of ICASSP 2009, pages 4741-4744. Taipei, Taiwan, April 2009.
A. Gravano, “Turn-Taking and Affirmative Cue Words in Task-Oriented Dialogue”. Ph.D. Thesis (awarded «distinction»), Columbia University, February 2009. Advisor: Prof. Julia Hirschberg.
A. Nenkova, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “High frequency word entrainment in spoken dialogue”, in Proceedings of ACL/HLT 2008 (short paper), pages 169-172. Columbus, OH, June 2008.
A. Gravano, S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, E. Sneed German, G. Ward, “The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty”, in Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008, pages 401-404. Campinas, Brazil, May 2008.
J. Hirschberg, A. Gravano, A. Nenkova, E. Sneed, G. Ward, “Intonational overload: Uses of the downstepped (H* !H* L- L%) contour in read and spontaneous speech”, in Cole, Jennifer and Hualde, José I. (eds.). Laboratory Phonology 9, pages 455-482. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. December 2007.
A. Gravano, S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, S. Mitchell, I. Vovsha, “Classification of discourse functions of affirmative words in spoken dialogue”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, pages 1613-1616. Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
S. Benus, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Prosody, emotions, and... whatever”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, pages 2629-2632. Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
S. Benus, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “The prosody of backchannels in American English”, in Proceedings of ICPhS 2007, pages 1065-1068. Saarbrücken, Germany, August 2007.
A. Gravano, S. Benus, H. Chávez, J. Hirschberg, L. Wilcox, “On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay”, in Proceedings of ACL 2007, pages 800-807. Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Effect of genre, speaker, and word class on the realization of given and new information”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2006, pages 557-560. Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
R. Sarikaya, A. Gravano, Y. Gao, “Rapid language model development using external resources for new spoken dialog domains”, in Proceedings of ICASSP 2005, pages 573-576. Philadelphia, PA, March 2005.

• Graph Theory

G. Durán, A. Gravano, R. McConnell, J. Spinrad, A. Tucker, “Polynomial time recognition of unit circular-arc graphs”, Journal of Algorithms, Vol. 58(1), pages 67-78, January 2006.
G. Durán, A. Gravano, M. Groshaus, F. Protti, J. Szwarcfiter, “On a conjecture concerning Helly circle graphs”, Pesquisa Operacional, Vol. 23, pages 221-229, April 2003.
A. Gravano, G. Durán, “The intersection between some subclasses of circular-arc and circle graphs”, Congressus Numerantium, Vol. 159, pages 183-192, December 2002.
H. Czemerinski, G. Durán, A. Gravano, “Bouchet graphs: a generalization of circle graphs”, Congressus Numerantium, Vol. 155, pages 95-108, December 2002.
A. Gravano, “Study of Problems, Properties and Algorithms for Circular-Arc and Circle Graphs” (in Spanish). Licenciatura Degree Thesis, University of Buenos Aires, July 2001. Advisor: Prof. Guillermo Durán.

Selected Talks

“Acoustic and prosodic correlates of social behavior”, at Interspeech 2011, Florence, Italy; August 2011.
“¿Por qué no habla mi computadora (todavía)?”, Charla de Borrachos, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; December 2010.
“Mimicking the interlocutor's speech: Models of speaker entrainment for improving the naturalness of spoken dialogue systems”, at the First Workshop on NLP Tools Applied to Discourse Analysis in Psychology, UCES, Buenos Aires, Argentina; May 2010.
“Breve introducción al procesamiento del habla”, at the VII Jornadas de Ciencias de la Computación, Rosario, Argentina; October 2009.
“Turn-yielding cues in task-oriented dialogue”, at SigDial 2009, London, U.K.; September 2009.
“Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue”, at Interspeech 2009, Brighton, U.K.; September 2009.
“A model of turn-taking in task-oriented dialogue”, at the LTI Seminar, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; and at AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ; February 2009.
“High frequency word entrainment in spoken dialogue”, at ACL/HLT 2008, Columbus, OH; June 2008.
“The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty”, at Speech Prosody 2008, Campinas, Brazil; May 2008.
“Classification of discourse functions of affirmative words in spoken dialogue”, at Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium; August 2007.
“On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay”, at ACL 2007, Prague, Czech Republic; June 2007.
“Effect of genre, speaker, and word class on the realization of given and new information”, at Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, PA; September 2006.
“Downstepped contours in the given/new distinction”, at the Workshop on the Role of Prosody in Structuring Discourse, Berlin, Germany; October 2005.
“The intersection between some subclasses of circular-arc and circle graphs”, at the 33rd Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, Boca Raton, FL; March 2002.
“Course-assignment problem”, at the VII Latin American Summer Workshop on Operations Research (ELAVIO), Viña del Mar, Chile; January 2001.

Miscellanea

My Erdös number is 3:

Guillermo Durán → John A. Bondy → Paul Erdös or
Jayme Szwarcfiter → John G. Gimbel → Paul Erdös or
Alan C. Tucker → Alan J. Hoffman → Paul Erdös

I am completely unrelated to Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.

Last updated: 04 May 2012