About me
I am a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, advised by Professor Shinji Watanabe, as a part of the Audio and Voice Lab.
I am interested in methods that can 1.) make speech models more generally useful and 2.) rely less on human supervision or modelling assumptions. This includes research topics like scaling, self-supervised learning, multilingualism, and long-form processing.
Previously, I was a Software Engineer at Texas Instruments, as part of the Ti.com e-commerce team. This collection of articles details some of the work I did on the team.
I received my Master’s in Language Technologies from CMU LTI in May 2024, and my BS in Computer Science and BA in History from the University of Central Florida in May 2021.
Recent News
- I will be interning at Adobe Research in San Francisco for Summer 2025
- XEUS won the Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2024
Selected Publications
Google Scholar will be more up-to-date.
OWLS: Scaling Laws for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation Models
William Chen, Jinchuan Tian, Yifan Peng, Brian Yan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe
ICML 2025
paper
Floras 50: A Massively Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Long-Form Conversational Speech
William Chen, Brian Yan, Chih-Chen Chen, Shinji Watanabe SLT 2024
paper
Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages
William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
EMNLP 2024, Best Paper Award
paper
EFFUSE: Efficient Self-Supervised Feature Fusion for E2E ASR in Low Resource and Multilingual Scenarios
Tejes Srivastava, Jiatong Shi, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe
INTERSPEECH 2024, Best Paper Award
paper
Train Long and Test Long: Leveraging Full Document Contexts in Speech Processing
William Chen, Takatomo Kano, Atsunori Ogawa, Marc Delcroix, Shinji Watanabe
ICASSP 2024 paper
Joint Prediction and Denoising for Large-Scale Multilingual Self-Supervised Learning
William Chen, Jiatong Shi, Brian Yan, Dan Berrebbi, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Shinji Watanabe
ASRU 2023
paper
Reducing Barriers to Self-Supervised Learning: HuBERT Pre-training with Academic Compute
William Chen, Xuankai Chang, Yifan Peng, Zhaoheng Ni, Soumi Maiti, Shinji Watanabe
INTERSPEECH 2023
paper
Improving Massively Multilingual ASR With Auxiliary CTC Objectives
William Chen, Brian Yan, Jiatong Shi, Yifan Peng, Soumi Maiti, Shinji Watanabe
ICASSP 2023, Top 3% Paper Award, SPS Student Travel Grand Award
paper
Past Positions
From May 2023 to August 2023, I was a Research Intern at the NTT Communication Sciences Lab in Japan, supervised by Marc Delcroix, Atsunori Ogawa, and Takatomo Kano.
From April 2021 to July 2021, I was part of the UCF Security and Analytics Lab, supervised by Professor David Mohaisen.
From June 2020 to July 2022, I was a Research Assistant at the UCF Computational Biology Lab, supervised by Professor Wei Zhang.
From January 2020 to October 2021, I was part of the UCF Evolutionary Computation Lab, supervised by Professor Annie Wu.