Research
Papers & patents
A selection of published research and granted patents, with the story
behind each. The full list is on
Google Scholar.
Papers
Are Human Conversations Special? A Large Language Model Perspective
arXiv:2403.05045 · 2024 · with Chaitanya Animesh, Sekhar Vallath, Kartik Talamadupula & Larry Heck
The question behind most of my career, made measurable. We analyzed how LLM attention behaves on human dialogue versus web text, code, and math: attention distance, dispersion, and entropy across layers. Conversations demand longer-range, higher-complexity attention, and models that clearly specialize for code and math show a measurable gap on human dialogue.
arXiv →
Plain-English explainer →
Reading with Intent (Emotional RAG LLMs: Reading Comprehension for the Open Internet)
arXiv:2408.11189 · 2024 · with Benjamin Reichman, Kartik Talamadupula & Larry Heck
RAG benchmarks retrieve tidy, neutral Wikipedia prose. The real internet is sarcastic, emotional, and unreliable. We built emotionally-inflected and sarcastic versions of retrieval corpora, showed how badly they distort reader models, and developed methods that make LLMs interpret tone instead of taking it literally.
arXiv →
Code & dataset →
Patents
US 11,093,718 B1 · Granted August 2021
Determining conversational structure from speech
Raw transcripts are a wall of words. This patent covers detecting the structure hiding inside live speech (who is addressing whom, what refers to what) so downstream systems have something to reason over.
Google Patents →
US 11,263,407 B1 · Granted March 2022
Determining topics and action items from conversations
The heart of conversation intelligence: surfacing what a meeting was actually about and what people committed to do, in real time, from messy, multi-party speech, years before LLMs made this look easy.
Google Patents →
US 11,302,314 B1 · Granted April 2022
Tracking specialized concepts, topics, and activities in conversations
Every customer cares about different concepts: their product names, their objections, their compliance phrases. This covers following those custom concepts through live conversations without retraining, by expanding a small tracker vocabulary through a universal model.
Google Patents →
US 11,599,713 B1 · Granted March 2023
Summarizing conversational speech
Summarizing dialogue is nothing like summarizing documents: meaning is co-constructed across turns, corrections, and interruptions. This covers our approach to compressing spoken conversations without losing what mattered.
Google Patents →