Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System Development

From the Publisher:

• New advances in spoken language processing: theory and practice
• In-depth coverage of speech processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding, and speech interface design
• Many case studies from state-of-the-art systems, including examples from Microsoft’s advanced research labs

Spoken Language Processing draws on the latest advances and techniques from multiple fields: computer science, electrical engineering, acoustics, linguistics, mathematics, psychology, and beyond. Starting with the fundamentals, it presents all this and more:

• Essential background on speech production and perception, probability and information theory, and pattern recognition
• Extracting information from the speech signal: useful representations and practical compression solutions
• Modern speech recognition techniques: hidden Markov models, acoustic and language modeling, improving resistance to environmental noises, search algorithms, and large vocabulary speech recognition
• Text-to-speech: analyzing documents, pitch and duration controls; trainable synthesis, and more
• Spoken language understanding: dialog management, spoken language applications, and multimodal interfaces

To illustrate the book’s methods, the authors present detailed case studies based on state-of-the-art systems, including Microsoft’s Whisper speech recognizer, Whistler text-to-speech system, Dr. Who dialog system, and the MiPad handheld device. Whether you’re planning, designing, building, or purchasing spoken language technology, this is the state of the art—fromalgorithms through business productivity.