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

Huang, Xuedong; Acero, Alex; Hon, Hsiao-Wuen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0130226165 ISBN 13: 9780130226167

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2001

Synopsis

Remarkable progress is being made in spoken language processing, but many powerful techniques have remained hidden in conference proceedings and academic papers, inaccessible to most practitioners. In this book, the leaders of the Speech Technology Group at Microsoft Research share these advances -- presenting not just the latest theory, but practical techniques for building commercially viable products.KEY TOPICS:Spoken Language Processing draws upon the latest advances and techniques from multiple fields: acoustics, phonology, phonetics, linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, syntax, psychology, and beyond. The book begins by presenting essential background on speech production and perception, probability and information theory, and pattern recognition. The authors demonstrate how to extract useful information from the speech signal; then present a variety of contemporary speech recognition techniques, including hidden Markov models, acoustic and language modeling, and techniques for improving resistance to environmental noise. Coverage includes decoders, search algorithms, large vocabulary speech recognition techniques, text-to-speech, spoken language dialog management, user interfaces, and interaction with non-speech interface modalities. The authors also present detailed case studies based on Microsoft's advanced prototypes, including the Whisper speech recognizer, Whistler text-to-speech system, and MiPad handheld computer.MARKET:For anyone involved with planning, designing, building, or purchasing spoken language technology.

About this title

About the Author

XUEDONG HUANG is founder and head of the Speech Technology Group at Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. He is an IEEE Fellow.

ALEX ACERO and HSIAO-WUEN HON are Senior Researchers at Microsoft Research and Senior Members of IEEE. Both received doctorates from Carnegie Mellon University.

Foreword by Dr. Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon University

From the Back Cover

• 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 artfrom algorithms through business productivity.

From the Inside Flap

Preface

Our primary motivation in writing this book is to share our working experience to bridge the gap between the knowledge of industry gurus and newcomers to the spoken language processing community. Many powerful techniques hide in conference proceedings and academic papers for years before becoming widely recognized by the research community or the industry. We spent many years pursuing spoken language technology research at Carnegie Mellon University before we started spoken language R&D at Microsoft. We fully understand that it is by no means a small undertaking to transfer a state-of-the-art spoken language research system into a commercially viable product that can truly help people improve their productivity. Our experience in both industry and academia is reflected in the context of this book, which presents a contemporary and comprehensive description of both theoretic and practical issues in spoken language processing. This book is intended for people of diverse academic and practical backgrounds. Speech scientists, computer scientists, linguists, engineers, physicists, and psychologists all have a unique perspective on spoken language processing. This book will be useful to all of these special interest groups.

Spoken language processing is a diverse subject that relies on knowledge of many levels, including acoustics, phonology, phonetics, linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. The diverse nature of spoken language processing requires knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, syntax, and psychology. There are a number of excellent books on the subfields of spoken language processing, including speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and spoken language understanding, but there is no single book that covers both theoretical and practical aspects of these subfields and spoken language interface design. We devote many chapters systematically introducing fundamental theories needed to understand how speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and spoken language understanding work. Even more important is the fact that the book highlights what works well in practice, which is invaluable if you want to build a practical speech recognizer, a practical text-to-speech synthesizer, or a practical spoken language system. Using numerous real examples in developing Microsoft's spoken language systems, we concentrate on showing how the fundamental theories can be applied to solve real problems in spoken language processing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130226165
• ISBN 13: 9780130226167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 980