Multilingual Speech Processing

Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff have compiled a comprehensive overview of speech processing from a multilingual perspective. By taking this all-inclusive approach to speech processing, the editors have included theories, algorithms, and techniques that are required to support spoken input and output in a large variety of languages. Multilingual Speech Processing presents a comprehensive introduction to research problems and solutions, both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, and highlights technology that incorporates the increasing necessity for multilingual applications in our global community. Current challenges of speech processing and the feasibility of sharing data and system components across different languages guide contributors in their discussions of trends, prognoses and open research issues. This includes automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, but also speech-to-speech translation, dialog systems, automatic language identification, and handling non-native speech. The book is complemented by an overview of multilingual resources, important research trends, and actual speech processing systems that are being deployed in multilingual human-human and human-machine interfaces. Researchers and developers in industry and academia with different backgrounds but a common interest in multilingual speech processing will find an excellent overview of research problems and solutions detailed from theoretical and practical perspectives. State-of-the-art research with a global perspective by authors from the USA, Asia, Europe, and South Africa The only comprehensive introduction to multilingual speech processing currently available Detailed presentation of technological advances integral to security, financial, cellular and commercial applications

Dialogue systems are a very appealing technology with an extraordinary future. Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogues Systems: Development and Assessment addresses the great demand for information about the development of advanced dialogue systems combining speech with other modalities under a multilingual framework. It aims to give a systematic overview of dialogue systems and recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems. Spoken Dialogue Systems are computer-based systems developed to provide information and carry out simple tasks using speech as the interaction mode. Examples include travel information and reservation, weather forecast information, directory information and product order. Multimodal Dialogue Systems aim to overcome the limitations of spoken dialogue systems which use speech as the only communication means, while Multilingual Systems allow interaction with users that speak different languages. Presents a clear snapshot of the structure of a standard dialogue system, by addressing its key components in the context of multilingual and multimodal interaction and the assessment of spoken, multilingual and multimodal systems In addition to the fundamentals of the technologies employed, the development and evaluation of these systems are described Highlights recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems This comprehensive overview is a must for graduate students and academics in the fields of speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech processing, language, and human–computer interaction technolgy. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system developers working in these areas.

Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications is the first comprehensive single-source guide to building robust and accurate multilingual NLP systems. Edited by two leading experts, it integrates cutting-edge advances with practical solutions drawn from extensive field experience. Part I introduces the core concepts and theoretical foundations of modern multilingual natural language processing, presenting today’s best practices for understanding word and document structure, analyzing syntax, modeling language, recognizing entailment, and detecting redundancy. Part II thoroughly addresses the practical considerations associated with building real-world applications, including information extraction, machine translation, information retrieval/search, summarization, question answering, distillation, processing pipelines, and more. This book contains important new contributions from leading researchers at IBM, Google, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, BBN, CMU, University of Edinburgh, University of Washington, University of North Texas, and others. Coverage includes Core NLP problems, and today’s best algorithms for attacking them Processing the diverse morphologies present in the world’s languages Uncovering syntactical structure, parsing semantics, using semantic role labeling, and scoring grammaticality Recognizing inferences, subjectivity, and opinion polarity Managing key algorithmic and design tradeoffs in real-world applications Extracting information via mention detection, coreference resolution, and events Building large-scale systems for machine translation, information retrieval, and summarization Answering complex questions through distillation and other advanced techniques Creating dialog systems that leverage advances in speech recognition, synthesis, and dialog management Constructing common infrastructure for multiple multilingual text processing applications This book will be invaluable for all engineers, software developers, researchers, and graduate students who want to process large quantities of text in multiple languages, in any environment: government, corporate, or academic.

In theory multiple languages can be recognized just as one language. However, current state of the art speech recognition systems are based on statistical models with many parameters. Extending such models to multiple languages requires more resources. Therefore a lot of research in the area of multilingual speech recognition has proposed techniques to reduce this need for more resources through parameter tying across languages. This work shows that tying at the density level of Hidden Markov Model based speech recognizers offers the greatest flexibility for the design of a multilingual acoustic model. Furthermore, new algorithms are designed and tested for a fast and efficient creation of systems for many different language combinations. These algorithms base on the addition of only relevant Gaussians and on the projection of a Gaussian mixture distribution to new sets of Gaussians. The positive aspects of the architecture proposed in this work are that non-native accent recognition fruitfully applies knowledge about the mother language of the speakers and that an optimal resource allocation for each language can be guaranteed through an online adaptation to the current tasks.

Speech processing addresses various scientific and technologicalareas. It includes speech analysis and variable rate coding, inorder to store or transmit speech. It also covers speech synthesis,especially from text, speech recognition, including speaker andlanguage identification, and spoken language understanding. This book covers the following topics: how to realize speechproduction and perception systems, how to synthesize and understandspeech using state-of-the-art methods in signal processing, patternrecognition, stochastic modelling computational linguistics andhuman factor studies.

2011 Carol Award winner for Debut Author from ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers)Jenny Lucas swore she'd never go home again. But being told you're dying has a way of changing things. Years after she left, she and her five-year-old daughter, Isabella, must return to her sleepy North Carolina town to face the ghosts she left behind. They welcome her in the form of her oxygen tank-toting grandmother, her stoic and distant father, and David, Isabella's dad . . . Who doesn't yet know he has a daughter. As Jenny navigates the rough and unknown waters of her new reality, the unforgettable story that unfolds is a testament to the power of love and its ability to change everything-to heal old hurts, bring new beginnings . . . Even overcome the impossible. A stunning debut about love and loss from a talented new voice.

An introduction to the major topics in developing multilingual processing systems for speech recognition, text understanding, machine translation and related NLP applications Addresses techniques for multilingual speech and language processing, focusing primarily on methods that can simultaneously be applied to more than one language • Written by authors with respected international reputations, providing an important contribution to the literature on natural language processing • Accompanied by a set of lecture presentation slides to illustrate the topics and a glossary of particular languages that pose special challenges to speech and language processing