Speech Engineering

Efficient processing of speech and language is required at all levels in the design of human-computer interfaces. In this perspective, the book provides a global understanding of the required theoretical foundations, as well as practical examples of successful applications, in the area of human-language technology. The authors start from acoustic signal processing to pragmatics, covering all the important aspects of speech and language processing such as phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics.

A wide range of fields of study support speech research. They cover many fields like for instance phonetics, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, sonics, information engineering (information theory, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence), and it is an extremely difficult job to carry all of these in one body.The first half of this book gives detailed descriptions of engineering applications, that is the speech, hearing and perception mechanisms that form the basis for automatic synthesis and recognition of speech. The second half of this book gives a detailed explanation of speech synthesis and recognition based on a collective physiological approach, that is the artificial neural networks which imitate human neural networks and have once again been bathed in attention lately. The characteristics of this book are that, along with having engineers and technicians as its main targets, it explains engineering models based on speech science.

Efficient processing of speech and language is required at all levels in the design of human-computer interfaces. In this perspective, the book provides a global understanding of the required theoretical foundations, as well as practical examples of successful applications, in the area of human-language technology. The authors start from acoustic signal processing to pragmatics, covering all the important aspects of speech and language processing such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics.Throughout the volume, the reader can easily notice an emerging methodology, a key issue in the rational design of efficient and robust language-based computer applications. While engineering rigor is guaranteed in all chapters, particular care has been taken in highlighting intuitive aspects of technical details.Contributions from acknowledged experts in the relevant sub-disciplines make this book a truly unique offering in the available literature on speech and language engineering.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2019, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in August 2019. The 57 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing including audio signal processing, automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, computational paralinguistics, speech synthesis, sign language and multimodal processing, and speech and language resources.

Signal and Acoustic Modeling for Speech and Communication Disorders demonstrates how speech signal processing and acoustic modeling can be instrumental in early detection and successful intervention with speech deficits resulting from Parkinson’s disease, Autism Spectrum disorder, cleft palate, intellectual disabilities, and neuro-motor impairments. Utilizing some of the most advanced methods in signal and acoustic modeling, this eminent group of contributors show how such technologies can inure to the benefit of healthcare and to society writ large. Paradoxically, what most of us take for granted still remains a Sisyphean battle for those with speech and language disorders, who struggle every day to make themselves heard and understood. The purpose of this book is to stimulate a vibrant discussion among speech scientists, system designers, and practitioners on how to best marshal the latest advances in signal and acoustic modeling to address some of the most challenging speech and communication disorders affecting a wide variety of patient populations across the world.

In this book we address robustness issues at the speech recognition and natural language parsing levels, with a focus on feature extraction and noise robust recognition, adaptive systems, language modeling, parsing, and natural language understanding. This book attempts to give a clear overview of the main technologies used in language and speech processing, along with an extensive bibliography to enable topics of interest to be pursued further. It also brings together speech and language technologies often considered separately. Robustness in Language and Speech Technology serves as a valuable reference and although not intended as a formal university textbook, contains some material that can be used for a course at the graduate or undergraduate level.