Statistical Methods For Speech Recognition

This book reflects decades of important research on the mathematical foundations of speech recognition. It focuses on underlying statistical techniques such as hidden Markov models, decision trees, the expectation-maximization algorithm, information theoretic goodness criteria, maximum entropy probability estimation, parameter and data clustering, and smoothing of probability distributions. The author's goal is to present these principles clearly in the simplest setting, to show the advantages of self-organization from real data, and to enable the reader to apply the techniques.

This book reflects decades of important research on the mathematical foundations of speech recognition. It focuses on underlying statistical techniques such as hidden Markov models, decision trees, the expectation-maximization algorithm, information theoretic goodness criteria, maximum entropy probability estimation, parameter and data clustering, and smoothing of probability distributions. The author's goal is to present these principles clearly in the simplest setting, to show the advantages of self-organization from real data, and to enable the reader to apply the techniques. Bradford Books imprint

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2013, held in Tarragona, Spain, in July 2013. The 24 full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the fields of computational language and speech processing and the statistical methods that are currently in use.

Speech is the most natural mode of communication and yet attempts to build systems which support robust habitable conversations between a human and a machine have so far had only limited success. A key reason is that current systems treat speech input as equivalent to a keyboard or mouse, and behaviour is controlled by predefined scripts that try to anticipate what the user will say and act accordingly. But speech recognisers make many errors and humans are not predictable; the result is systems which are difficult to design and fragile in use. Statistical methods for spoken dialogue management takes a radically different view. It treats dialogue as the problem of inferring a user's intentions based on what is said. The dialogue is modelled as a probabilistic network and the input speech acts are observations that provide evidence for performing Bayesian inference. The result is a system which is much more robust to speech recognition errors and for which a dialogue strategy can be learned automatically using reinforcement learning. The thesis describes both the architecture, the algorithms needed for fast real-time inference over very large networks, model parameter estimation and policy optimisation. This ground-breaking work will be of interest both to practitioners in spoken dialogue systems and to cognitive scientists interested in models of human behaviour.

Corpus-based methods will be found at the heart of many language and speech processing systems. This book provides an in-depth introduction to these technologies through chapters describing basic statistical modeling techniques for language and speech, the use of Hidden Markov Models in continuous speech recognition, the development of dialogue systems, part-of-speech tagging and partial parsing, data-oriented parsing and n-gram language modeling. The book attempts to give both a clear overview of the main technologies used in language and speech processing, along with sufficient mathematics to understand the underlying principles. There is also an extensive bibliography to enable topics of interest to be pursued further. Overall, we believe that the book will give newcomers a solid introduction to the field and it will give existing practitioners a concise review of the principal technologies used in state-of-the-art language and speech processing systems. Corpus-Based Methods in Language and Speech Processing is an initiative of ELSNET, the European Network in Language and Speech. In its activities, ELSNET attaches great importance to the integration of language and speech, both in research and in education. The need for and the potential of this integration are well demonstrated by this publication.

In this work, the authors present a fully statistical approach to model non--native speakers' pronunciation. Second-language speakers pronounce words in multiple different ways compared to the native speakers. Those deviations, may it be phoneme substitutions, deletions or insertions, can be modelled automatically with the new method presented here. The methods is based on a discrete hidden Markov model as a word pronunciation model, initialized on a standard pronunciation dictionary. The implementation and functionality of the methodology has been proven and verified with a test set of non-native English in the regarding accent. The book is written for researchers with a professional interest in phonetics and automatic speech and speaker recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2014, held in Grenoble, France, in October 2014. The 18 full papers presented together with three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine translation, speech and speaker recognition, machine learning methods, text extraction and categorization, and mining text.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2018, held in Mons, Belgium, in October 2018. The 15 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: speech synthesis and spoken language generation; speech recognition and post-processing; natural language processing and understanding; and text processing and analysis.