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Why Study Spoken Language?

Why Study Spoken Language?. Julia Hirschberg CS 4706. To find out why they speak the way they do. When do people speak faster or slower (speaking rate) Why do people’s voices have different ‘qualities’ on different occasions? (voice quality) When are people likely to be disfluent?

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Why Study Spoken Language?

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  1. Why Study Spoken Language? Julia Hirschberg CS 4706

  2. To find out why they speak the way they do • When do people speak faster or slower (speaking rate) • Why do people’s voices have different ‘qualities’ on different occasions? (voice quality) • When are people likely to be disfluent? • When do people “speak up” ? • When do they emphasize certain words? • When do people speak louder or softer? • When do people ‘take a break’ in their speech? • When do they use different intonational contours?

  3. Variation like this can signal • Topic Structure • Information Status: what’s shared knowledge? What’s important? • Speaker State • Emotion • Deception • Speech Acts • Syntactic Structure

  4. Semantic meaning • Speech planning

  5. To build computational systems to perform useful tasks • Speech recognition and synthesis (TTS) • Spoken Dialogue systems: • Over-the-phone services • Tutoring systems • Speech to Speech Translation • Speech Data Mining • Homeland Security: Deception and Speaker ID • To build language systems

  6. What will we study in this course? • Speech phenomena • Acoustics, intonation, disfluencies, laughter • Tools for speech annotation and analysis • Speech technologies • Text-to-Speech • Automatic Speech Recognition • Speaker Identification • Spoken Dialogue Systems

  7. Challenges for speech technologies • Pronunciation modeling • Modeling accent, phrasing and contour • Spoken cues to • Discourse segmentation • Information status • Topic detection • Speech acts • Turn-taking • Speaker State: emotional speech, charismatic speech, deceptive speech….

  8. Course information • Course syllabus and readings (Jurafsky & Martin, second edition, chapters available from the Village Copier, 119th & Amsterdam) • Speech tools and speech lab • Courseworks: discussion, homework assignments, course files • TA: Fadi Biadsy

  9. Homework and Exams • Lab/homework exercises • Learn how to do simple speech analysis with a standard software package (Praat) that you can download on your pc or mac • Learn how to analyze intonational variation • Build and evaluate • a TTS system • an ASR system • Take-home midterm and final

  10. Honor policy on syllabus • Late policy on syllabus (5 ‘free’ late days for the semester)

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