This book addresses state-of-the-art systems and achievements in various topics in the research field of speech and language technologies. Book chapters are organized in different sections covering diverse problems, which have to be solved in speech recognition and language understanding systems. In the first section machine translation systems based on large parallel corpora using rule-based and statistical-based translation methods are presented. The third chapter presents work on real time two way speech-to-speech translation systems. In the second section two papers explore the use of speech technologies in language learning. The third section presents a work on language modeling used for speech recognition. The chapters in section Text-to-speech systems and emotional speech describe corpus-based speech synthesis and highlight the importance of speech prosody in speech recognition. In the fifth section the problem of speaker diarization is addressed. The last section presents various topics in speech technology applications like audio-visual speech recognition and lip reading systems.

This book constitutes refereed proceedings from the First International Conference on Speech and Language Technologies for Low-resource Languages, SPELLL 2022, held in Kalavakkam, India, in November 2022. The 25 presented papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers are organised in the following topical sections: ​language resources; language technologies; speech technologies; multimodal data analysis; fake news detection in low-resource languages (regional-fake); low resource cross-domain, cross-lingualand cross-modal offensie content analysis (LC4).

This book draws on the recent remarkable advances in speech and language processing: advances that have moved speech technology beyond basic applications such as medical dictation and telephone self-service to increasingly sophisticated and clinically significant applications aimed at complex speech and language disorders. The book provides an introduction to the basic elements of speech and natural language processing technology, and illustrates their clinical potential by reviewing speech technology software currently in use for disorders such as autism and aphasia. The discussion is informed by the authors' own experiences in developing and investigating speech technology applications for these populations. Topics include detailed examples of speech and language technologies in both remediative and assistive applications, overviews of a number of current applications, and a checklist of criteria for selecting the most appropriate applications for particular user needs. This book will be of benefit to four audiences: application developers who are looking to apply these technologies; clinicians who are looking for software that may be of value to their clients; students of speech-language pathology and application development; and finally, people with speech and language disorders and their friends and family members.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IberSPEECH 2016 Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2016. The 27 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The selected articles in this volume are organized into four different topics: Speech Production, Analysis, Coding and Synthesis; Automatic Speech Recognition; Paralinguistic Speaker Trait Characterization; Speech and Language Technologies in Different Application Fields

The book provides an overview of more than a decade of joint R&D efforts in the Low Countries on HLT for Dutch. It not only presents the state of the art of HLT for Dutch in the areas covered, but, even more importantly, a description of the resources (data and tools) for Dutch that have been created are now available for both academia and industry worldwide. The contributions cover many areas of human language technology (for Dutch): corpus collection (including IPR issues) and building (in particular one corpus aiming at a collection of 500M word tokens), lexicology, anaphora resolution, a semantic network, parsing technology, speech recognition, machine translation, text (summaries) generation, web mining, information extraction, and text to speech to name the most important ones. The book also shows how a medium-sized language community (spanning two territories) can create a digital language infrastructure (resources, tools, etc.) as a basis for subsequent R&D. At the same time, it bundles contributions of almost all the HLT research groups in Flanders and the Netherlands, hence offers a view of their recent research activities. Targeted readers are mainly researchers in human language technology, in particular those focusing on Dutch. It concerns researchers active in larger networks such as the CLARIN, META-NET, FLaReNet and participating in conferences such as ACL, EACL, NAACL, COLING, RANLP, CICling, LREC, CLIN and DIR ( both in the Low Countries), InterSpeech, ASRU, ICASSP, ISCA, EUSIPCO, CLEF, TREC, etc. In addition, some chapters are interesting for human language technology policy makers and even for science policy makers in general.

Languages, in all their forms, are the more efficient and natural means for people to communicate. Enormous quantities of information are produced, distributed and consumed using languages. Human language technology's main purpose is to allow the use of automatic systems and tools to assist humans in producing and accessing information, to improve communication between humans, and to assist humans in communicating with machines. This book, sponsored by the Directorate General XIII of the European Union and the Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, USA, offers the first comprehensive overview of the human language technology field.

This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages. Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model. The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language’s tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IberSPEECH 2014 Conference, held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, in November 19-21, 2014. The 29 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on speech production, analysis, coding and synthesis; speaker and language characterization; automatic speech recognition; speech of language technologies in different application fields.

Human language technologies continue to play an important part in the modern information society. This book contains papers presented at the fifth international conference ‘Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2012)’, held in Tartu, Estonia, in October 2012. Baltic HLT provides a special venue for new and ongoing work in computational linguistics and related disciplines, both in the Baltic states and in a broader geographical perspective. It brings together scientists, developers, providers and users of HLT, and is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing, promoting cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. Twenty long papers, as well as the posters or demos accepted for presentation at the conference, are published here. They cover a wide range of topics: morphological disambiguation, dependency syntax and valency, computational semantics, named entities, dialogue modeling, terminology extraction and management, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech modeling and multimodal communication. Some of the papers also give a general overview of the state of the art of human language technology and language resources in the Baltic states. This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use and application of computational linguistics and related disciplines.