Why Study Spoken Language?
Julia Hirschberg
CS 4706
7/15/2016
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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?
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Variation like this can signal
• Topic Structure
• Information Status: what’s shared knowledge?
What’s important?
• Speaker State
– Emotion
– Deception
• Speech Acts
• Syntactic Structure
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• Semantic meaning
• Speech planning
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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
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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
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• Challenges for speech technologies
– Pronunciation modeling
– Modeling accent, phrasing and contour
– Spoken cues to
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Discourse segmentation
Information status
Topic detection
Speech acts
Turn-taking
• Speaker State: emotional speech,
charismatic speech, deceptive speech….
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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
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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
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• Honor policy on syllabus
• Late policy on syllabus (5 ‘free’ late days for the
semester)
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