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This is the world’s first edited book on independent component analysis (ICA)-based blind source separation (BSS) of convolutive mixtures of speech. This book brings together a small number of leading researchers to provide tutorial-like and in-depth treatment on major ICA-based BSS topics, with the objective of becoming the definitive source for current, comprehensive, authoritative, and yet accessible treatment.

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This collection examines the promise and limitations for computer-assisted language learning of emerging speech technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and acoustic visualization. Using pioneering research from contributors based in the US and Europe, this volume illustrates the uses of each technology for learning languages, the problems entailed in their use, and the solutions evolving in both technology and instructional design. To illuminate where these technologies stand on the path from research toward practice, the book chapters are organized to reflect five stages in the maturation of learning technologies: basic research, analysis of learners’ needs, adaptation of technologies to meet needs, development of prototypes to incorporate adapted technologies, and evaluation of prototypes. The volume demonstrates the progress in employing each class of speech technology while pointing up the effort that remains for effective, reliable application to language learning.

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Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

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This volume presents advanced speech technologies and their applications in the emerging areas of natural language processing, multilingual conversion between speech and text, integration of speech, text, visual information and gesture, and the design of computer workstations with a comfortable speech-based human interface. Multilingual dialogue-oriented applications are also presented, and their importance in the multilingual European environment is emphasized. Office modernisation is also addressed together with telecommunication, computer-aided education, and other areas relevant to the processing of speech-based information. The volume contains technical papers presenting advanced experimental results obtained in several projects within the ESPRIT Programme during the last three years. ... Read more

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Most of the books about computational (lexical) semanticlexicons deal with the depth (or content) aspect of lexicons, ignoringthe breadth (or coverage) aspect. This book presents a first attemptin the community to address both issues: content and coverage ofcomputational semantic lexicons, in a thorough manner. Moreover, itaddresses issues which have not yet been tackled in implementedsystems such as the application time of lexical rules. Lexical rulesand lexical underspecification are also contrasted in implementedsystems. The main approaches in the field of computational (lexical)semantics are represented in the present book (including Wordnet, CyC,Mikrokosmos, Generative Lexicon).
This book embraces several fields (and subfields) as different as:linguistics (theoretical, computational, semantics, pragmatics),psycholinguistics, cognitive science, computer science, artificialintelligence, knowledge representation, statistics and naturallanguage processing. The book also constitutes a very goodintroduction to the state of the art in computational semanticlexicons of the late 1990s. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Historical Perspective on WordNet, ETS Automated Essay Scoring, and More
"This volume emerged from the workshop on Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons [at] the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on June 28, 1996, Santa Cruz, California" (preface).The book contains 15 papers presented at the workshop.It targets researchers who seek more efficient automated methods of building semantic lexicons--working vocabularies--from large samples of natural language.

The papers present and evaluate technical approaches to achieving adequate coverage (breadth) and content (depth).Issues addressed include lexical rules, underspecification, coercion and machine readable dictionaries.Specific applications include CyC, Generative Lexicon, Levin's alternations, Mikrokosmos, and WordNet.Two key issues addressed across the chapters are how to resolve lexical ambiguity and the pros and cons of using lexical rules to classify related word forms.

The contributed chapters are grouped into four sections.Four papers in "Lexical Rules and Underspecification" discuss different approaches to using lexical rules and the tradeoffs of each approach.Three chapters in "Breadth of Semantic Lexicons" describe the use of existing lexical databases such as WordNet to acquire information about regularities in language.The third section, "Depth of Semantic Lexicons," contains four papers that focus on capturing an adequate level of detail from language samples.Four papers in the final section, "Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics," introduce issues of pragmatics, such as social constraints on conversation, in acquiring lexical information.

These papers were of initial interest to linguistic specialists and most have been dated by the subsequent evolution of computational linguistics.The continued use of WordNet in text mining and content analysis make the chapter by Christianne Fellbaum relevant to current applied research.The evolution of automated essay scoring by the Educational Testing Service brings similar relevance to the chapter on classification of free response essays by Jill Burstein and her colleagues.

This is a useful book if you work with text mining or related projects.Unless you can find a good deal on a used copy, however, I suggest borrowing it from a library and copying the chapters you need.Fair use and all that... ... Read more

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This short primer aims to show what is now possible with the help of speech technology with particular reference to uses in manufacturing industry. The book includes five major case studies of speech recognition and response in industry. The book is written in non-technical language and aims to give managers and senior engineers an overview of this technology and point out appropriate areas of implementation. Included as an appendix are brief details of companies offering equipment and services in this field. ... Read more

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This volume contains a collection of contributions to the science of language, focusing on the study of word length in particular. Within a synergetic framework, the word turns out to be a central linguistic unit, as is clearly outlined in the Editor’s preface. The book’s first chapter is an extensive introduction to the history and state of the art of word length studies.

The studies included unify contributions from three important linguistic fields, namely, linguistics and text analysis, mathematics and statistics, and corpus and data base design, which together give a comprehensive approach to the quantitative study of text and language and word length studies.

The broad spectrum of word length studies covered within this volume will be of interest to experts working in the fields of general linguistics, text scholarship and related fields, and, understanding language as one example of complex semiotic systems, the volume should be of interest for scholars from other fields as well.

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A look at the important impact of speech technology on the business worldAfter decades of painstaking research, speech-recognition technology is finally hitting the marketplace. This new technology holds that the voice is the ultimate bridge between humans and computers, thereby eliminating endless inputting, and leading to an entirely new era in business. In Business Speak, technology expert Dan Janal explores this innovative technology and covers the immense impact it will have on every aspect of the business world, from operations to products to services. He will cover how this technology will help managers modernize the workplace and improve productivity, and discuss the emergence of a new market in high-tech products. ... Read more

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The book introduces and discusses the future trends in computer science and artificial intelligence. These trends include image and speech technologies; virtual reality and multimedia systems; evolving systems and artificial life; artificial and natural neural networks; brain-computers; the Web, the intelligent agents on it, and the distributed processing systems; mobile robots in a real and in a virtual environment; bioinformatics, and the marriage of genetic engineering and information science. The book comprises chapters written by well-known specialists in this field and can be used by scientists and graduate students from different areas, as well as by a wider audience of people interested in the present and future development of intelligent systems, in all areas of information sciences. ... Read more

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The recent results of Japanese research and development in the field of speech synthesis are introduced in this book. Topics covered include text analysis, prosody control, speech synthesis units, speech modification algorithms, evaluation methods of text-to-speech synthesis, speaking style control, and voice quality control. The text presents the basic idea of speech synthesis,briefly surveys early warning systems, and follows with some of the important results of recent research, concluding with future research directions. ... Read more

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EDITS is a series of academic monographs covering a range of subjects in information technology. Published titles include works on machine translation and computational linguistics, while forthcoming volumes will cover VLSI design and the social dynamics for the growth of artificial intelligence. Written for researchers, practitioners and students, this book describes the latest theories, technologies and applications of the hidden Markov models. It introduces the necessary mathematic background needed for an understanding of the modelling and offers practical guidance for the use of both fundamental and advanced Markov models. This book is aimed at postgraduate students, scientists and engineers in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, electrical engineering and computer science. ... Read more

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Through his voluminous and influential writings, editorial activities, organizational leadership, intellectual acumen, and strong sense of history, Clifford A. Truesdell (1919-2000) was the main architect for the renaissance of rational continuum mechanics since the middle of the 20th century. This collection of 42 essays and research papers pays tribute to this man of mathematics, science, and natural philosophy as well as to his legacy. There are essays of personal reminiscences (including contributions from J. Serrin, W. Noll, and B.D. Coleman among others), as are papers at the forefronts of research in rational continuum mechanics and its applications to materials science and structural mechanics. With historical photographs, a curriculum vitae and a complete list of publications of Clifford Truesdell, this collection will be of lasting value to applied mathematicians, research scientists and engineers, and historians of science who are interested in the past and current status of the modern rationalist movement in continuum mechanics. ... Read more

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Before designing a speech application system, three key questions have to be answered: who will use it, why and how often? This book focuses on these high-level questions and gives a criteria of when and how to design speech systems. After an introduction, the state-of-the-art in modern voice user interfaces is displayed. The book goes on to evolve criteria for designing and evaluating successful voice user interfaces. Trends in this fast growing area are also presented.

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This digital document is a journal article from Decision Support Systems, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
While relationships and trust are now commonly accepted as central to conducting business both within and across organizations, literature provides only minimal guidance as to how relationships and trust in inter and intra-organizations are created. Moreover, the role that information technology could play in building trust has largely been ignored. This paper describes an Internet-based process for building trust between collaborative commerce partners. Integrating concepts from Winograd and Flores' concept of speech act theory based ''conversations for action'' with research on ''closed loop cycles'' of trust and relationships in the disciplines of management and marketing, the paper first develops a framework for understanding trust and trust-building processes. The framework characterizes the process of building of trust as the management of commitments inherent in speech acts between requesters (customers) and performers. Furthermore, joint sense making during the conversation for action contributes to greater transparency thereby also increasing the levels of mutual trust. The process framework is used to develop requirements for information technology support for a process and tool for building trust. The paper then goes on to describe an implementation of the conversations for action and the closed loop cycles through a web-based software tool based upon Winograd and Flores' work. Experiences with managing commitments and closing the loop are presented through a case study in an organization that develops and maintains menu-driven voice applications for the call center industry. The case study shows the inadequacy of traditional communication technologies in managing complex, geographically distributed collaborative commitments, and shows how the use of the software tool contributes to a greater level of satisfaction and closing of the performance loop. The paper ends with a reflection on the nature of the tool, its possible uses and misuses, and the role of human wisdom in its use. ... Read more

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Data-Driven Techniques in Speech Synthesis gives a firstreview of this new field. All areas of speech synthesis from text arecovered, including text analysis, letter-to-sound conversion, prosodicmarking and extraction of parameters to drive synthesis hardware.

Fuelled by cheap computer processing and memory, the fields of machinelearning in particular and artificial intelligence in general areincreasingly exploiting approaches in which large databases act asimplicit knowledge sources, rather than explicit rules manuallywritten by experts. Speech synthesis is one application area where thenew approach is proving powerfully effective, the reliance uponfragile specialist knowledge having hindered its development in thepast. This book provides the first review of the new topic, withcontributions from leading international experts. Data-Driven Techniques in Speech Synthesis is at the leadingedge of current research, written by well respected experts in thefield. The text is concise and accessible, and guides the readerthrough the new technology. The book will primarily appeal to researchengineers and scientists working in the area of speech synthesis.However, it will also be of interest to speech scientists andphoneticians as well as managers and project leaders in thetelecommunications industry who need an appreciation of thecapabilities and potential of modern speech synthesis technology. ... Read more

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Parsing technology is concerned with finding syntacticstructure in language. In parsing we have to deal with incomplete andnot necessarily accurate formal descriptions of natural languages.Robustness and efficiency are among the main issuesin parsing. Corpora can be used to obtain frequency information about languageuse. This allows probabilistic parsing, an approach that aims at bothrobustness and efficiency increase. Approximation techniques, to beapplied at the level of language description, parsing strategy, andsyntactic representation, have the same objective. Approximation atthe level of syntactic representation is also known asunderspecification, a traditional technique to deal with syntacticambiguity.
In this book new parsing technologies are collected that aim atattacking the problems of robustness and efficiency by exactly thesetechniques: the design of probabilistic grammars and efficientprobabilistic parsing algorithms, approximation techniques applied togrammars and parsers to increase parsing efficiency, and techniquesfor underspecification and the integration of semantic information inthe syntactic analysis to deal with massive ambiguity.
The book gives a state-of-the-art overview of current research anddevelopment in parsing technologies. In its chapters we see howprobabilistic methods have entered the toolbox of computationallinguistics in order to be applied in both parsing theory and parsingpractice. The book is both a unique reference for researchers and anintroduction to the field for interested graduate students. ... Read more

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The last decade has been one of dramatic progress in the fieldof Natural Language Processing (NLP). This hitherto largely academicdiscipline has found itself at the center of an information revolutionushered in by the Internet age, as demand for human-computercommunication and information access has exploded. Emergingapplications in computer-assisted information production anddissemination, automated understanding of news, understanding ofspoken language, and processing of foreign languages have givenimpetus to research that resulted in a new generation of robust tools,systems, and commercial products.
This volume focuses on the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) inInformation Retrieval, the technology that grew out of libraryresearch to become our best hope in dealing with today's informationoverload. The book gives a broad overview of the work being done atthe junction of these two important fields, and suggests directionsfor future explorations. It is organized into two loosely structuredparts: The first part, consisting of Chapters 1 through 7, discussesresearch systems and evaluations that represent major avenues wherethe impact of NLP technologies in information retrieval is beingexplored. The second part (Chapters 8 through 14) describes specificimplementations and prototypes of information systems where NLPtechniques are used or proposed to assist in accurate retrieval, textcategorization, question answering, and in organizing the results forthe user.
Audience: This book will be a valuable reference to researchersand practitioners in the fields of Natural Language Processing,Information Retrieval, and Computational Linguistics. ... Read more

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Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools, and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable.

This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a series of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.

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This book treats important topics in "Acoustic Echo and Noise Control" and reports the latest developments. Methods for enhancing the quality of transmitted speech signals are gaining growing attention in universities and in industrial development laboratories. This book, written by an international team of highly qualified experts, concentrates on the modern and advanced methods.