COMS 6998: Topics in Spoken Language Processing

Instructors: Julia Hirschberg and Sarah Ita Levitan

Time: F 10:10-12:00 (Spring 2019)

Location: TBD

 

Prerequisite: COMS 4705 or another speech or NLP class

Description:  This class will introduce students to spoken language processing:  basic concepts, analysis approaches, and applications.

Required readings: 

Juafsky & Martin 2019 chapters

These and other  readings are linked from this syllabus for each class.

 Suggested:

            Keith Johnson. Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics (3rd edition). Wiley.  2011.

 

Resources:

Praat: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

tutorials: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manualsByOthers.html)

Hirschberg, ÒPragmatics and ProsodyÓ, Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Y. Huang, Oxford University Press, 2017, Chapter 28.

Assignments:

 

Grade Breakdown

            Homeworks: TBD

            Project: TBD

 

Academic Integrity

The SEAS academic integrity policy is found here.

The CS academic integrity policy is found here.

Syllabus

Note: Schedule and readings are subject to change

Date

Topic

Readings

Assignments and Optional Readings

Week 1:1/25

Introduction to Speech Processing

TBD throughout

 

Week 2:2/1

From Sounds to Language

 

 

Week 3:2/8

Acoustics of Speech

 

 

Week 4:2/15

Tools for Speech Analysis

 

Homework 1: Praat Recording and Analysis

Week 5:2/22

Analyzing Speech Prosody

 

Homework 2: ToBI Labeling

Week 6:3/1

Text-to-Speech Synthesis

 

 

Week 7:3/8

Speech Recognition

 

 

Week 8:3/15

Spoken Dialogue Systems

 

Homework 3: Dialogue Act Identification in Switchboard

Week 10:/3/29

Entrainment in Spoken Language

 

 

Week 11:4/5

Speech Analysis: Sentiment and Emotion

 

 

Homework 4: Emotional Speech Detection

Week 12:4/12

Speech Analysis: Deception and Trust

 

 

 Week 13:4/19

Speech Analysis: Sarcasm

 

 

Week 14:4/26

Speech Analysis: Charisma, Likability and Style in Speech and Text

 

 

Week 15:5/3

Speech Analysis: Personality and Mental State

 

Final Project Reports due