Spoken Language Processing (CS 4706), Spring 2005

Time:

MW  2:40-3:55

Place

Mudd 253

Professor: 

Julia Hirschberg

Office Hours: 

TBA, CEPSR 705

Email: 

Julia[at]cs.columbia.edu

Phone: 

212-939-7114

Teaching Assistant:

Agus Gravano

Office Hours:

MW 4-5, CEPSR 7LW1

Email:

Agus[at]cs.columbia.edu

Phone:

212-939-7147

Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
 
Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Readings

Description:

This course introduces students to research in spoken language in computational linguistics, aka natural language processing (NLP). We will study the different `meanings' that can be conveyed by the way that speakers produce sentences, techniques for analyzing spoken language, methods of developing speech technologies, and applications of such technologies in the real world, such as text-to-speech systems, speech recognizers, spoken dialogue systems, and detectors for various types of emotional speech.  NB: This course can be counted as a PhD elective in Advanced AI .  It is a requirement for the MS NLP Track.  There are no official prerequisites for this course and no prior knowledge of NLP will be assumed.

Readings:

Required readings:  Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics by Keith Johnson  and selected chapters from  Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin.  Both are available from Morningside Bookstore and will also be on reserve in the library.  Other course readings will be available either on the web or in-class handouts. NB: '*' means that the reading is optional.

 Course Requirements:

Midterm and final; 4 lab homeworks (can be done on your own pc); 1 10m class presentation on a paper relevant to one of the classes.

Academic Integrity:

Copying or paraphrasing someone's work (code included), or permitting your own work to be copied or paraphrased, even if only in part, is not allowed, and will result in an automatic grade of 0 for the entire assignment or exam in which the copying or paraphrasing was done. Your grade should reflect your own work. If you believe you are going to have trouble completing an assignment, please talk to the professor in advance of the due date.

Announcements:

Resources:

Praat
Help using ToBI

Text-to-Song synthesis!

Syllabus:

Feb 3

Week

Date

Topic

Readings and Assignments

1

Jan 19

Introduction to the Course

 

 

Jan 24

Understanding Speech Variation

Hirschberg03

 

Jan 26

Interpreting Speech Variation

Pierrehumbert&Hirschberg '90; Hedbergetal02; Syrdal&Jilka04; Dohertyetal04;

 

Jan 31

Analyzing the Speech Signal:  Symbolic Approaches

J&M 4-4.2

 

Feb 2

Analyzing the Speech Signal:  Signal Processing Approaches

Johnson, Ch. 1-2

 

Feb 7

Representing Speech Variation

Wilson93; ToBI labeling conventions (and see ToBI examples); Baumannetal01

 

Feb 9

Tools for Speech Analysis

Praat tutorial

 

Feb 14

Lab:  Learning ToBI Labeling

Assignment 1: Complete the ToBI Labeling Manual Examples

 

Feb 16

Speech Generation: From Concept and from Text

HLT96-ch5, TTS systems

 

Feb 21

Modeling Pronunciation

J&M, 4.6

 

Feb 23

Predicting Accents and Phrasing

J&M, 4.7
Pan99, Sun02, Koehn00, Rambow01

 

Feb 28

Information Status: Focus and Given/New

*Nakatani99, GBrown83, Bard99, Prince92, Dahan02

 

Mar 2

 Discourse Structure in TTS Systems

J&M, 18.3, 19.4

 

Mar 7

Speech Recognition and Understanding

J&M, 7; HLT96-ch1

 

Mar 9

Midterm

 

 

Mar 21

Speech Disfluencies

*Brennan&Schober99, Hindle83, Hirschberg&Nakatani?;Bear92

 

Mar 23

Sentence, Speaker, and Topic Segmentation

 Shriberg00, Shriberg98

 

Mar 28

Identifying Speech Acts

J&M, 19.2-3 (new version)
Jurafsky98, Nickerson&Chu-Carroll99

 

Mar 30

Spoken Dialogue Systems

J&M, 19 (new version)
Walkeretal97, Goldberg03, Bell&Gustafson00,[pdf] Krahmer01

 

Apr 4

Turntaking in Spoken Dialogue

J&M, 19.1 (new version)
Turn-taking in Conversational Analysis (follow links)
Sacksetal74

 

Apr 6

Corrections and Repairs

Hirschbergetal04

 

Apr 11

Speech Search

Hirschbergetal01, SCANMail demo

 

Apr 13

Speech Data Mining

Maskeyetal03, Hearst99

 

Apr 18

Speech Summarization

Barzilay00, Furui02,  Maskey&Hirschberg03

 

Apr 20

Emotional Speech

Cowie00, Pereira00, Schroeder01, Bosch00, *Burkhardt00, *Ang02

 

Apr 25

Deceptive Speech

 

 

Apr 27

Charismatic Speech

 

 

May 2

Summing Up

 

 

May 3-5

Study Days

 

 

May 6-13

Finals

 

Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
Links to Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Text || Thanks