1. Why Study Spoken Language?
Julia Hirschberg
CS 4706
11/21/2018

2. 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?
11/21/2018

3. Variation like this can signal
Topic Structure
Information Status: what’s shared knowledge? What’s important?
Speaker State
Emotion
Deception
Speech Acts
Syntactic Structure
11/21/2018

4. Semantic meaning
Speech planning
11/21/2018

5. 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
11/21/2018

6. 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
11/21/2018

7. Challenges for speech technologies Pronunciation modeling
Modeling accent, phrasing and contour
Spoken cues to
Discourse segmentation
Information status
Topic detection
Speech acts
Turn-taking
Speaker State: emotional speech, charismatic speech, deceptive speech….
11/21/2018

8. Speech tools and speech lab
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
11/21/2018

9. 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
11/21/2018

10. Honor policy on syllabus
Late policy on syllabus (5 ‘free’ late days for the semester)
11/21/2018