The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
Author: Carlos Gussenhoven
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 957
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0198832230

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

Handbook of Automated Scoring

Handbook of Automated Scoring
Author: Duanli Yan
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 581
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1351264796

"Automated scoring engines [...] require a careful balancing of the contributions of technology, NLP, psychometrics, artificial intelligence, and the learning sciences. The present handbook is evidence that the theories, methodologies, and underlying technology that surround automated scoring have reached maturity, and that there is a growing acceptance of these technologies among experts and the public." From the Foreword by Alina von Davier, ACTNext Senior Vice President Handbook of Automated Scoring: Theory into Practice provides a scientifically grounded overview of the key research efforts required to move automated scoring systems into operational practice. It examines the field of automated scoring from the viewpoint of related scientific fields serving as its foundation, the latest developments of computational methodologies utilized in automated scoring, and several large-scale real-world applications of automated scoring for complex learning and assessment systems. The book is organized into three parts that cover (1) theoretical foundations, (2) operational methodologies, and (3) practical illustrations, each with a commentary. In addition, the handbook includes an introduction and synthesis chapter as well as a cross-chapter glossary.

Investigating Spoken English

Investigating Spoken English
Author: Štefan Beňuš
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2021-04-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030543498

Combining coverage of the key concepts and tools within phonetics and phonology with a systematic introduction to Praat, this textbook provides a lively and engaging 'way in' to the discipline. The author first covers the fundamentals of the articulatory and acoustic aspects of speech and introduces Praat as the main tool for examining and visualising speech. Next, the unit of analysis is gradually expanded (from syllables to words to turns and dialogues) and excerpts of real dialogues exemplify the core concepts for discovering how speech works. The final part of the book brings all the concepts and notions together with commentaries to the transcription of several short excerpts of dialogues. This book will be essential reading for students on undergraduate courses in phonetics and phonology.

The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics

The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics
Author: Rachael-Anne Knight
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 902
Release: 2021-12-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108596568

Phonetics - the study and classification of speech sounds - is a major sub-discipline of linguistics. Bringing together a team of internationally renowned phoneticians, this handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the most recent, cutting-edge work in the field, and focuses on the most widely-debated contemporary issues. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: segmental production, prosodic production, measuring speech, audition and perception, and applications of phonetics. Each chapter presents an historical overview of the area, along with critical issues, current research and advice on the best practice for teaching phonetics to undergraduates. It brings together global perspectives, and includes examples from a wide range of languages, allowing readers to extend their knowledge beyond English. By providing both state-of-the-art research information, and an appreciation of how it can be shared with students, this handbook is essential both for academic phoneticians, and anyone with an interest in this exciting, rapidly developing field.

Voice Attractiveness

Voice Attractiveness
Author: Benjamin Weiss
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-10-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9811566275

This book addresses various aspects of acoustic–phonetic analysis, including voice quality and fundamental frequency, and the effects of speech fluency and non-native accents, by examining read speech, public speech, and conversations. Voice is a sexually dimorphic trait that can convey important biological and social information about the speaker, and empirical findings suggest that voice characteristics and preferences play an important role in both intra- and intersexual selection, such as competition and mating, and social evaluation. Discussing evaluation criteria like physical attractiveness, pleasantness, likability, and even persuasiveness and charisma, the book bridges the gap between social and biological views on voice attractiveness. It presents conceptual, methodological and empirical work applying methods such as passive listening tests, psychoacoustic rating experiments, and crowd-sourced and interactive scenarios and highlights the diversity not only of the methods used when studying voice attractiveness, but also of the domains investigated, such as politicians’ speech, experimental speed dating, speech synthesis, vocal pathology, and voice preferences in human interactions as well as in human–computer and human–robot interactions. By doing so, it identifies widespread and complementary approaches and establishes common ground for further research.

Methods in prosody

Methods in prosody
Author: Ingo Feldhausen
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Philology. Linguistics
ISBN: 3961101043

This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study.

Computational Paralinguistics

Computational Paralinguistics
Author: Björn Schuller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1118706625

This book presents the methods, tools and techniques that are currently being used to recognise (automatically) the affect, emotion, personality and everything else beyond linguistics (‘paralinguistics’) expressed by or embedded in human speech and language. It is the first book to provide such a systematic survey of paralinguistics in speech and language processing. The technology described has evolved mainly from automatic speech and speaker recognition and processing, but also takes into account recent developments within speech signal processing, machine intelligence and data mining. Moreover, the book offers a hands-on approach by integrating actual data sets, software, and open-source utilities which will make the book invaluable as a teaching tool and similarly useful for those professionals already in the field. Key features: Provides an integrated presentation of basic research (in phonetics/linguistics and humanities) with state-of-the-art engineering approaches for speech signal processing and machine intelligence. Explains the history and state of the art of all of the sub-fields which contribute to the topic of computational paralinguistics. C overs the signal processing and machine learning aspects of the actual computational modelling of emotion and personality and explains the detection process from corpus collection to feature extraction and from model testing to system integration. Details aspects of real-world system integration including distribution, weakly supervised learning and confidence measures. Outlines machine learning approaches including static, dynamic and context‐sensitive algorithms for classification and regression. Includes a tutorial on freely available toolkits, such as the open-source ‘openEAR’ toolkit for emotion and affect recognition co-developed by one of the authors, and a listing of standard databases and feature sets used in the field to allow for immediate experimentation enabling the reader to build an emotion detection model on an existing corpus.

Speech Enhancement

Speech Enhancement
Author: Shoji Makino
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2005-03-17
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9783540240396

We live in a noisy world! In all applications (telecommunications, hands-free communications, recording, human-machine interfaces, etc) that require at least one microphone, the signal of interest is usually contaminated by noise and reverberation. As a result, the microphone signal has to be "cleaned" with digital signal processing tools before it is played out, transmitted, or stored. This book is about speech enhancement. Different well-known and state-of-the-art methods for noise reduction, with one or multiple microphones, are discussed. By speech enhancement, we mean not only noise reduction but also dereverberation and separation of independent signals. These topics are also covered in this book. However, the general emphasis is on noise reduction because of the large number of applications that can benefit from this technology. The goal of this book is to provide a strong reference for researchers, engineers, and graduate students who are interested in the problem of signal and speech enhancement. To do so, we invited well-known experts to contribute chapters covering the state of the art in this focused field.

Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding
Author: Gokhan Tur
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2011-05-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1119993946

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an emerging field in between speech and language processing, investigating human/ machine and human/ human communication by leveraging technologies from signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence. SLU systems are designed to extract the meaning from speech utterances and its applications are vast, from voice search in mobile devices to meeting summarization, attracting interest from both commercial and academic sectors. Both human/machine and human/human communications can benefit from the application of SLU, using differing tasks and approaches to better understand and utilize such communications. This book covers the state-of-the-art approaches for the most popular SLU tasks with chapters written by well-known researchers in the respective fields. Key features include: Presents a fully integrated view of the two distinct disciplines of speech processing and language processing for SLU tasks. Defines what is possible today for SLU as an enabling technology for enterprise (e.g., customer care centers or company meetings), and consumer (e.g., entertainment, mobile, car, robot, or smart environments) applications and outlines the key research areas. Provides a unique source of distilled information on methods for computer modeling of semantic information in human/machine and human/human conversations. This book can be successfully used for graduate courses in electronics engineering, computer science or computational linguistics. Moreover, technologists interested in processing spoken communications will find it a useful source of collated information of the topic drawn from the two distinct disciplines of speech processing and language processing under the new area of SLU.