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

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

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

Semantic meaning Speech planning 11/21/2018

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

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

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

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

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

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