Graduate School of Language Technology

Nordic Graduate School of Language Technology

Speech Technology Level 1 (2005)

 

The class is organized by

Rolf Carlson rolf at speech.kth.se (Responsible for the course) http://www.speech.kth.se/~rolf
Mats Blomberg matsb at speech.kth.se http://www.speech.kth.se/~matsb
Kjell Elenius kjell at speech.kth.se http://www.speech.kth.se/~kjell
Björn Granström bjorn at speech.kth.se http://www.speech.kth.se/~bjorn
David House davidh at speech.kth.se http://www.speech.kth.se/~davidh

Dept. Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

 

The start of the class will be in Göteborg September 15, 2005 followed by one meeting 31/10 – 1/11 and closing seminar in January 2006 both in Stockholm.

Overview

 

The aim of this course is to give an overview of speech technology, some of the underlying theories and models and how these are integrated into applications, such as multimodal dialog systems.

 

The course is intended for both students with a limited knowledge of the field and for students with a more extensive background in speech technology, who will be expected to take a more active part in the discussion of current research. In this way, the course is also meant to contribute to the common platform for students with different backgrounds in the Nordic graduate school of language technology supported by NorFA.

 

The course is divided into 5 parts:

Introductory lectures; Reading the listed material; Individual practical exercises; Preparing a term paper; and a Closing seminar including discussions, practical exercises and presentation of the term papers.

 

Introductory lectures will give an overview of the field with an emphasis on basic concepts and standard methods.

 

Individual practical exercises will include speech analysis and some other specific tasks related to speech technology. The results should be reported and discussed during the fall period.

 

During the course a term paper should be prepared by each student. The paper should be presented during the closing seminar in January (Stockholm). The closing seminar includes: Exercises, Presentation of term papers,  Discussion of the reading material and the term papers.

 

Schedule

Introductory lecture slides will be linked to each topic.

Date

Time

Content

Teacher

15/9

10.00-12.00
Humanisten,
Gothenburg
Room C430

Introduction

Rolf Carlson

Acoustic Phonetics

 

David House

15/9

13.00-17.00
Humanisten
Room C430

Dialog Systems

Rolf Carlson

17/10

 

Phonetic practical exercise due

David House

31/10
1/11

Detailed Program


Fantum, TMH, KTH, Stockholm

Speech and Speaker Recognition
Dialog system demonstration Multimodal speech Synthesis
Phonetic Analysis

Kjell Elenius
Mats Blomberg
Alec Seward
Gabriel Skantze
Björn Granström
David House

24/1  2006

10.00-16.00
Fantum, TMH, KTH, Stockholm

Closing seminar

All teachers

 

 Individual practical exercises

Phonetic analysis: Each student should carry out an acoustic investigation of their own speech. This exercise will make the student familiar with speech analysis and the basic structure of speech sounds. The results should be summarised and sent to David House before 17/10. The practical exercise will be discussed by all students during the second meeting 31/10 - 1/11. More information can be found on http://www.speech.kth.se/~rolf/NGSLT/SpeechTech1phonlab.html

During the second meeting and the closing seminar additional obligatory exercises on speech recognition and multimodal speech synthesis will be included.

 Term paper

During the course a term paper should be prepared by each student and reviewed by two other students. The paper should be presented during the closing seminar.
More information here

Closing seminar

The closing seminar includes: Presentation of term papers; Discussion of the reading material and the term papers.

Link to the Closing Seminar January 2006 with link to papers

 

Reading material

Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics, Keith Johnson, ISBN# 0-631-20094-0 (a second edition is also available)

An Introduction to Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Thierry Dutoit, ISBN# 0-7923-7923-4498-7

Holmes, John and Wendy Holmes (2001 2nd): Speech Synthesis and Recognition, London: Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0-7484-0856-8 (hardback), ISBN 0-7484-0857-6 (paperback)

Michael F McTear (2002) Spoken dialogue technology: enabling the conversational interface. ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 34 , Issue 1 (March 2002), pp. 90 - 169.
http://www.infj.ulst.ac.uk/~cbdg23/interests.html

Additional papers

A selection of papers and other publications will be used as additional reading material for each subtopic.
More information here

Requirements

In order to pass the course the students must: Complete the practical exercises; Prepare and present the term paper; Review two term papers; Participate actively in the discussions in the closing seminar.

 

Links to earlier Speech Technology 1:  2001, 2002, 2004

 

Last updated: January 9, 2006