Graduate School of Language Technology

Nordic Graduate School of Language Technology

Speech Technology Level 1 (2006)

 

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 11, 2005 followed by one meeting 19/10-20/10 and closing seminar in January 2007 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. The students will be expected to take a more active part in the discussion of current research. 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
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 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, and Discussion of the reading material and the term papers.

 

Schedule

Introductory lecture slides will be linked to each topic.

Date

Time

Content

Teacher

11/9

10.00-12.00
Humanisten,
Gothenburg
Room C430

Introduction

 

Acoustic Phonetics

David House

11/9

13.00-17.00
Humanisten
Room C430

Multimodal speech Synthesis

Björn Granström

9/10

 

Phonetic practical exercise due

David House

19/10-20/10

Fantum, TMH, KTH, Stockholm

 

PROGRAM

Speech and Speaker Recognition
Dialog system
Phonetic Analysis

Kjell Elenius
Mats Blomberg
Rolf Carlson
Björn Granström
Joakim Gustafson
David House
Alec Seward
Gabriel Skantze

2007
January 25, 10.00 start
January 26, 12.00 end

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. The practical exercise will be discussed by all students during the second meeting 19-20/10. More information here

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

Solutions to at least three questions in the Speech Recognition exercises should be submitted to Mats Blomberg before December 1.

 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.

 

More information here

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, 2005

 

Last updated: January 19, 2007