Spoken Language Processing (CS 4706), Spring 2005
Time:	MW  2:40-3:55	Place	Mudd 253
Professor:	Julia Hirschberg	Office Hours:	MW 5-6, CEPSR 705
Email:	julia [at] cs.columbia.edu	Phone:	212-939-7114
Teaching Assistant:	Agus Gravano	Office Hours:	MW 4-5, CEPSR 7LW1
Email:	agus [at] cs.columbia.edu	Phone:	212-939-7147

Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Readings

Description:

This course introduces students to research in spoken language in computational linguistics, aka natural language processing (NLP). We will study the different `meanings' that can be conveyed by the way that speakers produce sentences, techniques for analyzing spoken language, methods of developing speech technologies, and applications of such technologies in the real world, such as text-to-speech systems, speech recognizers, spoken dialogue systems, and detectors for various types of emotional speech.  NB: This course can be counted as a PhD elective in Advanced AI .  It is a requirement for the MS NLP Track.  There are no official prerequisites for this course and no prior knowledge of NLP will be assumed.

Readings:

Required readings:  Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics by Keith Johnson  and selected chapters from  Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin.  Both are available from Morningside Bookstore and will also be on reserve in the library.  Other course readings will be available either on the web or in-class handouts. NB: '*' means that the reading is optional/can be chosen for class report.

Course Requirements:

Midterm and final; 4 lab homeworks (can be done on your own pc); 1 10m class presentation on a paper relevant to one of the classes (one of the optional papers, marked with `*’ or one you choose).

Grading:
40% Homeworks
10% Class Presentation
20% Midterm Exam
30% Final Exam

Academic Integrity:

Copying or paraphrasing someone's work (code included), or permitting your own work to be copied or paraphrased, even if only in part, is not allowed, and will result in an automatic grade of 0 for the entire assignment or exam in which the copying or paraphrasing was done. Your grade should reflect your own work. If you believe you are going to have trouble completing an assignment, please talk to the professor in advance of the due date.

Announcements:

Resources:

Praat

Wavesurfer

Help using ToBI - ToBI Annotation Environments

Text-to-Speech Links and more...

Text-to-Song synthesis!

Syllabus:

Week	Date	Topic	Readings and Assignments	Reports and HW
1	W Jan 19	Introduction to the Course
2	M Jan 24	Understanding Speech Variation	Hirschberg03
2	W Jan 26	Studying Speech Variation	Pierrehumbert&Hirschberg '90; Hedberg&Sosa02; Syrdal&Jilka04; *Dohertyetal04
3	M Jan 31	Analyzing the Speech Signal:  Symbolic Approaches	J&M 4-4.2
3	W Feb 2	Analyzing the Speech Signal:  Signal Processing Approaches	Johnson, Ch. 1-2	Damian Carter
4	M Feb 7	Representing Speech Variation	Wilson93; ToBI labeling conventions (and see ToBI examples); *Baumannetal01	Russell Klopfer HW1: Using Praat (assigned)
4	W Feb 9	Tools for Speech Analysis	Praat tutorial (Agus Gravano and Stefan Benus)
5	M Feb 14	Lab: Learning ToBI Labeling	(Agus Gravano and Stefan Benus, in the Speech Lab)
5	W Feb 16	Speech Generation	HLT96-ch5, TTS systems	HW1 due HW2: ToBI (assigned)
6	M Feb 21	Modeling Pronunciation	J&M, 4.6; *Fackrell&Skut04	Han Cheng Liang
6	W Feb 23	Predicting Accents and Phrasing	J&M, 4.7 Pan99, *Sun02, Koehn00, Rambow01 (with David Elson on Sable)
7	M Feb 28	Information Status: Focus and Given/New	Nakatani99, GBrown83, *Bard99, Prince92, Dahan02	HW2 due David Vespe
7	W Mar 2	Discourse Structure in TTS Systems	J&M, 18.3, 19.4
8	M Mar 7	Speech Recognition and Understanding	J&M, 7; HLT96-ch1
8	W Mar 9	Midterm
10	M Mar 21	Speech Disfluencies	Hindle83;*Nakatani&Hirschberg94;Bear92; *Liuetal03	HW3a: TTS (assigned)
10	W Mar 23	Sentence, Speaker, and Topic Segmentation	Shriberg00, Choi00, *Utiyama01,	Matthew Waymost
11	M Mar 28	Identifying Speech Acts	J&M, 19.5-6 (new version) *Jurafsky98, Rosset&Lamel04, Nickerson&Chu-Carroll99	HW3a due HW3b assigned Dan J Raz
11	W Mar 30	Spoken Dialogue Systems	J&M, 19.1-3,9 (new version) Walkeretal97, *Bell&Gustafson00,	James Rishe
12	M Apr 4	Turntaking in Spoken Dialogue	J&M, 19.7 (new version) Conversational Analysis and Turn-Taking *Sacksetal74,Beattie82	HW3b due Sarah Friedman
8	W Apr 6	No Class Today		HW3c assigned
12	M Apr 11	Dialogue Errors and Corrections	J&M, 19.4 (new version) Hirschbergetal04, *Goldberg03, Krahmer01	Michael Bales
13	W Apr 13	Speech Data Mining	*Maskeyetal04, Hearst99	Irina Likhtina
14	M Apr 18	Speech Summarization	*Koumpis&Renals05, Hori02, Zechner01	Daniel Vassilev
14	W Apr 20	Emotional Speech	Cowie00, *Pereira00, Schroeder01, *Bosch00, *Burkhardt00, Ang02 *Gobl&Chasaide03	Lauren Wilcox HW3c due
15	M Apr 25	Deceptive Speech	DePauloetal83, Frank92, *Mehrabian77, Streeteretal71	Payton Ong HW4: Perception Test (assigned)
15	W Apr 27	Charismatic Speech	Boss76, Tuppen74, Weber47	Chen-Yung Hsu
16	M May 2	Summing Up		HW4 due
16	May 3-5	Study Days
17	W May 11	Final Exam. 1:10pm - 4:00pm. Mudd 253 (for those bringing their own laptops) and Speech Lab (for the rest).	Results of the perception tests - Mapping of synthesizers-CUIDs

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