Spoken Language Processing (CS 4706), Spring 2005
Time:	MW  2:40-3:55	Place	Mudd 253
Professor:	Julia Hirschberg	Office Hours:	TBA, 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.

 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.

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
Help using ToBI

Text-to-Song synthesis!

Syllabus:

Feb 3

Week	Date	Topic	Readings and Assignments
1	Jan 19	Introduction to the Course
	Jan 24	Understanding Speech Variation	Hirschberg03
	Jan 26	Interpreting Speech Variation	Pierrehumbert&Hirschberg '90; Hedbergetal02; Syrdal&Jilka04; Dohertyetal04;
	Jan 31	Analyzing the Speech Signal: Symbolic Approaches	J&M 4-4.2
	Feb 2	Analyzing the Speech Signal: Signal Processing Approaches	Johnson, Ch. 1-2
	Feb 7	Representing Speech Variation	Wilson93; ToBI labeling conventions (and see ToBI examples); Baumannetal01
	Feb 9	Tools for Speech Analysis	Praat tutorial
	Feb 14	Lab: Learning ToBI Labeling	Assignment 1: Complete the ToBI Labeling Manual Examples
	Feb 16	Speech Generation: From Concept and from Text	HLT96-ch5, TTS systems
	Feb 21	Modeling Pronunciation	J&M, 4.6
	Feb 23	Predicting Accents and Phrasing	J&M, 4.7 Pan99, Sun02, Koehn00, Rambow01
	Feb 28	Information Status: Focus and Given/New	*Nakatani99, GBrown83, Bard99, Prince92, Dahan02
	Mar 2	Discourse Structure in TTS Systems	J&M, 18.3, 19.4
	Mar 7	Speech Recognition and Understanding	J&M, 7; HLT96-ch1
	Mar 9	Midterm
	Mar 21	Speech Disfluencies	*Brennan&Schober99, Hindle83, Hirschberg&Nakatani?;Bear92
	Mar 23	Sentence, Speaker, and Topic Segmentation	Shriberg00, Shriberg98
	Mar 28	Identifying Speech Acts	J&M, 19.2-3 (new version) Jurafsky98, Nickerson&Chu-Carroll99
	Mar 30	Spoken Dialogue Systems	J&M, 19 (new version) Walkeretal97, Goldberg03, Bell&Gustafson00,[pdf] Krahmer01
	Apr 4	Turntaking in Spoken Dialogue	J&M, 19.1 (new version) Turn-taking in Conversational Analysis (follow links) Sacksetal74
	Apr 6	Corrections and Repairs	Hirschbergetal04
	Apr 11	Speech Search	Hirschbergetal01, SCANMail demo
	Apr 13	Speech Data Mining	Maskeyetal03, Hearst99
	Apr 18	Speech Summarization	Barzilay00, Furui02, Maskey&Hirschberg03
	Apr 20	Emotional Speech	Cowie00, Pereira00, Schroeder01, Bosch00, *Burkhardt00, *Ang02
	Apr 25	Deceptive Speech
	Apr 27	Charismatic Speech
	May 2	Summing Up
	May 3-5	Study Days
	May 6-13	Finals

Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
Links to Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Text || Thanks