CS4706: Spoken Language Processing, Spring 2012

Time: Mon/Wed 2:40-3:55
Place: Seeley Mudd 233

Professor Julia Hirschberg (Office Hours M 4:15-6:15 pm)
julia@cs.columbia.edu, 212-939-7114

Teaching Assistants

Rivka Levitan (Office Hours M 12:30-2:30) rlevitan@cs.columbia.edu, 212-939-7147

Erica Cooper (Office Hours W 12:30-2:30) ecooper@cs.columbia.edu, 212-939-7122

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

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 such as text-to-speech systems and speech recognition systems, and applications of speech technologies in the real world, such as spoken dialogue systems (SDS).  Students will build an SDS in a domain of their choice, working in small teams.   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 except Data Structures or equivalent, and no prior knowledge of NLP will be assumed.

Requirements

The major requirements of the course are a midterm, a final, and a 3-part class project.  Class participation will also contribute to your final grade.  The project involves building a spoken dialogue system in a domain of your choice.  You will build a text-to-speech (TTS) system and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system from components we will provide; the dialogue component will involve building a simple system to put inputs and outputs together to accomplish some interesting and useful or fun task.  You are encouraged to do these projects in teams of 2-3.  There will be several project deadlines during the term where we evaluate your project description, your TTS system, your ASR system, and the overall project.  Project deadlines  will be allowed total of 5 late days with no questions asked; after that, 10% per late day will be deducted from the grade for that component, unless you have a note from your doctor.  Do not use these up early!  Save them for real emergencies. 

All students are required to have a Computer Science Account for this class. To sign up for one, go to the CRF website and then click on "Apply for an Account".  The Speech Lab is available for use in homeworks as needed on a signup basis.  Some parts of the project must be done in the Lab.

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 Prof. Hirschberg in advance of the due date.  Please see the university policy.

Required texts:

    Daniel Jurafsky and  James H. Martin Speech and Language Processing (second edition). Pearson: Prentice Hall. 2009.  See errata before you do each reading assignment.  There are some typos in algorithms.

    Other required readings are available online via links from this syllabus.

Grading:

• 50% Exams

• 50% Course Project

•           Class participation will be taken into account in calculating the final grade.

Homework submission procedure is described HERE.

Lab Signup.

Sign-up to use the Linux computers in the Speech Lab. .

 Resources

·         Praat - Praat resources

·         Help using ToBI - ToBI Annotation Environments

·         Text-to-Speech Links and more...

·         Sox - audio file editing

Syllabus

Links to Resources

cf. also resources available from the text homepage

Places to look up definitions and descriptions of terminology:

1. Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics
2. Interesting Language Factoids and Non

Other resources

1. Karen Chung Language and Linguistics links
2. CatSpeak
3. Check out Eliza
4. Appelt and Israel's information extraction tutorial (IJCAI-99).
5. Framenet.
6. Ask Jeeves-- a search engine that answers questions in plain English.
7. Answer Bus -- another Q/A system.
8. Columbia's NewsBlaster summarizer
9. Systran machine translation (also in use at Babelfish)
10. AT&T Labs - Research Finite State Machine Library
11. Michael Collins' Parser
12. On-line dictionaries in many languages.
13. WordNet
14. Framenet
15. CoBuildDirect Corpus
16. AT&T's SCANMail voicemail browsing/search system
17. DiaLeague 2001 -- includes a link to an online dialogue system demo.
18. James Allen's Dialogue Modeling for Spoken Language Systems ACL 1997 Tutorial
19. Festival speech synthesizer demo and links to other TTS systems
20. Julia Hirschberg's Intonational Variation in Spoken Dialogue Systems tutorial

Julia Hirschberg
Professor, Computer Science

Columbia University
Department of Computer Science
1214 Amsterdam Avenue
M/C 0401
450 CS Building
New York, NY 10027

email: julia@cs.columbia.edu
phone: (212) 939-7114

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