Language Engineering Applications

Outline

Any content on Language Engineering (LE) Applications will include (1) generic technologies, (2) standard applications, (3) systems design, and (4) tools and platforms. Generic technologies include the basic methods needed to process speech and text. Standard applications are the typical areas where working systems can be applied. These do not change much over the years although their specific manifestations do. Systems design is where everything comes together by learning how to design prototype application systems incorporating generic technologies. Tools and platforms focus on the basic tools which everyone uses but also larger comprehensive platforms now available for building more integrated systems. Group work and project-based education are important here due to the need for integrating the processing of different phenomena such as signals and symbols, but also multimodality.

Topics

• Generic technologies
  • speech recognition and synthesis/TTS
  • speaker identification/verification
  • text processing (preprocessing + parsing) and generation
  • text analysis and markup (SGML, XML, TEI)
  • integration of speech and text processing (signals <-> symbols <-> symbols)
  • multimodal integration (e.g. with visual input)
  • data collection (ELRA, LDC), requirements, evaluation and training
• Standard applications (including design issues, speaking environment, human factors, and examples)
  • Command-and-control
  • Intelligent MultiMedia (MultiModal) systems
  • Spoken dialogue systems
  • Information Retrieval (IR) and Extraction (IE)
  • Dictation
  • Machine Translation (MT)
  • Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL)
• Systems design
• Requirements, development, evaluation and testing
• Empirical methods (databases, knowledge elicitation)
• Architectures & communications systems
• Standards: e.g. EAGLES
• Tools and Platforms
• tools, e.g. Waves, Matlab, Entropic HTK
• evaluation and usage of a typical platform including speech and NLP (typically as groupwork or project-based building of prototype application systems)