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Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm, and System Development by Xuedong Huang .. PDF

Remarkable progress is being made in spoken language processing, but many powerful techniques have remained hidden in conference proceedings and academic papers, inaccessible to most practitioners. In this book, the leaders of the Speech Technology Group at Microsoft Research share these advances — presenting not just the latest theory, but practical techniques for building commercially viable products. A book on the science and linguistics of this technology and how to use it in developing and building hardware and software products. Spoken Language Processing draws on techniques from multiple fields: computer science, electrical engineering, acoustics, linguistics, mathematics, psychology, and beyond. Starting with the fundamentals, it presents all this and more:

Advances in spoken language processing: theory and practice;
In-depth coverage of speech processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding, and speech interface design;
Many case studies from state-of-the-art systems, including examples from Microsoft's advanced research labs;
Essential background on speech production and perception, probability and information theory, and pattern recognition;
Extracting information from the speech signal: useful representations and practical compression solutions;
Modern speech recognition techniques: hidden Markov models, acoustic and language modeling, improving resistance to environmental noises, search algorithms, and large vocabulary speech recognition;
Text-to-speech: analysing documents, pitch and duration controls; trainable synthesis, and more;
Spoken language understanding: dialogue management, spoken language applications, and multimodal interfaces.

To illustrate the book's methods, the authors present detailed case studies based on systems like Microsoft's Whisper speech recognizer, Whistler text-to-speech system, Dr. Who dialogue system, and the MiPad handheld device. Whether you're planning, designing, building, or purchasing spoken language technology, this provides good reference―from algorithms through business productivity.

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