SPEECH AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

The book “Speech and Language Technologies” addresses state-of-the-art systems and achievements in various topics in the research field of speech and language technologies. Book chapters are organized in different sections covering diverse problems, which have to be solved in speech recognition and language understanding systems. In the first section machine translation systems based on large parallel corpora using rule-based and statistical-based translation methods are presented. The third chapter presents work on real time two way speech-to-speech translation systems. In the second section two papers explore the use of speech technologies in language learning. The third section presents a work on language modeling used for speech recognition. The chapters in section Text-to-speech systems and emotional speech describe corpusbased speech synthesis and highlight the importance of speech prosody in speech recognition. In the fifth section the problem of speaker diarization is addressed. The last section presents various topics in speech technology applications, like audiovisual speech recognition and lip reading systems. I would like to thank to all authors who have contributed research and application papers from the field of speech and language technologies.