Speech and Natural Language Processing

Analysis and modeling of speech signals. Models of speech production. Speech coding algorithms. Introduction to speech recognition and hidden Markov models. Feature extraction algorithms for speech processing applications. Statistical text-to-speech synthesis. Speech processing applications: speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken dialogue systems and the VoiceXML language. Core concepts of computational linguistics. Natural language processing tools: regular expressions, finite state machines, n-gram language models, context-free grammars, decision trees, probabilistic models of syntactic and semantic parsing, first-order predicate calculus, discourse modeling and statistical machine translation.