Speech Technology ─ Theory and Applications

In recent years, spoken language research has successfully developed several practical applications, as well as brought forward advanced novel topics to investigate further. Speech Technology: Theory and Applications collects interesting research and development results and provides an overview of selected challenges still to be resolved.

The book is organized along two main themes: research on enabling technology and applications that exemplify the use of this technology. Each chapter is an independent review of a specific topic, covering research problems and possible solutions. The basic technology development covers areas such as automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, spoken dialogue systems and dialogue modeling, expressive speech synthesis, emotions and affective computing, multimodal communication and animated agents. The applications include speech translation, in-car, space, and military applications as well as those for special user groups. Discussion of general evaluation methodologies is also included.

Speech Technology: Theory and Applications should be a useful reference for researchers, engineers and students in the field of speech technology.

Dr. Chen is an associate professor at the Computing Science Department, ChalmersUniversity of Sweden. She has been working in Human Factors and Ergonomicsresearch for over 20 years and has published over 20 papers in the cognitive sciencespecially related to speech technology application. Chen has over 20 years teaching andresearch experience on ergonomics, human factors and human-computer interaction.She has been teaching on human cognition, human-computer interaction, usability anduser-centered design, and research methodology in undergraduate and graduate level. Inthe past 8 years, her research interests in focused on speech and multimodal interactiondesign in different applications.Dr. Jokinen is a Professor of Language Technology at the University of Helsinki. Shehas played a leading role in several academic and industrial research projectsconcerning spoken dialogue systems, cooperative communication, adaptation, andmultimodality. She has published a large number of articles and papers, organized manyworkshops in major international workshops, and given several invited talks andseminars. She is the secretary of the SIGDial, the ISCA/ACL Special Interest Group forDiscourse and Dialogue.