This handbook provides easy access to current practice and requirements in the main spoken language technologies.

The handbook "Technical Communication" brings together a variety of topics which range from the role of technical media in human communication to the linguistic, multimodal enhancement of present-day technologies. It covers the area of computer-mediated text, voice and multimedia communication as well as of technical documentation. In doing so, the handbook takes professional and private communication into account. Special emphasis is put on technical communication by means of web 2.0 technologies and its standardization and evaluation in system development. In summary, the handbook deals with theoretical issues of technical communication and its practical impact on the development and usage of text and speech technologies.

Dictation systems, read-aloud software for the blind, speech control of machinery, geographical information systems with speech input and output, and educational software with talking head' artificial tutorial agents are already on the market. The field is expanding rapidly, and new methods and applications emerge almost daily. But good sources of systematic information have not kept pace with the body of information needed for development and evaluation of these systems. Much of this information is widely scattered through speech and acoustic engineering, linguistics, phonetics, and experimental psychology.The Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems presents current and developing best practice in resource creation for speech input/output software and hardware. This volume brings experts in these fields together to give detailed how to' information and recommendations on planning spoken dialogue systems, designing and evaluating audiovisual and multimodal systems, and evaluating consumer off-the-shelf products.In addition to standard terminology in the field, the following topics are covered in depth: How to collect high quality data for designing, training, and evaluating multimodal and speech dialogue systems; How to evaluate real-life computer systems with speech input and output; How to describe and model human-computer dialogue precisely and in depth.Also included: A fully searchable CD-ROM containing a hypertext version of the book in HTML format for fast look-up of specific points, convenient desktop use, and lightweight mobile reference; and The first systematic medium-scale compendium of terminology with definitions.This handbook has been especially designed for theneeds of development engineers, decision-makers, researchers, and advanced level students in the fields of speech technology, multimodal interfaces, multimedia, computational linguistics, and phonetics.

This book offers a state-of-the-art survey of methods and techniques for structuring, acquiring and maintaining lexical resources for speech and language processing. The first chapter provides a broad survey of the field of computational lexicography, introducing most of the issues, terms and topics which are addressed in more detail in the rest of the book. The next two chapters focus on the structure and the content of man-made lexicons, concentrating respectively on (morpho-)syntactic and (morpho-)phonological information. Both chapters adopt a declarative constraint-based methodology and pay ample attention to the various ways in which lexical generalizations can be formalized and exploited to enhance the consistency and to reduce the redundancy of lexicons. A complementary perspective is offered in the next two chapters, which present techniques for automatically deriving lexical resources from text corpora. These chapters adopt an inductive data-oriented methodology and focus also on methods for tokenization, lemmatization and shallow parsing. The next three chapters focus on speech applications, more specifically on the organization of speech data bases, and on the use of lexica in speech synthesis and speech recognition. The last chapter takes a psycholinguistic perspective and addresses the relation between storage and computation in the mental lexicon. The relevance of these topics for speech and language processing is obvious, for since NLP systems need large lexica in order to achieve reasonable coverage, and since the construction and maintenance of large-size lexical resources is a complex and costly task, it is of crucial importance for those who design or build such systems to be aware of the latest developments in this fast-moving field. The intended audience for this book includes advanced students and professional scientists working in the areas of computational linguistics and language and speech technology.

Dictation systems, read-aloud software for the blind, speech control of machinery, geographical information systems with speech input and output, and educational software with 'talking head' artificial tutorial agents are already on the market. The field is expanding rapidly, and new methods and applications emerge almost daily. But good sources of systematic information have not kept pace with the body of information needed for development and evaluation of these systems. Much of this information is widely scattered through speech and acoustic engineering, linguistics, phonetics, and experimental psychology. The Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems presents current and developing best practice in resource creation for speech input/output software and hardware. This volume brings experts in these fields together to give detailed 'how to' information and recommendations on planning spoken dialogue systems, designing and evaluating audiovisual and multimodal systems, and evaluating consumer off-the-shelf products.In addition to standard terminology in the field, the following topics are covered in depth: * How to collect high quality data for designing, training, and evaluating multimodal and speech dialogue systems; * How to evaluate real-life computer systems with speech input and output; * How to describe and model human-computer dialogue precisely and in depth. Also included: * The first systematic medium-scale compendium of terminology with definitions. This handbook has been especially designed for the needs of development engineers, decision-makers, researchers, and advanced level students in the fields of speech technology, multimodal interfaces, multimedia, computational linguistics, and phonetics.

This book offers a state-of-the-art survey of methods and techniques for structuring, acquiring and maintaining lexical resources for speech and language processing. The first chapter provides a broad survey of the field of computational lexicography, introducing most of the issues, terms and topics which are addressed in more detail in the rest of the book. The next two chapters focus on the structure and the content of man-made lexicons, concentrating respectively on (morpho-)syntactic and (morpho-)phonological information. Both chapters adopt a declarative constraint-based methodology and pay ample attention to the various ways in which lexical generalizations can be formalized and exploited to enhance the consistency and to reduce the redundancy of lexicons. A complementary perspective is offered in the next two chapters, which present techniques for automatically deriving lexical resources from text corpora. These chapters adopt an inductive data-oriented methodology and focus also on methods for tokenization, lemmatization and shallow parsing. The next three chapters focus on speech applications, more specifically on the organization of speech data bases, and on the use of lexica in speech synthesis and speech recognition. The last chapter takes a psycholinguistic perspective and addresses the relation between storage and computation in the mental lexicon. The relevance of these topics for speech and language processing is obvious, for since NLP systems need large lexica in order to achieve reasonable coverage, and since the construction and maintenance of large-size lexical resources is a complex and costly task, it is of crucial importance for those who design or build such systems to be aware of the latest developments in this fast-moving field. The intended audience for this book includes advanced students and professional scientists working in the areas of computational linguistics and language and speech technology.

This work offers a survey of methods and techniques for structuring, acquiring and maintaining lexical resources for speech and language processing. The first chapter provides a broad survey of the field of computational lexicography, introducing most of the issues, terms and topics which are addressed in more detail in the rest of the book. The next two chapters focus on the structure and the content of man-made lexicons, concentrating respectively on (morpho-)syntactic and (morpho-)phonological information. Both chapters adopt a declarative constraint-based methodology and pay ample attention to the various ways in which lexical generalizations can be formalized and exploited to enhance the consistency and to reduce the redundancy of lexicons. A complementary perspective is offered in the next two chapters, which present techniques for automatically deriving lexical resources from text corpora. These chapters adopt an inductive data-oriented methodology and focus also on methods for tokenization, lemmatization and shallow parsing. The next three chapters focus on speech synthesis and speech recognition. The last chapter takes a psycholinguistic perspective and addresses the relation between storage and computation in the mental lexicon. The work should be helpful for advanced students and professional scientists working in the areas of computational linguistics and language and speech technology.

This volume presents papers in English and German looking at the area of language processing and speech technology. The following subjects were discussed: modelling, cognition, perception and behaviour; langauge and speech systems; multilingual research and developments; prosody; syntax, morphology, lexicon; semantics; formalisms and parsing; and tools for development and teaching.