Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.

This volume contains the revised texts of the lectures given at the Nordic Prosody VIII conference, held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim, Norway), in August 2000. Most of the nineteen contributions deal with prosodic aspects of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Estonian and Finnish, thus including in the notion of Nordic even the major Finno-Ugrian languages around the Baltic Sea. The scope of the papers is wider than on former occasions, not only representing well-established approaches to prosodic research but also covering new areas like the investigation of speech errors, the auditory processing of pitch, voice imitation, or multimodal speech perception.