After decades of research activity, Chinese spoken language processing (CSLP) has advanced considerably both in practical technology and theoretical discovery. In this book, the editors provide both an introduction to the field as well as unique research problems with their solutions in various areas of CSLP. The contributions represent pioneering efforts ranging from CSLP principles to technologies and applications, with each chapter encapsulating a single problem and its solutions.A commemorative volume for the 10th anniversary of the international symposium on CSLP in Singapore, this is a valuable reference for established researchers and an excellent introduction for those interested in the area of CSLP.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2006, held in Singapore in December 2006, co-located with ICCPOL 2006, the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Coverage includes speech science, acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition, speech data mining, and machine translation of speech.
"A breath of fresh air… Its dual track for spoken and written language finally gives American students a chance to develop oral proficiency without being slowed down by the character writing… An ideal textbook for any program that seeks to advance rapidly in spoken Chinese and to fully prepare the students for their encounter with China. --Dr. Jingqi Fu, Associate Professor of Chinese, St. Mary's College of Maryland"
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Learning Chinese can be frustrating and difficult, partly because it's very different from European languages. Following a teacher, textbook or language course is not enough. They show you the characters, words and grammar you need to become proficient in Chinese, but they don't teach you how to learn them! Regardless of what program you're in (if any), you need to take responsibility for your own learning. If you don't, you will miss many important things that aren't included in the course you're taking. If you study on your own, you need to be even more aware of what you need to do, what you're doing at the moment and the difference between them. Here are some of the questions I have asked and have since been asked many times by students: How do I learn characters efficiently? How do I get the most out of my course or teacher? Which are the best learning tools and resources? How can I become fluent in Mandarin? How can I improve my pronunciation? How do I learn successfully on my own? How can I motivate myself to study more? How can I fit learning Chinese into a busy schedule? The answers I've found to these questions and many others form the core of this book. It took eight years of learning, researching, teaching and writing to figure these things out. Not everybody has the time to do that! I can't go back in time and help myself learn in a better way, but I can help you! This book is meant for normal students and independent language learners alike. While it covers all major areas of learning, you won't learn Chinese just by reading this book. It's like when someone on TV teaches you how to cook: you won't get to eat the delicious dish just by watching the program; you have to do the cooking yourself. That's true for this book as well. When you apply what you learn, it will boost your learning, making every hour you spend count for more, but you still have to do the learning yourself. This is what a few readers have said about the book: "The book had me nodding at a heap of things I'd learnt the hard way, wishing I knew them when I started, as well as highlighting areas that I'm currently missing in my study." - Geoff van der Meer, VP engineering "This publication is like a bible for anyone serious about Chinese proficiency. It's easy for anyone to read and written with scientific precision." - Zachary Danz, foreign teacher, children's theatre artist About me I started learning Chinese when I was 23 (that's more than eight years ago now) and have since studied in many different situations, including serious immersion programs abroad, high-intensity programs in Sweden, online courses, as well as on the side while working or studying other things. I have also successfully used my Chinese in a graduate program for teaching Chinese as a second language, taught entirely in Chinese mostly for native speakers (the Graduate Institute for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University). All these parts have contributed to my website, Hacking Chinese, where I write regularly about how to learn Mandarin.
Remarkable progress is being made in spoken language processing, but many powerful techniques have remained hidden in conference proceedings and academic papers, inaccessible to most practitioners. In this book, the leaders of the Speech Technology Group at Microsoft Research share these advances -- presenting not just the latest theory, but practical techniques for building commercially viable products.KEY TOPICS: Spoken Language Processing draws upon the latest advances and techniques from multiple fields: acoustics, phonology, phonetics, linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, syntax, psychology, and beyond. The book begins by presenting essential background on speech production and perception, probability and information theory, and pattern recognition. The authors demonstrate how to extract useful information from the speech signal; then present a variety of contemporary speech recognition techniques, including hidden Markov models, acoustic and language modeling, and techniques for improving resistance to environmental noise. Coverage includes decoders, search algorithms, large vocabulary speech recognition techniques, text-to-speech, spoken language dialog management, user interfaces, and interaction with non-speech interface modalities. The authors also present detailed case studies based on Microsoft's advanced prototypes, including the Whisper speech recognizer, Whistler text-to-speech system, and MiPad handheld computer.MARKET: For anyone involved with planning, designing, building, or purchasing spoken language technology.
In recent years, deep learning has fundamentally changed the landscapes of a number of areas in artificial intelligence, including speech, vision, natural language, robotics, and game playing. In particular, the striking success of deep learning in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications has served as a benchmark for the advances in one of the most important tasks in artificial intelligence. This book reviews the state of the art of deep learning research and its successful applications to major NLP tasks, including speech recognition and understanding, dialogue systems, lexical analysis, parsing, knowledge graphs, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, social computing, and natural language generation from images. Outlining and analyzing various research frontiers of NLP in the deep learning era, it features self-contained, comprehensive chapters written by leading researchers in the field. A glossary of technical terms and commonly used acronyms in the intersection of deep learning and NLP is also provided. The book appeals to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, lecturers and industrial researchers, as well as anyone interested in deep learning and natural language processing.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the second International Workshop on Advanced Computational Intelligence (IWACI 2009), with a sequel of IWACI 2008 successfully held in Macao, China. IWACI 2009 provided a high-level international forum for scientists, engineers, and educators to present state-of-the-art research in computational intelligence and related fields. Over the past decades, computational intelligence community has witnessed t- mendous efforts and developments in all aspects of theoretical foundations, archit- tures and network organizations, modelling and simulation, empirical study, as well as a wide range of applications across different domains. IWACI 2009 provided a great platform for the community to share their latest research results, discuss critical future research directions, stimulate innovative research ideas, as well as facilitate inter- tional multidisciplinary collaborations. IWACI 2009 received 146 submissions from about 373 authors in 26 countries and regions (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Islamic Republic of Iran, Japan, Jordan, Macao, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, USA, Ve- zuela, Vietnam, and Yemen) across six continents (Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Oceania). Based on the rigorous peer reviews by the Program Committee members, 52 high-quality papers were selected for publication in this book, with an acceptance rate of 36.3%. These papers cover major topics of the theoretical research, empirical study, and applications of computational intelligence.
