After more than two decades of research activity, speech recognition has begun to live up to its promise as a practical technology and interest in the field is growing dramatically. Readings in Speech Recognition provides a collection of seminal papers that have influenced or redirected the field and that illustrate the central insights that have emerged over the years. The editors provide an introduction to the field, its concerns and research problems. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the main schools of thought and design philosophies that have motivated different approaches to speech recognition system design. Each chapter includes an introduction to the papers that highlights the major insights or needs that have motivated an approach to a problem and describes the commonalities and differences of that approach to others in the book.

Speech recognition by machine : a review / D.R. Reddy -- The value of speech recognition systems / W.A. Lea -- Digital representations of speech signals / R.W. Schafer and L.R. Rabiner -- Comparison of parametric representations for monosyllabic word recognition in continuously spoken sentences / S.B. Davis and P. Mermelstein -- Vector quantization / R.M. Gray -- A joint synchrony-mean-rate model of auditory speech processing / S. Seneff -- Isolated and connected word recognition : theory and selected applications / L.R. Rabiner and S.E. Levinson -- Minimum prediction residual principle applied to speech recognition / F. Itakura -- Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition / S. Hakoe and S. Chiba -- Speaker-independent recognition of isolated words using clustering techniques / L.R. Rabiner [and others]Two-level DP-matching : a dynamic programming-based pattern matching algorithm for connected word recognition / H. Sakoe -- The use of a one-stage dynamic pr ...

Originally published in 1995, this collection of papers introduced a new dimension to the understanding of reading by focusing on the relation between spoken and written language processing. New perspectives on speech and reading are introduced by highlighting aspects of the two linguistic skills that had received little attention in the past. The comparative perspective adopted in this collection presents an innovative focus on speech and the acquisition of alphabetic reading skill. Major new sources of evidence are discussed, like reading in nonconventional input modalities, braille reading, and speech processing in lip-reading. Contributors also discuss the reading process in non-alphabetic orthographies and the specifics of the reading acquisition problem in logographic or mixed writing systems (like Chinese and Japanese) and their relations to underlying speech representations. A central concern of all chapters is the role of phonological processes in different modalities and writings systems, and at different stages in the reading acquisition process. Drawing on expertise of the contributors, the book presents a novel and varied view of the achievements, the promises and the challenges facing the researcher once the intimate link between speech and reading comes to the foreground.

Speech Recognition has a long history of being one of the difficult problems in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. As one goes from problem solving tasks such as puzzles and chess to perceptual tasks such as speech and vision, the problem characteristics change dramatically: knowledge poor to knowledge rich; low data rates to high data rates; slow response time (minutes to hours) to instantaneous response time. These characteristics taken together increase the computational complexity of the problem by several orders of magnitude. Further, speech provides a challenging task domain which embodies many of the requirements of intelligent behavior: operate in real time; exploit vast amounts of knowledge, tolerate errorful, unexpected unknown input; use symbols and abstractions; communicate in natural language and learn from the environment. Voice input to computers offers a number of advantages. It provides a natural, fast, hands free, eyes free, location free input medium. However, there are many as yet unsolved problems that prevent routine use of speech as an input device by non-experts. These include cost, real time response, speaker independence, robustness to variations such as noise, microphone, speech rate and loudness, and the ability to handle non-grammatical speech. Satisfactory solutions to each of these problems can be expected within the next decade. Recognition of unrestricted spontaneous continuous speech appears unsolvable at present. However, by the addition of simple constraints, such as clarification dialog to resolve ambiguity, we believe it will be possible to develop systems capable of accepting very large vocabulary continuous speechdictation.

Based on a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in 1993, this book addresses recent advances in automatic speech recognition and speech coding. The book contains contributions by many of the most outstanding researchers from the best laboratories worldwide in the field. The contributions have been grouped into five parts: on acoustic modeling; language modeling; speech processing, analysis and synthesis; speech coding; and vector quantization and neural nets. For each of these topics, some of the best-known researchers were invited to give a lecture. In addition to these lectures, the topics were complemented with discussions and presentations of the work of those attending. Altogether, the reader is given a wide perspective on recent advances in the field and will be able to see the trends for future work.

This handbook plays a fundamental role in sustainable progress in speech research and development. With an accessible format and with accompanying DVD-Rom, it targets three categories of readers: graduate students, professors and active researchers in academia, and engineers in industry who need to understand or implement some specific algorithms for their speech-related products. It is a superb source of application-oriented, authoritative and comprehensive information about these technologies, this work combines the established knowledge derived from research in such fast evolving disciplines as Signal Processing and Communications, Acoustics, Computer Science and Linguistics.