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This book traces the history of language technology from writing - the first technology specifically designed for language - to digital speech and other contemporary language systems. The book describes the social impact of technological developments over five millennia, and addresses topics such as the ways in which literacy has influenced cognitive and scientific development; the social impact of modern speech technology; the influence of various printing technologies; the uses and limitations of machine translation; how far mass information access is a means for exploitation or enlightenment; the deciphering of ancient scripts; and technical aids for people with language disabilities. Richard Sproat writes in a clear, readable style, introducing linguistic and other scientific concepts as they are needed. His book offers fascinating reading for everyone interested in how language and technology have shaped and continue to shape our day-to-day lives.
For millennia humans have used visible marks to communicate information. Modern examples of conventional graphical symbols include written language, and non-linguistic symbol systems such as mathematical symbology or traffic signs. The latter kinds of symbols convey information without reference to language. This book presents the first systematic study of graphical symbol systems, including a history of graphical symbols from the Paleolithic onwards, a taxonomy of non-linguistic systems – systems that are not tied to spoken language – and a survey of more than 25 such systems. One important feature of many non-linguistic systems is that, as in written language, symbols may be combined i...
This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in morphological theory. It includes a wide array of techniques and systems in computational morphology (including discussion of their limitations), and describes some unusual applications.Sproat motivates the study of computational morphology by arguing that a computational natural language system, such as a parser or a generator, must incorporate a model of morphology. He discusses a range of applications for programs with knowledge of morphology, some of which are not generally found in the literature. Sproat then provides an overview of some of the basic descriptive facts about morphology and issues in theoretical morphol...
For a machine to convert text into sounds that humans can understand as speech requires an enormous range of components, from abstract analysis of discourse structure to synthesis and modulation of the acoustic output. Work in the field is thus inherently interdisciplinary, involving linguistics, computer science, acoustics, and psychology. This collection of articles by leading researchers in each of the fields involved in text-to-speech synthesis provides a picture of recent work in laboratories throughout the world and of the problems and challenges that remain. By providing samples of synthesized speech as well as video demonstrations for several of the synthesizers discussed, the book will also allow the reader to judge what all the work adds up to -- that is, how good is the synthetic speech we can now produce? Topics covered include: Signal processing and source modeling Linguistic analysis Articulatory synthesis and visual speech Concatenative synthesis and automated segmentation Prosodic analysis of natural speech Synthesis of prosody Evaluation and perception Systems and applications.
Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to modern Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this is the only available work in English to cover all of the world's writing systems from ancient times to the present. Describing scores of scripts in use now or in the past around the world, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of writing systems. More than eighty articles by scholars from over a dozen countries explain and document how a vast array of writing systems work--how alphabets, ideograms, pictographs, and hieroglyphics convey meaning in graphic form. The work is organized in thirteen parts, each dealing with...
This innovative book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems and relates it to psycholinguistic results. Drawing on case studies of writing systems around the world, it offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements and the formal constraints that hold of the mapping relation between them. Based on the insights gained, it posits a new taxonomy of writing systems. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, and speech technology.
Weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) are commonly used by engineers and computational linguists for processing and generating speech and text. This book first provides a detailed introduction to this formalism. It then introduces Pynini, a Python library for compiling finite-state grammars and for combining, optimizing, applying, and searching finite-state transducers. This book illustrates this library's conventions and use with a series of case studies. These include the compilation and application of context-dependent rewrite rules, the construction of morphological analyzers and generators, and text generation and processing applications.
The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.
Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The Bell Labs Approach is the first monograph-length description of the Bell Labs work on multilingual text-to-speech synthesis. Every important aspect of the system is described, including text analysis, segmental timing, intonation and synthesis. There is also a discussion of evaluation methodologies, as well as a chapter outlining some future areas of research. While the book focuses on the Bell Labs approach to the various problems of converting from text into speech, other approaches are discussed and compared. Thus, this book serves both the function of providing a single reference to an important strand of research in multilingual synthesis, while at the same time providing a source of information on current trends in the field. Chapters in this work were contributed by Richard Sproat, Jan van Santen, Bernd Möbius, Chilin Shih, Joseph Olive, Evelyne Tzoukermann, all of Bell Labs, and Kazuaki Maeda of the University of Pennsylvania.
This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other components of grammar. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending the concept of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linglustics at UCLA.