• Classify the problems and approaches in natural language and speech processing
• Task-analysis for language and speech processing systems
• Familiarity with key concepts in linguistics and in digital signal processing
• Explain the principal methods for speech input and output
• Motivation and skills for further work in the area of language and speech processing (e.g. master's thesis)

1. Introduction: Problems of digital language and speech processing
2. Linguistic Foundations
   2.1 Human speech production
   2.2 Language as a system
3. Foundations of speech signal processing
   3.1 Speech signals in the time domain
   3.2 Speech signals in the frequency domain
   3.3 Digitization
   3.4 Source-Filter-Model
4. Speech output
   4.1 Speech reproduction
   4.2 Speech synthesis for unrestricted vocabulary
5. Speech input
   5.1 Speaker recognition
   5.2 Speech recognition
6. Spoken language dialog systems
   6.1 Methods
   6.2 Dialog description languages

oral test

Handouts of the slides used in this lecture will be made available via TISS.

For further reading:
Pfister, B.; Kaufmann, T.: Sprachverarbeitung.
Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag (2008)
Vary, P.; Heute, U.; Hess, W.:  Digitale Sprachsignalverarbeitung.
Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner (1998)
Fellbaum K.: Sprachverarbeitung und Sprachübertragung. Berlin Springer 1984.  O'Shaughnesy D.: Speech Communication: Human and Machine (2nd edition), Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press 2000.

Curiosity for language