11-751: Speech Recognition and Understanding

Department: Language Technologies Institute (LTI)
Units: 12
Semester: Fall
Instructors: Alex Waibel and Tanja Schultz

Prerequisites: Sound mathematical background, knowledge of basic statistics, good computing skills. No prior experience with speech recognition is necessary. Permission From Instructor (Undergraduates).

Course home page: http://www.is.cs.cmu.edu/11-751

Note: This is a 12-unit core course for LTI students and 1 CS core unit for CSD students.

Course Description:
The technology to allow humans to communicate with machines by speech and the technology to enable machines to understand when humans communicate with each other is rapidly maturing. This course provides an introduction to the theoretical background as well as the experimental practice that has made the field what it is today. We will cover theoretical foundations, essential algorithms, major approaches, experimental strategies and current state-of-the-art systems and will introduce the participants to ongoing work in representation, algorithms and interface design. The course will be completed by a brief overview of multilingual speech recognition dealing with various languages.

This course is primarily for graduate students in LTI, CS, Robotics, ECE, HCI, Psychology, or Computational Linguistics. Others by prior permission of instructor. No prior experience with speech recognition is necessary. The course is suitable for graduate students with some background in computer science and electrical engineering, as well as for advanced undergraduates. 
The course involves written and programming assignments. Some reading of papers may also be required.

Topics to be covered:

• Speech 

  • Speech production and perception 

  • Digital signal processing for speech signals

• Recognition Approaches

  • Template-based recognition

  • Hidden Markov modeling

  • Artificial neural networks 

• Search Techniques 

• Language Processing

  • Language modeling

  • Spoken language understanding

• Speech system design 

  • Robust recognition 

  • Speech interface design

  • Multimodal interfaces 

  • Applications, Systems