LINGUIST List 8.1008

Fri Jul 4 1997

Books: NLP

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <annlinguistlist.org>

 * AN INTRODUCTION TO TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS
 by Thierry Dutoit, Faculty Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium

 Thierry Dutoit graduated as an electrical engineer and PhD from
the Faculty Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, in 1988 and 1993,
respectively. He is now assistant professor at the Faculty
Polytechnique de Mons and consultant for AT&T Labs Research in Murray
Hill, New Jersey, USA. He is the author of the widely acclaimed MBROLA
high quality free speech synthesis project. An Introduction to
Text-to-Speech Synthesis is a comprehensive introduction to the
subject. The author treats two areas of speech synthesis: Part I of
the book concerns natural language processing and the inherent
problems it presents for speech synthesis; Part II focuses on digital
signal processing, with an emphasis on the concatenative approach.
Both parts of the text guide the reader through the material in a
step-by-step easy-to-follow way. This is the first book to treat the
topic of speech synthesis from the perspective of two different
engineering approaches. The book will be of interest to researchers
and students in phonetics and speech communication, in both academia
and industry.

 Contents: List of
Figures. Foreword. Preface. 1. Introduction. Part One: From Text to
its Narrow Phonetic Transcription. 2. Grammars, Inference, Parsing,
and Transduction. 3. NLP Architectures for TTS
Synthesis. 4. Morpho-Syntactic Analysis. 5. Automatic
Phonetization. 6. Automatic Prosody Generation. Part Two: From Narrow
Phonetic Transcription to Speech. 7. Synthesis Strategies. 8. Linear
Prediction Synthesis. 9. Hybrid Harmonic/ Stochastic
Synthesis. 10. Time-Domain Algorithms. 11. Conclusions and
Perspectives. Index.

 TEXT, SPEECH AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY 3
 1997 312 pp. Hardbound ISBN 0-7923-4498-7 $99.00

 * RECENT ADVANCES IN PARSING TECHNOLOGY

 edited by Harry Bunt, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Masaru
Tomita, Keio University, Japan

 Parsing technologies are concerned with the automatic
decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, with
structures in formal or natural languages as their main, but certainly
not their only, domain of application. The focus of Recent Advances in
Parsing Technology is on parsing technologies for linguistic
structures, but it also contains chapters concerned with parsing two
or more dimensional languages. New and improved parsing technologies
are important not only for achieving better performance in terms of
efficiency, robustness, coverage, etc., but also because the
developments in areas related to natural language processing give rise
to new requirements on parsing technologies. Ongoing research in the
areas of formal and computational linguistics and artificial
intelligence lead to new formalisms for the representation of
linguistic knowledge, and these formalisms and their application in
such areas as machine translation and language-based interfaces call
for new, effective approaches to parsing. Moreover, advances in speech
technology and multimedia applications cause an increasing demand for
parsing technologies where language, speech, and other modalities are
fully integrated.

 Recent Advances in Parsing Technology presents an overview of
recent developments in this area with an emphasis on new approaches
for parsing modern, constraint-based formalisms on stochastic
approaches to parsing, and on aspects of integrating syntactic parsing
in further processing.


 Text, Speech and Language Technology Volume 1 1996 432 pp.
Hardbound ISBN 0-7923-4152-X $128.00

The following contributing LINGUIST publishers have made their backlists available on the World Wide Web:

• Blackwells
• Cascadilla Press
• Cornell University Linguistics Dept.
• CSLI Publications
• Garland Publishing
• Holland Academic Graphics
• John Benjamins
• Kluwer Academic Publishers
• MIT Working papers in Linguistics
• Mouton de Gruyter
• U. of Massachusetts Graduate Linguistics Association
• Pacific Linguistics Publications
• Routledge
• Summer Institute of Linguistics