Efficient processing of speech and language is required at all levels in the design of human-computer interfaces. In this perspective, the book provides a global understanding of the required theoretical foundations, as well as practical examples of successful applications, in the area of human-language technology. The authors start from acoustic signal processing to pragmatics, covering all the important aspects of speech and language processing such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
Throughout the volume, the reader can easily notice an emerging methodology, a key issue in the rational design of efficient and robust language-based computer applications. While engineering rigor is guaranteed in all chapters, particular care has been taken in highlighting intuitive aspects of technical details.
Contributions from acknowledged experts in the relevant sub-disciplines make this book a truly unique offering in the available literature on speech and language engineering.

Students, researchers, scholars and those with a general interest in language and speech engineering will find this book an useful source of information, from broad intuition down to the technical detail. The goal of the authors has been to construct a text on speech processing and natural-language understanding that can be useful to serious university undergraduates, but also to include aspects that make the work useful to established researchers in need of a reference guide to their field.

Acknowledgements - Preface - Author Biographies - Components of a Natural Language Grammar - Linguistic Models for Parsing and Generation - Introduction to Semantics - Introduction to Pragmatics - Digital Signal Processing - Speech Signal Modeling and Analysis - Speech Coding Techniques and Standards - Morpho-Lexical Processing and Part-of-Speech Tagging - Syntactic Processing - Applied Semantics - Multilingual Natural Language Processing - Automatic Speech and Spaker Recognition - Speech Synthesizers and Automatic - Translation and Technology: An Overview - Applied Models for Man-Machine Dialogue - Man-Machine Voice Communication - Glossary - Index.

The book first elaborates on the current ecology of the World Wide Web, where autonomous information sources come and go in dynamic and unpredictable ways.

With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun.

This book provides the conceptual foundation required for the design and development of complex distributed and real-time applications.