Course Description

The automatic processing of spoken and written language takes an important role in information technology and supports the mode of human-computer interaction in multi-media systems which exhibits the most developed symbolic communication system — natural human language. In this course, we develop the linguistic foundations needed by engineers for the design and the development of speech and language processing systems. In doing this, we take full consideration of the fact that part of the students in the engineering sciences have no prior knowledge in this area. For certain topics, linguists from University of Graz, who are doing research in that field, are invited to teach the class.

The course introduces to the following linguistic fields:

1. Introduction to linguistics
2. Auditory, articulatory and acoustic phonetics
3. Vowels and their acoustic properties
4. Consonants and categorical perception
5. Phonology and sociolinguistics (by Anneliese Kelterer, Department of Linguistics, Graz)
6. Prosody and prosodic hierarchy
7. Morphology
8. Syntax (by Sophie Christian, Department of Linguistics, Graz)
9. Psycholinguistic methods
10. Resources for linguistic research and speech technology

Teaching Methods

Lecture with integrated excercises on real speech examples; active involvement of the students in form of in-class group work & pair work; reading state-of-the-art publications.