Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information. The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop brought together researchers in the respective technologies on the one hand, and mathematicians and statisticians on the other hand, for an intensive week of cross-fertilization. There is a long history of benefit from introducing mathematical techniques and ideas to speech and language technologies. Examples include the source-channel paradigm, hidden Markov models, decision trees, exponential models and formal languages theory. It is likely that new mathematical techniques, or novel applications of existing techniques, will once again prove pivotal for moving the field forward. This volume consists of original contributions presented by participants during the two workshops. Topics include language modeling, prosody, acoustic-phonetic modeling, and statistical methodology.

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.

Mathematical Linguistics introduces the mathematical foundations of linguistics to computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians interested in natural language processing. The book presents linguistics as a cumulative body of knowledge from the ground up: no prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed. As the first textbook of its kind, this book is useful for those in information science and in natural language technologies.

Mathematical Linguistics introduces the mathematical foundations of linguistics to computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians interested in natural language processing. The book presents linguistics as a cumulative body of knowledge from the ground up: no prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed. As the first textbook of its kind, this book is useful for those in information science and in natural language technologies.

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.

This book reflects decades of important research on the mathematical foundations of speech recognition. It focuses on underlying statistical techniques such as hidden Markov models, decision trees, the expectation-maximization algorithm, information theoretic goodness criteria, maximum entropy probability estimation, parameter and data clustering, and smoothing of probability distributions. The author's goal is to present these principles clearly in the simplest setting, to show the advantages of self-organization from real data, and to enable the reader to apply the techniques. Bradford Books imprint