The monograph Prosodic Phrase in Spoken Czech provides a missing source of information on a crucial element in the sound structure of the Czech language: the prosodic phrase. The introductory chapters offer a concise lead-in even to non-specialists: they explain the nature and typical approaches to speech prosody and offer an overview of the commonly used hierarchy of prosodic units. The core of the study is based on speech material that was produced with legitimate communicative intents: storytelling, newsreading and poetry reciting. Prosodic phrases in the given material are described in terms of their phonetic structure, acoustic properties, and a specific syntactic issue. Moreover, the perceptual importance of prosodic phrasing is discussed together with a presentation of original perception experiments. A short chapter is dedicated to automatic detection of prosodic breaks by artificial neural networks. Apart from interesting facts about a core unit of prosodic structure, the prosodic phrase, the book can serve as a source of data in designing further experiments with natural language.

An innovative and unified grammar of sentence intonation, applied to six Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2006, held in Singapore in December 2006, co-located with ICCPOL 2006, the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Coverage includes speech science, acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition, speech data mining, and machine translation of speech.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2008, held in Brno, Czech Republic, September 8-12, 2008. The 79 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to, text corpora and tagging; transcription problems in spoken corpora; sense disambiguation; links between text and speech oriented systems; parsing issues; parsing problems in spoken texts; multi-lingual issues; multi-lingual dialogue systems; information retrieval and information extraction; text/topic summarization; machine translation; semantic networks and ontologies; semantic web; speech modeling; speech segmentation; speech recognition; search in speech for IR and IE; text-to-speech synthesis; dialogue systems; development of dialogue strategies; prosody in dialogues; emotions and personality modeling; user modeling; knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems; assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue; applied systems and software; facial animation; and visual speech synthesis

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2007, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in September 2007. The 80 revised full papers presented in this volume cover a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD'99, held in Plzen, Czech Republic in September 1999. The 57 revised full papers and 19 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The book presents state-of-the-art research and technology in the field of natural language processing with emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue.