Computational Linguistics

Term Paper # 75132

Computer and Technology > Programming
Language > English: Linguistics
Linguistics

This paper analyzes the field of computational linguistics, focusing on the processes of speech recognition and speech synthesis.

885 words () | 3 sources | MLA | 2005 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that computational linguistics, an interdisciplinary field of study, is the intersection between linguistics and computer science, which actually began in the 1950s, predating artificial intelligence's beginnings in the 1960s. The author points out that speech synthesis and speech recognition are opposites of each other because speech synthesis is the process of turning text or data into speech; whereas, speech recognition is the process of taking spoken language and converting it into text. The paper stresses that the task of making a computer understand spoken language is definitely not an easy one nor will it mastered in the near future.

From the Paper:

"Speech analysis is done in four basic steps: text analysis, phonetic transcription, prosodic analysis, and waveform generation. Text analysis consists of identifying sentence boundaries, proper names, abbreviations, acronyms, the accepted spelling of words, and other syntactic and semantic features. Next, for phonetic transcription, pronunciation must be found for every word, including exceptions to general rules (have and four don't rhyme with rave and sour) and heteronyms (words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, like the verb 'to record' and the noun record)."