COMS 6998: Advanced Topics in Spoken Language Processing

Instructors: Julia Hirschberg

Time:  Tu 4: 10-6:00 (Fall 2022)

Location: Mudd 1127

 

 

Prerequisite: COMS 4705 or another speech or NLP class

Description:  This class will introduce students to spoken language processing:  basic concepts, analysis approaches, and applications.  Applications include Text-to-Speech Synthesis, dialogue systems, and analysis of entrainment, personality, emotion, humor and sarcasm, deception and charisma.

 

Required readings:

Jurafsky & Martin 2021 (3^rd edition) chapters

These and other readings are linked from this syllabus for each class.

Suggested:

Keith Johnson. Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics (3rd edition). Wiley.  2011.

 

Resources:

A list of resources can be found here.

 

Office Hours

Julia Hirschberg: Th 4-5pm (in CEPSR 705)

Lin Ai:  Tu 2-3pm (zoom)

Run Chen: W 4:30-5:30 (zoom)

Arushi Sahai: F 11:30-2:301-2pm (in CEPSR 7LW3) and on zoom

Grade Breakdown

20% weekly posts

20% HW1

30% HW2

30% HW3

 

Also please note our late policies:

For weekly posts:  Monday deadline 11:59pm; 1 late day allowed but 1 point lost

For homeworks: 3 late days allowed but 5 points lost for each late day

 

Academic Integrity

The SEAS academic integrity policy is found here.

The CS academic integrity policy is found here.

Syllabus

Note: Schedule and readings are subject to change.  Readings labeled with * are optional.

 

Date	Topic	Readings	Assignments
Week 1: 9/6	Introduction to Speech Processing
Week 2: 9/13	From Sounds to Language	Jurafsky & Martin Chapter 25 (sections 1-3)
Week 3: 9/20	Acoustics of Speech	Jurafsky & Martin Chapter 25 (sections 4-6)
Week 4: 9/27	Tools for Speech Analysis	Praat Tutorial Some video tutorials:  here and a larger set here Download the latest version of Praat	HW1: Praat Recording and Analysis (assigned)
Week 5: 10/4	Analyzing Speech Prosody	ToBI Conventions AuToBI Prosody and Meaning *Guidelines for ToBI Labeling
Week 6: 10/11	Text-to-Speech Synthesis (Rose Sloan) – This class will be remote, on zoom.  Please find the zoom link in Courseworks  Zoom Class Sessions  Tomorrow 4:00pm	Jurafsky & Martin Chapter 26 (Introduction, sections 6, 8) *Prosody Prediction from Syntactic, Lexical, and Word Embedding Features, *Comparing acoustic and textual representations of previous linguistic context for improving Text-to-Speech, *Where do the improvements come from in sequence-to-sequence neural tts?	HW1 due
Week 7: 10/18	Spoken Dialogue Systems	Jurafsky & Martin Chapters 22, 23, and 24	HW2 assigned
Week 8: 10/25	Speech Analysis: Charisma, Likability and Style (Andrew Rosenberg)	What Makes a Speaker Charismatic?  Producing and Perceiving Charismatic Speech "Would You Buy A Car From Me?"-- On the Likability of Telephone Voices Extracting Social Meaning: Identifying Interactional Style in Spoken Conversation
Week 9: 11/1	Speech Analysis: Emotion and Sentiment Detection (Zixioafan Yang) and Sara (Ziwei) Gong Emotion Elicitation --  This class will be remote, on zoom.  Please find the zoom link in Courseworks  Zoom Class Sessions  Tomorrow 4:00pm	Predicting Arousal and Valence from Waveforms and Spectrograms using Deep Neural Networks The 6 Types of Basic Emotions and Their Effect on Human Behavior	HW2 due
11/8	No class: Election Day
Week 10: 11/15	Speech Analysis: Personality (Michelle Levine) and Mental State	Predicting the Big 5 personality traits from digital footprints on social media: A meta-analysis Multimodal Deep Learning for Mental Disorders Prediction from Audio Speech Samples Speech Processing Approach for Diagnosing Dementia in an Early Stage
Week 11: 11/22	Speech Analysis: Deception and Trust and Radicalization	Acoustic-Prosodic and Lexical Cues to Deception and Trust:  Deciphering How People Detect Lies Multimodal Deception Detection using Automatically Extracted Acoustic, Visual and Lexical Features Identifying the Popularity and Persuasiveness of Right- and Left-learning Group Videos on Social Media	HW3 assigned
Week 12: 11/29	Speech Analysis: Entrainment in Spoken Language and Empathetic Conversations	Measuring acoustic-prosodic entrainment with respect to multiple levels and dimensions Nora the Empathetic Psychologist 11 Nonverbal Ways to Express Empathy And Camaraderie With Your Team
Week 13: 12/6	Speech Analysis: Sarcasm (Smaranda Muresan) and Humor in CHoRaL (Shayan Hooshmand) and MoreHumor (Lin Ai)	“Laughing at you or with you”: The Role of Sarcasm in Shaping the Disagreement Space "Sure, I did the right thing": A system for sarcasm detection in speech "Yeah, right": Sarcasm recognition for spoken dialogue systems *Why can’t robots understand sarcasm? Multimodal Indicators of Humor in Video CHoRaL: Collecting Humor Reaction Labels from Millions of Social Media Users	HW3 Due