Language in Cognitive Science

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Language in Cognitive Science
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Research Areas for Language

• Computational models of speech production and
  perception
• Signal processing for speech analysis,
  enhancement and transformation applications
• Algorithms and models for speech recognition and
  synthesis
• Speaker and language recognition
• Natural language processing for speech
  understanding and generation (cont.?)

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More Research Areas

• Information retrieval and summarization
• Computational models of discourse and dialog
• Evaluation of human and computer system
  performance
• --Research is currently being carried out by
  practitioners of artificial intelligence,
  computer science, electronic engineering,
  linguistics, phonetics, and psychology.

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Language Technology (LT)

• Two Categories
• Spoken Language
• Written Language
• Two Constructs
• Sending Language (Acquisition Translation)
• Receiving Language (Generation Output)

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Spoken Language

• Only in Spoken Language (not written)
• -- filled pauses
• -- false starts
• -- hesitations
• -- ungrammatical constructions

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Spoken, cont.

• Optical Information
• -- facial expressions (eye contact, movement of
  eyebrows, smiles or frowns, etc.)
• -- gestures (hand movement, body positioning,
  posture, etc.)

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LT terms

• Prosodyacoustic structure that extends over
  several segments or words (indicates users
  intention)
• -stress, intonation (tone), rhythm
• Modeling Dynamicsaccounting for differences in
  individual articulators
• Multimodalitydealing with several principles and
  aspects of speech/language

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Approaches in LT--Templates

• Use of Templates
• -pre-programmed
• -domain task specific
• -sets probabilities, restrictions, allowances,
  distribution

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Approaches in LT-Components

• Use of components (an example)
• In attempting to send language
• (1) Generate the message. This would require a
  planning component (brain forming ideas) and a
  syntatic generation component (spellcheck)
• (2)Output-requires some type of interface

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Approaches in LT Algorithms and Models

• Use of Algorithms essential to setting up
  templates for languageare what enables
  programmer to set up the restrictions,
  distributions, etc
• Use of Models (an example)
• Acoustic Model Template design for measuring
  the prosody of a given sample of language
  (transition probabilities, output distributions,
  etc..)

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Some Tools for LT

• CSLU Toolkit involves speech recognition,
  natural language understanding, speech synthesis,
  facial animation technologies
• Computerized Speech Labs (CSL) 2 models (4300B
  4100) less sophisticated than CSLU toolkit
• Winpitch and Winpitch II spectrographic
  display, prosodic morphing