The present volume consists of the proceedings of a National Sysmposium on Speech Technology under the aegis of the Dravidian Linguistics Association as part of its 26th All India Conference of Dravidian Linguists held at the P.S.Telugu University, Hyderabad from 18 to 20 June 1998. The Symposium was inaugurated on 19 June 1998. The scope, goal and utility of Speech Technology was highlighted. Professor V.I. Subramoniam, in his inaugural address said that language is now under the purview of technology and is no longer the philosopher's domain as it was before the advent of the industrialised society. He emphasised the need for technology in analysing language with special reference to neurolinguistics.
The objectives and goals of the Symposium have been moderate to provide a forum for multidisciplinary approach to speech and language with particular reference to the Indian context. India is rich both in containing a large number of languages as well as in possessing technological know-how and skills, and their application to developmental activities. The application of advances in Computer and Information Technologies to the investigation of Indian languages is one such endeavour. Further, computer analysis is an essential addition to the development of Indian languages and technologies. With this aim, selected computer scientists, communication engineers, information technologists, computational linguists, speech scientists, phoneticians, linguists, educational technologists and statisticians were invited to contribute their present research related to speech technology. The outcome of this effort is the publication of this book, a collection of 18 papers that explore the ways in which computer speech technology is being developed in India.
The book combines both theoretical and empirical interests to create an avenue for the productive interchange of ideas among scientists working in different related disciplines. This will be a valuable resource available for exploring both the linguistic and the computational implications of the Indian languages. It presents the state-of-the-art which surveys some important aspects of the field, facts, issues and achievements, which constitute the sum of human knowledge and computer programming. Leading scientists and researchers from fields as divergent as linguistics and artificial intelligence have presented interdisciplinary study of issues in human-computer interface in tune with current thinking and developments. We would feel our efforts are worthwhile if the broad and rich coverage of the book attracts many scholars (i.e. speech/language specialists and engineers) in India as well as abroad as they can gain sound working knowledge on speech and computing that can lead to systematic programming and development of Indian languages.
The introductory article on "Speech Technology" by John Esling is an invited paper which outlines several areas of speech technology such as speech language databases, integration of speech and natural language processing, semantic interpretation, language cognition and its disorders, speech analysis, speech synthesis, speaker/language/phoneme recognition and verification as some of the potential areas of research. Esling suggests that speech technology can grow as a productive research area and it will continue to be a multidisciplinary endeavour. An interesting coincidence has emerged in that almost all of the research areas identified in the introductory paper by Esling are explored in the contributions submitted in and discussed at this Symposium.
The papers presented by a score of professionals on Speech Technology in the 26 All India Conference of Dravidian Linguists which met at Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad are now collected by Dr. K. Nagamma Reddy and presented to the world of scholarship.
It is in the late forties of the last century when the Spectrogram was found to be useful, Martin Joos wrote an introductory textbook on Acoustic Phonetics. In the decades that followed only a few linguists took up the data from spectrography and identified the phonemic or phonetic units. It was used more as a diagnostic tool. The British and the European scholars made extensive use of instruments to study the speech sounds. They also made use of palatograms. C. R. Sankaran in the Deccan College made an attempt in the forties. So also the Department of Physics at Aligarh published a few articles. In India acoustic studies were in the hands of a few and usually not looked upon with favour upto the late eighties.
When computer became a handy tool for extensive calculation and formulation of hypothesis, study of acoustic phonetics was undertaken by scholars of the departments of physics, computer science, statistics and linguistics. Researchers showed interest to voice scripts, speech recognition and such other related fields where such projects attracted research funds. Many came forward and the papers in this book are an index of the growth in the area of Speech Technology.
India, Africa and other countries which are labelled as under-developed countries economically have several languages spoken in their boundaries. Each language clamours for recognition as a National language. The only solution to tackle the language problem is to use machines to translate from one language to another. Automatic Translation attracted the attention of scholars and fund providers. The assurance of researchers that a language in toto can be translated into another, to impress on the fund givers, was soon found to be an over assurance. This was realized after spending considerable amount of money in the U.S.A. and in India. It is now found that with a fixed number of sentences and meaning one can translate from one language into another. The article, of Akshara Bharathi in this volume will further confirm that only pre-determined sentences and meaning, which cannot be modified are translatable without problem. Both sentences and meanings are open ended because language is used by thousands of people.
The use of computers which helps in storing extensive calculations and the Speech Laboratories which give all information of the sound units within moments, whereas, in the early fifties they have to be measured with a scale, now help the researchers with an enormous amount of usable data for making hypotheses.
Several phases of Linguistics including semantics, historical and comparative linguistics will be benefited by the use of computer and speech laboratories. A new area of research is ushered in India. The articles found in this volume and careful editing of Prof. K. Nagamma Reddy will be gratefully remembered by Scholars in India and elsewhere.
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