Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions


Book Description

"Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions" presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding. Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation natural language technologies for practical speech processing applications that serve the consumer’s need for well-functioning natural language-driven personal assistants and other mobile devices, while also addressing business’ need for better functioning IVR-driven call centers that yield a more satisfying experience for the caller. This anthology is aimed at two distinct audiences: one consisting of speech engineers and system developers; the other comprised of linguists and cognitive scientists. The text builds on the experience and knowledge of each of these audiences by exposing them to the work of the other.




Where Humans Meet Machines


Book Description

Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation of natural language technologies to resolve some of the most vexing natural-language problems that compromise the performance of speech systems today. This fourteen-chapter anthology consists of contributions from industry scientists and from academicians working at major universities in North America and Europe. They include researchers who have played a central role in DARPA-funded programs and developers who craft real-world solutions for corporations. This anthology is aimed at speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications.




Design of Multimodal Mobile Interfaces


Book Description

The “smart mobile” has become an essential and inseparable part of our lives. This powerful tool enables us to perform multi-tasks in different modalities of voice, text, gesture, etc. The user plays an important role in the mode of operation, so multimodal interaction provides the user with new complex multiple modalities of interfacing with a system, such as speech, touch, type and more. The book will discuss the new world of mobile multimodality, focusing on innovative technologies and design which create a state-of-the-art user interface. It will examine the practical challenges entailed in meeting commercial deployment goals, and offer new approaches to the designing such interfaces. A multimodal interface for mobile devices requires the integration of several recognition technologies together with sophisticated user interface and distinct tools for input and output of data. The book will address the challenge of designing devices in a synergetic fashion which does not burden the user or to create a technological overload.




The Conversational Interface


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the conversational interface, which is becoming the main mode of interaction with virtual personal assistants, smart devices, various types of wearable, and social robots. The book consists of four parts. Part I presents the background to conversational interfaces, examining past and present work on spoken language interaction with computers. Part II covers the various technologies that are required to build a conversational interface along with practical chapters and exercises using open source tools. Part III looks at interactions with smart devices, wearables, and robots, and discusses the role of emotion and personality in the conversational interface. Part IV examines methods for evaluating conversational interfaces and discusses future directions.




Smart Health


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference for Smart Health, ICSH 2014, held in Beijing, China, in July 2014. The 21 papers presented together with 4 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information sharing, integrating and extraction; health data analysis and management; clinical and medical data mining; and clinical practice and medical monitoring.




Speech and Language Technology for Language Disorders


Book Description

This book draws on the recent remarkable advances in speech and language processing: advances that have moved speech technology beyond basic applications such as medical dictation and telephone self-service to increasingly sophisticated and clinically significant applications aimed at complex speech and language disorders. The book provides an introduction to the basic elements of speech and natural language processing technology, and illustrates their clinical potential by reviewing speech technology software currently in use for disorders such as autism and aphasia. The discussion is informed by the authors' own experiences in developing and investigating speech technology applications for these populations. Topics include detailed examples of speech and language technologies in both remediative and assistive applications, overviews of a number of current applications, and a checklist of criteria for selecting the most appropriate applications for particular user needs. This book will be of benefit to four audiences: application developers who are looking to apply these technologies; clinicians who are looking for software that may be of value to their clients; students of speech-language pathology and application development; and finally, people with speech and language disorders and their friends and family members.




Human Language Technologies - The Baltic Perspective


Book Description

In the modern information society, there is an ever-growing need for improved natural language processing and human language technologies.This book presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference 'Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective' (Baltic HLT 2014) held in Kaunas, Lithuania in September 2014. The Baltic HLT conferences provide an important forum for gathering and consolidating ideas, and are an opportunity for the Baltic countries to present important research results to an international audience. The book contains 39 long and short papers presented at the conference. These cover a wide range of topics: syntactic analysis, sentiment analysis, co-reference resolution, authorship attribution, information extraction, document clustering, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech recognition, synthesis and others. The book is divided into three main sections: speech technology, methods in computational linguistics, and preparation of language resources. This book will be of interest to anyone whose work involves the use and application of computational linguistics and related disciplines.




Technology and Theology


Book Description

Technology is growing at an exponential rate vis-à-vis humanity’s ability to control it. Moreover, the numerous ethical issues that technology raises are also troubling. These statements, however, may be alarmist—since Telus would tell us “The Future is Friendly”. The Modernist vision of the future was utopic, for instance Star Trek of the 1960s. But postmodern views, such as are found in Blade Runner 2049, are dystopic. Theology is in a unique interdisciplinary position to deal with the many issues, pro and con, that technology raises. Even theologians like Origen in the third century and Aquinas in the thirteenth century made forays into Artificial Intelligence and surrounding issues (they just didn’t know it at the time). Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Transhumanism raise questions about what it means to be human. What is consciousness? What is soul? What are life and death? Can technology really save us and give us eternal life? Theology is in a unique position to handle these questions and issues. This book also has practical applications in terms of ecclesiology (church) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—both in terms of what it means to be a church and in terms of the sacraments or ordinances. Is there such a thing as a “Virtual Church” or must we gather physically to constitute one? Are Baptism and Communion legitimate if one is not physically in a church building but are “online”? This book struggles with these and many other questions which will help the scholar or reader make up their own minds, however tentatively.




Speech and Automata in Health Care


Book Description

Examines various speech technologies deployed in healthcare service robots to maximize the robot's ability to interpret user input. Demonstrates how robot anthropomorphic features and etiquette in behavior promotes user-positive emotions, acceptance of robots, and compliance with robot requests. Analyzes how multimodal medical-service robots and other cyber-physical systems can reduce mistakes and mishaps in the operating room. Evaluates various input methods for improving acceptance of robots in the older adult population. Presents case studies of cognitively and socially engaging robots in the long-term care setting for helping older adults with activities of daily living and in the pediatric setting for helping children with autism spectrum conditions and metabolic disorders. Speech and Automata in Health Care forges new ground by closely analyzing how three separate disciplines - speech technology, robotics, and medical/surgical/assistive care - intersect with one another, resulting in an innovative way of diagnosing and treating both juvenile and adult illnesses and conditions. This includes the use of speech-enabled robotics to help the elderly population cope with common problems associated with aging caused by the diminution in their sensory, auditory and motor capabilities. By examining the emerging nexus of speech, automata, and health care, the authors demonstrate the exciting potential of automata, both speech-driven and multimodal, to affect the healthcare delivery system so that it better meets the needs of the populations it serves. This book provides both empirical research findings and incisive literature reviews that demonstrate some of the more novel uses of speech-enabled and multimodal automata in the operating room, hospital ward, long-term care facility, and in the home. Studies backed by major universities, research institutes, and by EU-funded collaborative projects are debuted in this volume. This volume provides a wealth of timely material for industrial engineers, speech scientists, computational linguists, and for signal processing and intelligent systems design experts. Topics include: Spoken Interaction with Healthcare Robots Service Robot Feature Effects on Patient Acceptance/Emotional Response Designing Embodied and Virtual Agents for the Operating Room The Emerging Role of Robotics for Personal Health Management in the Older-Adult Population Why Input Methods for Robots that Serve the Older Adult Are Critical for Usability Socially and Cognitively Engaging Robots in the Long-Term Care Setting Voice-Enabled Assistive Robots for Managing Autism Spectrum Conditions ASR and TTS for Voice-Controlled Robot Interactions in Treating Children with Metabolic Disorders




Text Mining of Web-Based Medical Content


Book Description

• Includes Text Mining and Natural Language Processing Methods for extracting information from electronic health records and biomedical literature. • Analyzes text analytic tools for new media such as online forums, social media posts, tweets and video sharing. • Demonstrates how to use speech and audio technologies for improving access to online content for the visually impaired. Text Mining of Web-Based Medical Content examines various approaches to deriving high quality information from online biomedical literature, electronic health records, query search terms, social media posts and tweets. Using some of the latest empirical methods of knowledge extraction, the authors show how online content, generated by both professionals and laypersons, can be mined for valuable information about disease processes, adverse drug reactions not captured during clinical trials, and tropical fever outbreaks. Additionally, the authors show how to perform infromation extraction on a hospital intranet, how to build a social media search engine to glean information about patients' own experiences interacting with healthcare professionals, and how to improve access to online health information. This volume provides a wealth of timely material for health informatic professionals and machine learning, data mining, and natural language researchers. Topics in this book include: • Mining Biomedical Literature and Clinical Narratives • Medication Information Extraction • Machine Learning Techniques for Mining Medical Search Queries • Detecting the Level of Personal Health Information Revealed in Social Media • Curating Layperson’s Personal Experiences with Health Care from Social Media and Twitter • Health Dialogue Systems for Improving Access to Online Content • Crowd-based Audio Clips to Improve Online Video Access for the Visually Impaired • Semantic-based Visual Information Retrieval for Mining Radiographic Image Data • Evaluating the Importance of Medical Terminology in YouTube Video Titles and Descriptions