The Language Sciences Initiative welcomes Dr. Nobuaki Minematsu to UBC to present Speech Structure and Its Derivatives - What is the skeleton of spoken language?, a lecture discussing his work using speech structure to examine how human infants deal with the variability of human speech acoustics. All are welcome to attend.
Dr. Minematsu is a Professor in the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, where he earned his Doctor of Engineering in 1995. He has a wide interest in speech communication and covers from speech sciences to speech technologies. He also has expert knowledge on how to apply speech technologies for second language learning. He is a vice-chair of IEICE and a chair of Spoken Language Processing SIG of IPSJ, and is a member of IEEE, ISCA, SLaTE, IPA, APSIPA, IEICE, IPSJ, and ASJ.
Speech Structure and Its Derivatives - What is the skeleton of spoken language?
Friday, April 13, 2018
11:30am-1:00pm
MacLeod Room 220
2356 Main Mall
Abstract
Speech has huge acoustic variability in nature but humans use this fragile media as default media for language communication. With the help of DNN-based acoustic modeling, robustness of automatic speech recognition systems has been improved but it is still not comparable to robustness that humans exhibit.
How do human infants acquire super-robust or super-flexible capabilities of dealing with speech acoustics? The lecturer introduces a linguistically classical but technically new idea, speech structure, to this question. He also explains that, by assuming structural speech processing in humans, some mysterious behaviors of language disorder can be logically and easily predicted.