Introduction to Speech Technology

Explore the field of Speech Technology with this introductory workshop, designed to improve your knowledge of the principles and applications of speech processing. This is a beginner-friendly, hands-on workshop that covers the basics of acoustic modeling, phonetics, and a brief look at the applications of speech technology in modern applications.

We will discuss real-world applications such as automatic transcription, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and speaker identification, and take a look at existing tools and techniques for building simple speech-powered tools.

Join us for an engaging and accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its practical applications for everyday tasks! In "NLP for All," we will explore the fundamental concepts behind NLP: From understanding how computers interpret human language; to discovering how to improve search queries, use regular expressions, find datasets, and learn about pipelines for working with language. Whether you're curious about chatbots, voice assistants, or automated text transcription and analysis, this series will demystify popular technologies and show you how they work.

• Foundations of NLP: Gain a solid grasp of NLP concepts and terminology without needing a technical background.
• Real-World Applications: Explore practical uses of NLP in various contexts, such as improving search and information retrieval, generating and evaluating automatic transcriptions, and working with popular libraries such as spaCy, PyTorch and scikit-learn.
• Hands-On Experience: We will illustrate NLP concepts in action with a well-documented code notebook, aimed at solving practical examples. We will also explore online sources for NLP tools and datasets, such as HuggingFace.

• A Google account to run Google Colab (where we will do most of our programming exercises)
• Basic knowledge of Python. You can brush up python fundamentals with Software Carpentry's Introduction to Python (section 1).

SERIES: Natural Language Processing for All

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When:  Thursdays, 3-4 pm, Sept. 5 - Oct. 24, 2024
Where: Weaver Science-Engineering Library, Rm 212 and on  Zoom
Instructors: Megh Krishnaswamy
YouTube: The video links would be posted here.

Workshop Materials

• 09/05  Introduction to NLP with SpaCy - YouTube

• 09/12  Regular Expressions for NLP  

• 09/19  NLP with Transformers - YouTube

• 09/26  Introduction to Semantic Search - YouTube

• 10/03  Introduction to Information Extraction  

• 10/10  Text pre-processing for NLP - YouTube

• 10/17  Introduction to Speech Technology 

• 10/24  Speech-to-Text with Whisper AI - YouTube

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