Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NFS) Combined Research and Curriculum Development Awards program, CSLR is directing a multi-university effort to develop a portable curriculum in human language technology.

The primary objective of the portable human language technology curriculum is the development of a comprehensive set of laboratory courses that provide the theoretical and practical foundation for training researchers and developers of future human communication systems. These courses will incorporate state of the art tools and technologies for learning about, researching and developing human communication systems and their underlying technologies.

In each of these courses, laboratory modules will be developed to provide students with hands-on experience using state-of-the-art tools and technologies in signal processing, speech recognition, speaker identification, natural language understanding, speech synthesis, facial animation, and dialogue modeling. In addition, these technologies will be investigated in the context of working systems designed by the students. Taken together, these courses provide the theoretical and foundation for students to design conversational systems incorporating animated agents.

The specific objectives of the project, as stated in the CRCD proposal, are:

• To develop a comprehensive, multidisciplinary curriculum in HLT incorporating the latest research advances in the field that prepares advanced undergraduate and graduate students for careers in industry and academia;
  
  
• To stimulate and sustain interest, continued study, and careers in areas of HLT, with special attention to recruiting more women, by providing an exciting and enriching learning experience through hands-on experience developing and evaluating language technologies and systems; and
  
  
• To facilitate transfer to and implementation of the curriculum at other institutions and to widely disseminate project results.

The courses being developed are intended to serve as an addendum to current course offering in degree programs such disciplines as Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, Psychology, Speech, Hearing and Language Sciences, and Communication. Taken together as a set, the courses can be used as the core of a multidisciplinary certificate program in human language technology.

The courses being developed are intended to serve as an addendum to current course offering in degree programs such disciplines as Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, Psychology, Speech, Hearing and Language Sciences, and Communication. Taken together as a set, the courses can be used as the core of a multidisciplinary certificate program in human language technology.

Progress During the First Year

Six courses have been developed and taught at in five different universities during the first year of the award. In all courses, modules within the CSLU Toolkit (a comprehensive set of tools and technologies for researching and developing language technologies and systems) were used to provide students with hands-on experience using and developing speech and technologies (e.g., speech recognition, speech synthesis); designing and running experiments, and creating useful spoken dialogue systems.

To read a comprehensive progress report for the first year of the project, click here (in PDF format).

Progress During the Second Year

During the second year, four additional courses have been developed and taught.

A comprehensive progress report for the second year of the project, will soon be available (in PDF format).

Listing of Courses

Here is a list of the courses which have been developed and offered during the first two years under support from the NIH Combined Research and Curriculum Development Awards program. Descriptions of each course can be obtained by clicking on the course name. These descriptions contain links to the course materials created and used by the instructors.

• Science of Human Communication,
  Instructor: John Hansen at University of Colorado, Boulder



• Signals & Systems for Audiology and Speech Sciences,
  Instructor: John Hansen C



• Speech Processing & Recognition,
  Instructor: John Hansen at University of Colorado, Boulder



• Text-to-speech Synthesis,
  Instructor: Alan W. Black at Carnegie Mellon University



• Psychology of Multimedia: Speech Perception,
  Instructor: Dom Massaro at University of California, Santa Cruz



• Experiments in Speech User Interfaces,
  Instructor: Cliff Nass at Stanford University



• Natural Language Processing,
  Instructor: James Martin at University of Colorado, Boulder



• Introduction to Computational Corpus Linguistics, New
  Instructor: Dan Jurafsky at University of Colorado, Boulder



• Speech Recognition and Synthesis, New
  Instructor: Dan Jurafsky at University of Colorado, Boulder



• Language, Perception and Cognition, New
  Instructor: Dom Massaro at University of California, Santa Cruz



• CSLR Short Course on Mixed-Initiative Spoken Dialog Systems, New
  Instructor: Wayne Ward, et al. at University of Colorado, Boulder