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Introduction to Speech & Natural Language Processing

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Introducing Course

Krishnendu Ghosh

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Course Details

Credit: 1 (1-0-0-0-1)

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Course: Introduction to Speech and Natural Language Processing

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Course Type: Elective

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Course Overview

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This course gives a high-level introduction to Speech and NLP, focusing on applications, pipelines, and intuition. It covers how machines process speech and text, and how systems like voice assistants and chatbots work. The course emphasizes big-picture understanding with small hands-on examples, without going deep into theory.

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Course Objectives

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  • Understand what SNLP can do
  • Learn basic speech → text → meaning pipeline
  • Get intuition of speech & text processing
  • Know key components before building models
  • Explore common tasks & applications
  • Build small toy models for practice

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Syllabus

Unit 1: What is SNLP (2 Hours)

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Speech Processing vs NLP

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Real-world systems

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End-to-end pipelines

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Applications

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Syllabus

Unit 2: Basic Speech Processing (4 Hours)

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Speech Production

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Spoken Language Processing

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Speech acquisition

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Feature extraction

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Neural speech representation

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Syllabus

Unit 3: Basic Text Processing (3 Hours)

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Pre-processing: Tokenization, Stopwords, Stemming vs Lemmatization

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N-grams

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Representations: Bag of Words, TF-IDF, Word2Vec, GloVe

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Syllabus

Unit 4: Speech Applications (2 Hours)

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ASR pipeline

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Intro to Whisper / wav2vec

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TTS pipeline

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Syllabus

Unit 6: NLP Applications (3 Hours)

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Text classification, Sentiment analysis

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POS tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Dependency parsing

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Semantic ambiguity

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LLMs

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Challenges

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Text books

Speech and Language Processing – Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin (3rd Edition, Draft Available Online)

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Springer Handbook of Speech Processing - Jacob Benesty, M. Mohan Sondhi, Yiteng Arden Huang

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Reference books / Material

Natural Language Processing with Python (NLTK Book) – Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper

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Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm, and System Development – Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon

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Fundamentals of Speech Recognition – Lawrence Rabiner, Biing-Hwang Juang

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Grading Policy

Theoretical Assignments (2) 24%

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Quizzes (12) 36%

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1 Project Formulation 20%

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Attendance 20% / 10%

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Timeline

Theoretical Assignment 1 14 October

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Theoretical Assignment 2 9 December

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Project Presentation 23 December

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Semester Ends 27 December

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