Multilingual Speech and Language Processing

Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China Pascale Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her scientific career spans over 20 years and three continents, contributing to the advancement of speech and language processing systems in English, French, Chinese and Japanese. Prof. Fung s team created the world s first multilingual voice browser that uses a single recognition engine for eight European and Asian languages. She was also the first to propose statistical models to recognize code switching spoken queries, an important development in multilingual communities. In addition to her academic research, Prof. Fung's work is cited by top industrial laboratories which created the current generation of multilingual products. Richard Sproat, Oregon Health and Science University, USA Richard Sproat is a Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Center for Spoken Language Understanding, at the Oregon Health and Science University, USA. Prof. Sproat has been working on speech and language processing for over 25 years. Originally trained as a linguist, he became involved in text-to-speech synthesis at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was one of the key developers of the Bell Labs multilingual text-to-speech synthesizer. He continues to work on multilingual speech and language processing as a visiting scientist at Google. Prof. Sproat is the author of several books on the subject.