With only 3 short videos and 1 essential reading, you might be able to explore some of the recommended or extra readings this week. Feel free to pursue areas that interest you, and read either Jurafsky & Martin or Taylor – see which you prefer. Taylor is certainly the authority when it comes to Text-To-Speech, but on the other hand Jurafsky & Martin are experts in NLP.
Reading
Jurafsky & Martin (2nd ed) – Section 8.1 – Text Normalisation
We need to normalise the input text so that it contains a sequence of pronounceable words.
Taylor – Chapter 3 – The text-to-speech problem
Discusses the differences between spoken and written forms of language, and describes the structure of a typical TTS system.
Jurafsky & Martin – Chapter 5 – Part-of-Speech Tagging
For our purposes, only sections 5.1 to 5.5 are needed.
Jurafsky & Martin – Chapter 2 – Regular Expressions and Automata
An important technique used widely in NLP. In TTS, it can be applied to tasks such as detecting and expanding non-standard words.
Taylor – Chapter 4 – Text Processing
Complementary to Jurafsky & Martin, Section 8.1.
Taylor – Chapter 5 – Text decoding
Complementary to Jurafsky & Martin, Section 8.1.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 3.4 – Finite-State Transducers
FST are a powerful and general-purpose mechanism for mapping ("transducing") an input string to an output string.