CURRICULA AND COURSEWARE IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE ENGINEERING IN EUROPE: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL Michael F. McTear University of Ulster ( + on behalf of the Spoken Language Engineering Working Group of the Socrates Thematic Network on Speech Communication Science) mf.mctear@ulst.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper summarises work by the Spoken Language Engineering (SLE) Working Group of the Socrates Thematic Network in Speech Communication Sciences. The thematic network has shown that computer-based teaching aids are vital to the future development of SLE education. This follows from the multidisciplinary and technical nature of SLE, which requires novel ways of presenting unfamiliar material. The paper analyses software resources available in relation to curricular requirements and educational criteria and makes recommendations for modules in an SLE curriculum. In addition, we identify areas for which high-quality courseware is, to our knowledge, unavailable and identify actions to fill these remaining gaps. 1. INTRODUCTION The Spoken Language Engineering (SLE) Working Group of the Socrates Thematic Network in Speech Communication Sciences, now in its third funding year, has surveyed SLE course provision in Europe [1] and has made proposals for SLE curriculum development at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels [2]. The thematic network has shown that computer-based teaching aids (on-line tutorials, demonstration packages and so on) are vital to the future development of SLE education. This follows from the multidisciplinary and technical nature of SLE, which requires novel ways of presenting unfamiliar material. In recent years, such software has begun to appear, partly as a result of initiatives taken within the network, within associated projects and independently. The increasing interest in SLE courseware was demonstrated at the recent MATISSE workshop, from which much of the following review material is taken [3]. This paper is a short version of a review of these materials which will be available in book form at Eurospeech [4]. 2. MODULES FOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE ENGINEERING 2.1 Phonetics and Speech Production Most speech technology courses start with an introduction to time and frequency domain representations, and relate these to basic phonetics. All this is natural material for multi-media presentation and a number of tools are available, varying from simple editors and annotation tools to large-scale packages which cover complete areas in phonetics. A particularly useful feature is vocal tract animation coupled to speech synthesis. Figure 1 shows BALDI, an animated conversational agent provided with the CSLU toolkit. BALDI presents visual speech through facial animation synchronised with synthesised or recorded speech [5]. Figure 1. BALDI with visible articulators One of the best tutorials in this area is the Sensimetric CDROM on speech production and perception [6]. This CDROM contains units on spectrograms, vowel and consonant acoustics, speech and vowel perception. Its interactivity provides considerable pedagogical advantage when compared to a printed textbook. For example, in the speech acoustic unit self- and teacher guided instruction promotes experience-based interactive learning that enables students to gain intuitive understanding of relationships between the place and manner of articulation with time and frequency characterization of the signal. Other interactive demonstrations include adjustable filtering of synthetic sources, demonstrations of the vowel spaces of adult and child speakers, identification and discrimination experiments with various stimuli, creating and analyzing conventional or 3D spectrograms, and examining animated vocal tracts synchronized with audio playback and spectrogram displays. Most Web based courses are not interactive and multimedial, as the web medium is too limited in capacity for attractive animations involving video and sound. Some courses have short sound or speech samples, a good example being a Web based course in German on acoustic phonetics [7].