Note from the Editor

Excerpt

This special issue of the Journal consists of nearly two dozen articles that address both methodological approaches to Arabic Natural Language Processing and Automatic Speech Recognition as well as pilot-tested applications that are of commercial value. In keeping with prior special issues of this Journal, published under the auspices of the current Editor-in-Chief, this issue will consider both text-based (written) natural language communications as well as spoken language understanding as two sides of the same coin when studying Natural Language Processing. In addition, as reflected in the title, some of the key components of automatic speech recognition as they pertain to Arabic speech, such as speaker identification, speech synthesis, identifying regional accents, and evaluating natural language dialogue systems, are addressed using highly novel techniques and approaches. Given that the integrated study of both Natural Language Processing and Automatic Speech Recognition has proven to be the up and coming trend in the speech technology world today, as demonstrated at the recent Mobile Voice Conference, sponsored by AVIOS and William Meisel, President of TMA Associates, this issue well captures the zeitgeist by showing the leitmotif of the speech technology sciences as the integration of speech recognition with natural language understanding and generation. …