June 12, 2006

UARC researchers publish book on speech recognition technology

Beth Ann Hockey, a visiting professor of linguistics, has coauthored a book on the Regulus grammar compiler, an open-source software toolkit that her research group has helped develop.

Hockey, a researcher at the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) at NASA Ames, leads the Clarissa project to develop an advanced spoken-dialogue system for NASA. Clarissa, which was tested by astronauts on the International Space Station last year (see earlier story), is one of several major speech-recognition projects to make use of Regulus.

Hockey's coauthors on the new book, Putting Linguistics into Speech Recognition: The Regulus Grammar Compiler (CSLI Publications, 2006), are Manny Raymer, who also works on the Clarissa project at NASA Ames, and Pierrette Bouillon, project lead on the MedSLT medical speech translator project at Geneva University.

The authors will attend a book-signing event on Saturday, June 17, at 5 p.m. at Leigh's Favorite Books, 121 South Murphy Avenue, in Sunnyvale, (408) 736-2665.

"It's unusual to have a signing for an academic book, but our local bookstore thought it was a cool idea, and so did we, so it should be a rare and interesting event," Hockey said.