Introducing Speech and Language Processing (Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics) Review

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Introducing Speech and Language Processing (Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics) ReviewI've been using this as the textbook in my speech technology course at SJSU, with generally good results.
The book assumes that the reader is aquainted with basic acoustic and linguistic concepts such as glottal excitation, frequency spectra, fundamental frequency, and IPA transcription. The book is therefore not suitable on its own for a class of true beginners. For such an audience, instructors will want to supplement Coleman's book with a gentler introductory book such as Ladefoged (1996) or Johnson (2003).
By far the best feature of this book is its focus on concrete implementation, in source code, of the concepts discussed. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a working C program is worth a thousand more. Coleman deserves our thanks for including actual speech processing code with his textbook.
The focus on explicit source code is one of a number of features that differentiate Coleman's textbook from the Jurafsky & Martin textbook that I use in other courses. Coleman's book is slimmer and less ambitious in its coverage of topics compared with Jurafsky & Martin's massive tome. Coleman's textbook also contains far fewer typos and other errors.
On the other hand, some parts of Coleman's book are frustratingly brief, incomplete, or opaque. An example is Section 4.2 on spectral analysis. The mechanics of the Hanning window are introduced, but without motivation---we never learn what the window is for, or why we need it. The results of the Fourier transform are displayed but no hint is offered as to how it works. Overall this section compares quite unfavorably to the masterful presentation of Fourier analysis in Chapter 10 of Ladefoged (1996).
Finally, it is important to note that there is a simple bug that infects most of the C programs supplied with the book. The variable "length", used to store the size of an input file, is declared as type "(int *)". This should be changed to type "int", so that memory is allocated to store the input size. Consequently, subsequent references to "*length" should be changed to "length", and "length" to "&length". Once this bug is fixed, the code compiles fine on any platform, not just on the compiler supplied with the book.Introducing Speech and Language Processing (Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics) Overview

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