Analysis and modeling of speech signals. Models of speech production. Speech coding algorithms. Introduction to speech recognition and hidden Markov models. Feature extraction algorithms for speech processing applications. Statistical text-to-speech synthesis. Speech processing applications: speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken dialogue systems and the VoiceXML language. Core concepts of computational linguistics. Natural language processing tools: regular expressions, finite state machines, n-gram language models, context-free grammars, decision trees, probabilistic models of syntactic and semantic parsing, first-order predicate calculus, discourse modeling and statistical machine translation.