Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language Processing (review)

This book is an outgrowth of the International Conference on Human and Computer Processing of Language and Speech that was held at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand (8–12 December 1997). Contributors to this book include linguists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, computer scientists, and engineers. The nineteen chapters are divided into three sections: psycholinguistics (6), linguistics (6), and engineering (7). Ten chapters include coverage of Thai language data (marked with an asterisk): two in psycholinguistics, three in linguistics, and five in engineering.

The psycholinguistics section includes contributions by Arthur Abramson—‘Speech as encoded language’ (3–16) and *‘The perception of voicing distinctions’ (25–31); Nijasri Suwanwela—‘Localization of language function in the brain’ (18–24); Anne Cutler—‘Real words, phantom words, and impossible words’ (32–42); Denis Burnham—*‘ Excavations in language development: Cross-linguistic studies of consonant and tone perception’ (43–69); and Chris Davis—‘Lexical access and the mental lexicon: Can priming tell us anything?’ (70–99).

In the linguistics section, four of the six chapters deal with computer processing of natural language: Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin—*‘Linguistics and machine processing of language’ (100–114); Christian Benoît—‘Linguistic relevance from phonetic irrelevance’ (115–26); Wirote Aroonmanakun—*‘Zero pronoun resolution in Thai: A centering approach’ (127–47); and María B. Pérez Cabello De Alba—‘A semantic approach to natural language processing: Functional grammar computational model of the natural language user’ (148–57). The remaining two chapters in this section are by Sunant Anchaleenukoon—*‘Predicate system in French and Thai MT’ (158–65) and Jordan Zlatev—‘Connectionism and language understanding’ (166–92).

The engineering section of the book deals primarily with developments in speech synthesis, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and machine translation systems as applied to the Thai language: Somchai Jitapunkul et al.—*‘Thai automatic speech recognition models’ (195–213); Surapant Meknavin and Boonserm Kijsirikul—*‘Thai grapheme-to-phoneme conversion’ (214–23); Mathieu Lafourcade and Wanchai Rivepiboon—*‘Issues in the French-English-Thai dictionary project’ (272–88); Lafourcade—*‘ Multilingual natural language processing and the Internet’ (289–306); Ekachai Leelarasmee—*‘ A multilingual (Thai-English) closed caption TV system’ (307–13).

There is also a very useful addendum (Colin Schoknecht—‘Appendix: Three systems of Thai transcription’, 329–36) describing three of the major systems of Thai phonemic transcription: IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet); LRU (Linguistics Research Unit of Chulalongkorn University); and AUA (American University Alumni Association Language Center).

This book illustrates how the Thai language can be used as a tool to investigate basic issues in language processing. It is highly recommended to those with an interest in hyphenated fields of Thai linguistics.