For the specific areas to be covered, authors were recruited from major European development laboratories, both in industry and in academia. The main technical authors are Frederic Bimbot, Lou Boves, Gerard Chollet, Khalid Choukri, Els den Os, Christoph Draxler, Norman Fraser, Dafydd Gibbon, Peter Howell, Lars Knohl, Volker Kraft, Hermann Ney, Renee van Bezooijen and and David van Leeuwen. Preliminary versions of the Handbook have been widely distributed within the world wide spoken language community, and feedback from experts in the subfields covered by the Handbook has been incorporsted in a number of revision cycles.
This procedure, which, though time-consuming, is felt to have been well worth-while, was considered necessary in order to emphasise the consensus oriented character of the Handbook. The results of this procedure mean that each chapter is not the personal view alone of its main technical author alone, but has been thoroughly discussed in the community.
The Handbook covers the four main areas of spoken language system and corpus design, spoken language characterisation, spoken language system assessment, and spoken language reference materials, together with a user guide, glossary, comprehensive bibliography, and index. The section on system and corpus design includes chapters on system design, corpus design, corpus collection and corpus representation. The second group of chapters covers spoken language lexica, language models as part of the characterisation of corpora and as system components, and the physical characterisation and description of corpora. The assessment oriented chapters cover basic experimental methodology, and the assessment of speaker verification, speech recognition, speech synthesis and interactive dialogue systems. Each chapter refers not only to current methods, but provides explicit recommendations on good practice and, where relevant, information on available tools. Finally, a collection of reference materials is included, mainly provided by representatives of other projects within the Language Engineering and ESPRIT domains, but partly specially written; these materials cover specifications of standard formats and practice, from the IPA and SAMPA standard transcription and labelling practice to corpus recording and archiving standards.