Klaus Zechner is a Senior Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service and leads a team of speech scientists within the NLP & Speech group in the R&D division. Keelan Evanini (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is a Research Director at the Educational Testing Service.
""This book is a landmark volume that provide a comprehensive synthesis of work on automated speech assessment over the past 20 years at Educational Testing Services. The book compiles vital viewpoints, theories, applications, and knowledge from assessment specialists, linguists, computer scientists, and statisticians to provide an engaging and approachable introduction to a dense and innovative field of study that has direct and important implications for language assessment and natural language processing. The book will find a warm welcome in university classrooms, researchers’ bookshelves, and libraries for years to come by providing essential knowledge that will help new and experienced readers immerse themselves in automated speech assessment. The individual chapters provide important methodological advances, data analysis approaches, best-practice, and clear interpretations that will help move speech assessment into the next generation. The book fills an important gap by connecting automated speech technology, natural language processing, and statistical learning with applied speech assessment."" Scott Andrew Crossley, Georgia State University, USA.