Over the last 20 years, approaches to designing speech and language processing algorithms have moved from methods based on linguistics and speech science to data-driven pattern recognition techniques. These techniques have been the focus of intense, fast-moving research and have contributed to significant advances in this field. Pattern Recognition in Speech and Language Processing offers a systematic, up-to-date presentation of these recent developments. It begins with the fundamentals and recent theoretical advances in pattern recognition, with emphasis on classifier design criteria and optimization procedures..