Nigel G. Ward is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas, El Paso. He has published widely in human-computer interaction and speech technology as applied to spoken dialog systems, information retrieval, and second language learning, and is Chair of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group of the International Communication Association.
'Nigel G. Ward's book presents a novel approach to a long elusive question: what are the acoustic correlates of prosody that align with communicative functions? By taking a data mining approach, acoustic features long thought to be correlates of prosodic categories and long speculated as contributing in complex ways, can be examined together. While research has been hampered by the lack of consensus defining discrete communicative functions, Ward takes a defiantly speculative approach in the interpretation of his very concrete statistical associations, paving the way for the discipline to use his methods experimentally.' Nanette Veilleux, Simmons University, Boston