Principles and theories underlying the design and implementation of human-computer spoken language systems. Component technologies including multilingual speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialog modelling, speech synthesis. Related topics including acoustic-phonetics in conversational speech. Linguistic features of spoken language, digital signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, statistical modelling and artificial intelligence. Software architectures that integrate the various component technologies. Examples of real applications. Students are advised to take ELE3410 before taking this course.