Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

This thesis explores a novel approach to visual speech modeling. Visual speech, or a sequence of images of the speaker's face, is traditionally viewed as a single stream of contiguous units, each corresponding to a phonetic segment. These units are…