ISCApad number 105

March 14th, 2007

MESSAGE from Sadaoki Furui Board Member in charge of Workshops

Dear Members,
ISCA organizes ITRWs (ISCA Tutorial and research Workshops) in which a special effort is made to gather scientists doing research on specific topics. This sequence of workshops has played an important role in bringing speech scientists together. ISCA also finds it important to co-sponsor other specialized workshops focused on a research topic of interest. A set of guidelines has been prepared for those who wish to organize such events, together with a document describing the general policy for events organized or supported by ISCA. ISCA helps the organizers in many ways. ISCA assists in distributing information about events, for example with the help of the ISCA forthcoming event web page and ISCApad. Participants in all events can apply for ISCA grants. The ISCA grant policy is described in detail on the ISCA grant web page. For a list of past ITRWs and ISCA-supported workshops, see the ISCA Archive. If you are willing to organize yourself an ITRW or an ISCA-supported workshop, please contact me at Tokyo Institute of Technology, the ISCA Workshop Coordinator.

Sadaoki Furui, Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Editorial

Dear Members,
During these first months of the year, conference activity seems a bit low but having a glance at the forthcoming conferences and workshops shows that this is far from being a passive period. ISCA is currently quite busy with a lot of new activities: increasing our support to the student branch, promoting awards (as Christian Benoit award), organizing your future Interspeech conferences and ITRW and SIG workshops, Distinguished Lecturers program,... ISCApad is still open to post your job openings, to inform on recently published books and to advertise future workshops or conferences you are organizing. Be sure to have paid your membership fee in order to benefit fromall services offered by ISCA and if you move, don't ever forget to inform our secretariat more particularly if you have a new email address.

Christian Wellekens

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. ISCA News
  2. SIG's activities
  3. Courses, internships
  4. Books, databases, softwares
  5. Job openings
  6. Journals
  7. Future Interspeech Conferences
  8. Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW)
  9. Forthcoming Events supported (but not organized) by ISCA
  10. Future Speech Science and technology events

ISCA NEWS


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Archives
THanks to the efforts of our archivist, Interspeech-ICSLP 2006 is now available on on website
Call for applications to the Christian Benoit Award
The Christian Benoit Award is delivered periodically by the Association Christian Benoit (**). It is given to promising young scientists in the domain of Speech Communication. The Award provides financial support for the development of a multi-media project promoting the work of these young scientists, and is valued at 7,622 Euros.
The first award was delivered to Tony Ezzat from MIT in June 2000, for his research in Audiovisual Speech Synthesis, the second award to Johanna Barry from University of Melbourne in September 2002 for her work on the acquisition of lexical tones in profoundly hearing-impaired speakers using a cochlear implant, and the third award to Olov Engwal from KTH in Stockholm in October 2004 for the elaboration of ARTUR, a multi-modal articulation tutor able to give automatic feedback to real users.
The fourth award will be delivered this year to ANY PROJECT IN THE FIELD OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION. Candidates should be in the final stages of their doctoral research or within the five years following the obtention of their PhD.
The Christian Benoit award will offer financial support to develop a multi-media project which (a) demonstrates the candidate's research in a way that helps launching that candidate's career, and (b) leverages electronic publishing technologies intelligently so as to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of this content.
In the application, the candidate should provide
-- a statement of research interest,
-- a detailed curriculum vitae, and
-- a description of the proposed multi-media project.
If the project already exists, a copy or link should be provided along with the application.
Applications should be sent to Pascal Perrier and received by Friday April 20th, 2007. Electronic submissions are mandatory.
The successful candidate will be notified by June 1st and invited to make a brief presentation of his/her work at the Interspeech 2007 Conference in Antwerp (Belgium).
Travel expenses for attendance at the Award ceremony will be provided by the Christian Benoit Association. For further information, please contact Pascal Perrier.
** The Christian Benoit Association is a nonprofit organization, whose purpose is to facilitate the development of research projects in the field of speech communication. Established in honor of Christian Benoit, French CNRS researcher in the field of speech communication who died on the 26th of April, 1998, at the age of 41, the Award places special emphasis on multimedia representations of ongoing research.

SIG's activities


A list of Speech Interest Groups can be found on our web.

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COURSES, INTERNSHIPS


Studentships available for 2006/7 at the Department of Computer Science
The University of Sheffield - UK
One-Year MSc in HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
The Sheffield MSc in Human Language Technology has been carefully tailored to meet the demand for graduates with the highly-specialised multi-disciplinary skills that are required in HLT, both as practitioners in the development of HLT applications and as researchers into the advanced capabilities required for next-generation HLT systems. The course provides a balanced programme of instruction across a range of relevant disciplines including speech technology, natural language processing and dialogue systems.
The programme is taught in a research-led environment. This means that you will study the most advanced theories and techniques in the field, and also have the opportunity to use state- of-the-art software tools. You will also have opportunities to engage in research-level activity through in-depth exploration of chosen topics and through your dissertation.
Graduates from this course are highly valued in industry, commerce and academia. The programme is also an excellent introduction to the substantial research opportunities for doctoral-level study in HLT.
A number of studentships are available, on a competitive basis, to suitably qualified applicants. These awards pay a stipend in addition to the course fees.
See further details of the course
Information on how to apply

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BOOKS, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

The Blizzard Challenge 2007

Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases
Website
Alan W Black, Keiichi Tokuda, Simon King, Michael Picheny, and Shinsuke Sakai
In order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, Blizzard Challenge 2005 and 2006 were held. We will now have the third challenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2007.
The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build synthetic voices from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluated through listening tests.
For the Blizzard Challenge 2007, ATR-SLC (http://www.slc.atr.jp/) will release an eight-hour American English speech database. We would ask each participant to build three voices using a) the whole set of the database, b) the ARCTIC subset of the database, and c) a limited-amount of sentences chosen by each participant, respectively. Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated and each participant will synthesize them with their system. The speech will then be put on the web for evaluation.
The results will be presented at a satellite event at ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, in Bonn, Germany. Participants will be expected to submit 4 page papers describing their entries for review. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, and published on the Blizzard website.
Call for participation
The Blizzard Challenge: Registration
Interested parties should register their intentions to participate by mailing. They should identify a contact person in their team, as well as provide email and real mail addresses.
Registration
A registration fee of 500 USD is due at time of submission (March 30) to offset the costs of paying undergraduate listeners. There is a mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge.
To join the list send a message with the following line in the body of the message
subscribe blizzard-discuss
The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Timeline
Jan 23 2007 Blizzard Challenge 2007 Announcement
Feb 2 2007 Participant registration deadline (but later registrations may be possible - please contact the organisers)
Feb 16 2007 Deadline for agreement for the use of the corpus
Feb 23 2007 Database released (one month for training)
Mar 23 2007 Test sentences released (one week for synthesis)
Mar 30 2007 Deadline for the synthesized speech (two weeks for preparation of the evaluation web site)
Apr 16 2007 Evaluation system goes live (one month for evaluation)
May 14 2007 End of Evaluation (two weeks for gathering the scores)
May 28 2007 Results distributed to teams (one month for writing paper)
June 29 2007 Satellite workshop papers due (two weeks for review)
July 16 2007 Notification of acceptance
Aug 22-24 2007 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis in Bonn
Aug 25 2007 Presentation of results at the satellite workshop in Bonn
Further Information
For further information please contact Further description of the Challenge itself was published in Interspeech 2005 Eurospeech in Lisbon.

Books

Human Communication Disorders/ Speech therapy
This interesting series can be listed on Wiley website

Incurses em torno do ritmo da fala
Author: ( Plinio A. Barbosa
Publisher: Pontes Editores (city: Campinas)
Year: 2006 (released 11/24/2006)
(In Portuguese, abstract attached.) Website

Speech Quality of VoIP: Assessment and Prediction
Author: Alexander Raake
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, UK-Chichester, September 2006
Website

Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech, Studies in the Evolution of Language
Author: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Website

Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels
Authors: Antonio M. Peinado and Jose C. Segura
Publisher: Wiley, July 2006
Website

Multilingual Speech Processing
Editors: Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff ,
Elsevier Academic Press, April 2006
Website

Reconnaissance automatique de la parole: Du signal a l'interpretation
Authors: Jean-Paul Haton
Christophe Cerisara
Dominique Fohr
Yves Laprie
Kamel Smaili
392 Pages
Publisher: Dunod

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JOB OPENINGS

We invite all laboratories and industrial companies which have job offers to send them to the ISCApad editor: they will appear in the newsletter and on our website for free. (also have a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs.html as well as http://www.elsnet.org/ Jobs)

Postdoctoral position- INRIA-LORIA Nancy France

Objective
Despite recent progresses achieved in speech synthesis, it is still very difficult to modify the characteristics linked to the speaker since signals are synthesized by concatenating sounds uttered by a given speaker. It is thus almost impossible to modify acoustic cues of sounds as well as characteristics linked to the speaker.
The objective of the postdoc is to elaborate copy synthesis algorithms that enable a speech signal to be reproduced as faithfully as possible while offering the possibility of modifying acoustic cues. For this reason this postdoctoral work will rely on the utilization of a formant synthesizer derived from that proposed by Klatt[1]. Synthesis thus rests on the filtering by a system of resonators (representing formants) of a sound source, periodic for the voiced sounds as vowels, aperiodic (a noise) for unvoiced sounds as fricatives phonemes.
Work
The work will consist of adapting the synthesizer so that it does lend itself to copy synthesis as well as possible and to develop algorithms to optimizing source and formant parameters.
In order to copy speech sufficiently finely it is necessary to adjust formant and source parameters precisely. The LF source model proposed by Fant and Liljencrants [2] is sufficiently versatile to approximate a natural speech source. The optimization of the four parameters was the subject of a number of works in the case where the vocal tract filter and source are estimated jointly [3,4] or when the source signal is known [5]. The specificity of copy synthesis is that the filter of the vocal tract is only roughly approximated by formants hypothesised and that the ratio of noise in the source has also to be adjusted for each of the formants.
Resonators of a formant synthesizer can be organized in cascade or in parallel. Only the second solution is usable in the case of copy synthesis because it enables formants to be adjusted independently [6]. The frequency, amplitude and bandwidth of each formant have to be specified. One important advantage of the parallel architecture is that it is possible to adjust only amplitude by setting the bandwidth to a default value once the formant frequency is known. The second aspect of the work will be on the elaboration of an algorithm to adjust amplitudes and frequencies. The adjustment of amplitudes must be synchronized on source periods in order to capture fast variations of amplitude, and that of formant frequencies will rest upon the automatic formant tracking previously developed [7]. Improvements will be about the choice of the formant number so as to increase the closeness of the speech copied with respect to the original signal.
The two aspects have been presented independently to simplify the presentation of the work. To a certain extent only they also can be addressed independently. However, it is clear that the improvement of the synthesis quality will be all the better since interactions between these two aspects will have been considered together.
The Parole team mainly works on automatic speech recognition and speech analysis. In the domain of analysis a number of algorithms have been developed (F0 detection, formant tracking, pitch marking, copy synthesis...) and are available in WinSnoori software which already contains a series of tools for copy synthesis and which is developed by the team for several years.
Skill and profile
A good knowledge in speech analysis or in signal processing is required.
References
Copy synthesis tools of WinSnoori are presented here.
[1] D.H. Klatt, “Software for a cascade/parallel formant synthesizer”, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 67(3), p. 971-995, March 1980.
[2] G. Fant and J. Liljencrants, “A four parameter model of glottal flow”, STL, QPSR, 4, p. 1-13, 1985
[3] M. Frölich , D. Michaelis and H.W. Strube, “SIM-simultaneous inverse filtering and matching of a glottal flow model for acoustic speech signals”, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 115(1), p.337-351, 2003.
[4] D. Vincent, O. Rosec and T. Chonavel, “Estimation of LF glottal source parameters based on an ARX model”, Proc. of Interspeech, p. 333-336, Lisboa, Sep. 2005.
[5] J. Pérez and A. Bonafonte, “Automatic Voice-Source Parametrization of Natural Speech”, Proc. of Interspeech, Lisboa, Sep. 2005.
[6] W. J. Holmes, “Copy synthesis of female speech using the JSRU parallel formant synthesiser”, Proceedings of European Conference on Speech Technology, p. 513-516, Paris, France, Sep., 1989
[7] Y. Laprie, “A concurrent curve strategy for formant tracking”, Proc. of ICSLP, Jegu, Korea, Oct. 2004
Contact
Interested candidates are invited to contact Yves Laprie
Important information
This position is advertised in the framework of the national INRIA campaign for recruiting post-docs. It is a one year position, renewable, beginning fall 2007. The salary is 2,320€ gross per month.
Selection of candidates will be a two step process. A first selection for a candidate will be carried out internally by the PAROLE group. The selected candidate application will then be further processed for approval and funding by an INRIA committee.
Doctoral thesis less than one year old (May 2006) or being defended before end of 2007. If defence has not taken place yet, candidates must specify the tentative date and jury for the defence.
Useful link
Presentation of INRIA postdoctoral positions To apply(be patient, loading this link takes times…)

Research scientist- Speech Technology- Princeton, NJ, USA

Company Profile: Headquartered in Princeton, NJ, ETS (Educational Testing Service)is the world's premier educational measurement institution and a leader in educational research. As an innovator in developing achievement and occupational tests for clients in business, education, and government, we are determined to advance educational excellence for the communities we serve.
Job Description: ETS Research & Development has a Research Scientist opening in the Automated Scoring and Natural Language Processing Group. This group conducts research focusing on the development of new capabilities in automated scoring and NLP-based analysis and evaluation systems, which are used to improve assessments, learning tools and test development practices for diverse groups of users that include K-12 students, college students, English Language Learners and lifelong learners. The Research Scientist position involves applying scientific, technical and software engineering skills to designing and conducting research studies and developing capabilities in support of educational products and services. The job is a full-time job.
Required qualifications
· A Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or Electrical Engineering with a focus on speech technology, particularly speech recognition. Knowledge of linguistics is a plus.
· Evidence of at least three years of independent substantive research experience and/or experience in developing and deploying speech technology capabilities, preferably in educational environments.
· Demonstrable contributions to new and/or modified theories of speech processing and their implementation in automated systems.
· Practical expertise with speech recognition systems and fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Java, Perl, C/C++, Python).
· Three years of independent substantive research experience and/or experience in developing and deploying speech technology capabilities, preferably in educational environments.
How to apply
Please send copy of your resume, along with cover letter stating salary requirements and job #2965, to e-mail
ETS offers competitive salaries, outstanding benefits, a stimulating work environment, and attractive growth potential. ETS is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer.
Web site

Research Fellow in Speech Synthesis- Centre for Speech Technology Research/ University of Edinburgh

The Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh is seeking a research fellow to work on the speech synthesis project "Automatically-determined inventories for speech synthesis". This project uses machine learning techniques to automatically discover, from speech data, a set of units for speech synthesis - that is, an alternative to manually-specified phoneme-based units such as diphones. This research is currently being conducted within a concatenative (i.e. unit selection) framework, but we now seek to extend this to the other major synthesis technique: statistical parametric synthesis, based on Hidden Markov Models (i.e., trajectory HMMs). The successful candidate will be expected to contribute, plan and execute new research, as well as extend our existing techniques. You ideally will have a PhD in speech synthesis and experience of trajectory Hidden Markov Models. You will have very good programming skills, preferably in C++, and experience with one or more of: concatenative speech synthesis techniques; statistical models of speech; perceptual evaluations; Festival. An automatic speech recognition background is also appropriate for this position. This post is fixed term for 15 months.
For more information and application instructions, consult our website and enter vacancy number 3006866.

Software Engineer Position at Be Vocal, Mountain View, CA,USA

We are currently looking for a Software Engineer with previous exposure to Speech, to work in our Speech and Natural Language Technology group. This group’s mission is to be the center of excellence for speech and natural language technologies within BeVocal. Responsibilities include assisting in the development of internal tools and processes for building Natural Language based speech applications as well as on ongoing infrastructure/product improvements. The successful candidate must be able to take direction from senior members of the team and will also be given the opportunity to make original contributions to new and existing technologies during the application development process. As such, you must be highly motivated and have the ability to work well independently in addition to working as a team.
Responsibilities
* Develop and maintain speech recognition/NLP tools and supporting infrastructure
* Develop and enhance component speech grammars
* Work on innovative solutions to improve overall Speech/NL performance across BeVocal’s deployments.
Requirements
* BS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Linguistics, an MS is a preferred.
* 2-5 years of software development experience in Perl, Java, C/C++. A willingness and ability to pick up additional software languages as needed is essential.
* Exposure or experience with speech recognition/pattern recognition either from an academic environment or directly related work experience.
* Experience working as part of a world-class speech and language group is highly desirable.
* Experience building natural language applications is preferred.
* Experience building LVCSR speech recognition systems is a plus.
For immediate consideration, please send your resume by email and include "Software Engineer, Speech" in the subject line of your email. Principals only please (no 3rd parties or agencies). Contact for details
BeVocal's policy is to comply with all applicable laws and to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees without regard to non-job-related factors such as race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, veteran status, marital status or sexual orientation. This policy applies to all areas of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, compensation, benefits, transfer, and social and recreational programs.

Postdoctoral Fellow -- Speech Synthesis- Alfred I. Dupont Hospital for Children, Wilmington, DE

The Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, DE has an immediate opening for a Postdoctoral Fellow in Speech Synthesis in the Speech Research Laboratory, within the Department of Biomedical Research. The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, or a related field, demonstrated experience in data-based speech synthesis techniques, and an interest in modeling prosody, particularly intonation, in speech synthesis systems. The primary responsibilities for this position include: Developing a model for intonation that can be trained on and capture the important talker-specific features of an individual's speech while also representing phonologically motivated f0 characteristics; implementing the intonation model for the ModelTalker TTS system; and assisting in the creation of unit concatenation voices for the ModelTalker TTS system. A Ph.D. in Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology, or closely related field with demonstrated knowledge of and experience in concatenative speech synthesis techniques, speech analysis techniques, and acoustic phonetics is required. Computer programming experience with C or C++, knowledge of additional languages is a plus. Experience with Unix/Linux and Windows operating systems is essential.
This is a two-year grant-funded position. For more information, email Dr Timothy Bunnel or call at (302) 651-6835. Applicants may also post their resume on-line at www.nemours.org or send resume with salary requirements to Dr. Timothy Bunnell, Department of Biomedical Research, Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, P.O. Box 269, Wilmington, DE 19899.

Position at Saybot in China

Job title: Speech Scientist
Location: China (Beijing or Shanghai)
Saybot develops software technology and curricula for learning spoken english. Since 2005, we have been building software which features state-of-the-art speech technologies and innovative interactive lessons to help users practice speaking English. We are currently looking for talented speech scientists to help strengthen our R&D team and to develop our next-generation products. Successful candidates would have proven excellence and good work ethics in academic or industry context and demonstrated creativity in building speech systems with revolutionary designs.
* MS/PhD degree in speech technology (or related).
* Expertise in at least one of the following areas and basic knowledge of the others:
o acoustic model training,
o speaker adaptation,
o natural language understanding,
o prosody analysis,
o embedded recognizers.
* Excellent programming skills in both object-oriented languages (C++, C# or Java) and scripting (Perl or Python).
* Good knowledge and experience in at least one commonly used recognizer (HTK, Sphinx, Nuance...).
* Excellent communication skills in written and oral English.
* Experience in machine translation is a plus.
* Experience in VoIP integration is a plus.
* Experience in language teaching is a plus.

Contact: Sylvain Chevalier

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT POSITION IN "AUDIO CONTENT ACCESS" at IRCAM (Paris)

PRESENTATION OF THE MUSICDISCOVER PROJECT :
The goal of the MusicDiscover project is to give access to the contents of musical audios recordings (as it is the case, for example, for texts), i.e. to a structured description, as complete as possible, of the recordings: melody, genre/style, rate/rhythm, instrumentation, musical structure, harmony, etc. The principal objective is thus to develop and evaluate means directed towards the contents, which include techniques and tools for analysis, indexing, representation and search for information. These means will make it possible to build and use such a structured description. This project of the ACI "Masses of Data" is carried out in collaboration between Ircam (Paris), Get-Telecom (Paris) and the LIRIS (Lyon) since October 2004. The principal lines of research are :
- Rhythmic analysis and detection of ruptures
- Recognition of musical instruments and indexing
- Source Separation
- Structured Description
- Research of music by similarity
- Recognition of musical titles
- Classification of musical titles in genre and emotion.
The available position relates to the construction and the use of the Structured Description in collaboration with the other lines of research.
DEVELOPMENTS TASKS:
A position is available from December 1st 2006 within the "Equipe Analyse/Synthese" of Ircam for a 9 months total duration. The contents of work are as follows:
- Participation in the design of a Structured Description
- Software development for construction and use of Structured Descriptions
- Participation in the definition and development of the graphic interface
- Participation in the evaluations
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE:
- Experience of research in Audio Indexing and signal processing
- Experience in Flash, C and C++ and Matlab programming.
- High productivity, methodical work, excellent programming style.
- Good knowledge of UNIX and Windows environments.
AVAILABILITY :
- The position is available in the "Analysis/Synthesis" team in the R&D department from November 1st 2006 for a duration of 9 months.
EEC WORKING PAPERS :
- In order to start immediately, the candidate should preferably have EEC citizenship or already own valid EEC working papers.
SALARY:
- According to background and experience.
TO APPLY:
- Please send your resume with qualifications and informations adressing the above issues, preferably by email to Xavier Rodet, Analyse/Synthese team manager.
or by fax at: (33 1) 44 78 15 40, care of Xavier.Rodet
or by surface mail to: Xavier Rodet, IRCAM, 1 Place Stravinsky, 75004 Paris.
Introducing IRCAM
IRCAM is a leading non-profit organization dedicated to musical production, R&D and education in acoustics and music, located in the center of Paris (France), next to the Pompidou Center. It hosts composers, researchers and students from many countries cooperating in contemporary music production, scientific and applied research. The main topics addressed in its R&D departement are acoustics, psychoacoustics, audio synthesis and processing, computer aided composition, user interfaces, real time systems. Detailed activities of IRCAM and its groups are presented on our WWW server

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JOURNALS

CfP: IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE- Special Issue on Spoken Language Technology

The evolution of speech and language technologies over the past decade has spawned an exciting new research area known as Spoken Language Tech nology (SLT). Technological advances in SLT promise to provide ubiquit ous and personalized access to information, communication, and entertai nment services. For example, advances in natural language understanding and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition have resulted in a new generation of automated contact center services that offer callers the flexibility to speak their request naturally using their own words as opposed to the words dictated to them by the machine. Advances in ma chine translation technology have resulted in speech-to-speech translat ion products that offer multi-party multi-lingual communication. Advanc es in information search and data mining are providing the means to ext ract intelligence information from large corpora of speech data (e.g., TV programs, call center data) to help improve business operation and s earch for information rapidly without having to listen to conversations .
This special issue on Spoken Language Technology is motivated by the fi rst SLT workshop, Aruba, December 2006, jointly sponsored by IEEE and A CL (www.slt2006.org). The goal is to solicit tutorial articles with com prehensive surveys of important theories, algorithms, tools, and applic ations of SLT on existing and new commercial, academic and government a pplications. Prospective authors should submit a white paper summarizin g the motivation, the significance of the topic, brief history, and an outline of the content. Authors with accepted proposals will be invited to write a full manuscript.
Scope of topics:
Publications in the following areas are strongly encouraged
Spoken language understanding
Dialog management
Spoken language generation
Spoken document retrieval
Information extraction from speech
Question answering from speech
Spoken document summarization
Machine translation of spoken language
Speech data mining and search
Voice-based human computer interfaces
Spoken dialog systems, applications and standards
Multimodal processing, systems and standards
Machine learning for spoken language processing
Speech and language processing in the world wide web
Submission Procedure:
Prospective authors should submit their white papers to the web submiss ion system at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/spm according to the following timetable. The white papers should be three pages maximum
Important dates
White paper due: June 1, 2007
Invitation notification: July 1, 2007
Manuscript due: October 1, 2007
Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2007
Final Manuscript due: January 15, 2008
Publication date: May, 2008
Guest Editors:
Mazin Gilbert
AT&T Labs - Research
180 Park Avenue
Florham Park, NJ, 07932
Kevin Knight
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Steve Young
Cambridge University
Trumpington Street
Cambridge, CB2 1PZ

Call for Papers- Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing

Dramatic advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology in recent years has enabled serious growth in spoken language processing research, both for human-computer interaction and spoken document processing. The challenges of working with spoken language, including ASR errors and disfluencies, were major factors in the adoption of statistical techniques in the language processing community. Statistical methods now dominate many areas of text processing as well, enabled by growing collections of linguistic data resources and developments in machine learning. While transfer of methods from spoken- to written- language processing continues, advances in written-language processing also now have a significant impact on spoken-language processing. This issue seeks to highlight the cross-fertilization in speech and text processing by publishing novel statistical modeling and learning methods that span a variety of language processing applications.
We invite papers describing new approaches to statistical language processing of both spoken and written language. Submissions must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers will be considered. Of particular interest are methods that transfer recent developments from text processing to speech processing and vice versa, but new methods in one domain are also welcome. Papers describing new strategies for integrating acoustic and linguistic cues in spoken language processing are also encouraged.
Topics of interest include:
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning
- Discriminative learning
- Transfer or adaptation to new domains
- Active learning
- Reinforcement learning
- Memory-based learning and neighborhood methods
- Novel statistical models
- Statistical methods for feature selection or transformation
Specific applications of interest include information extraction, question answering, text segmentation and classification, summarization, translation, language generation and spoken language dialogs. Papers that address component problems of these larger applications are also encouraged, including parsing, discourse analysis, and talker interaction analysis. The issue aims to cover a variety of applications as well as different statistical methods.
Submission procedure:
Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in any recent issue of the Transactions. Note that all rules will apply with regard to submission lengths, mandatory overlength page charges, and color charges. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission system. When selecting a manuscript type, authors must click on "Special Issue of TASLP on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing". Authors should follow the instructions for the IEEE Transactions Audio, Speech and Language Processing and indicate in the Comments to the Editor-in-Chief that the manuscript is submitted for publication in the Special Issue on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing. We require a completed copyright form to be signed and faxed to +1-732-562-8905 at the time of submission. Please indicate the manuscript number on the top of the page.
Schedule:
Submission deadline: 15 June 2007
Notification of final acceptance: 15 December 2008
Final manuscript due: 1 February 2008
Publication date: May 2008
Guest Editors:
Dr. Bill Byrne Cambridge University, UK
Dr. Mark Johnson Brown University, USA
Dr. Lillian Lee Cornell University, USA
Dr. Steve Renals University of Edinburgh, UK

Call for papers for a special issue of Speech Communication on Iberian Languages

Iberian languages (henceforth IL) are amongst the most widely spoken languages in the world. Nowadays, 628 million people on virtually all continents have Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Galician, etc. as their official language. Consequently, important speech research centers and companies, both public and private, are focusing their interest on those languages. This effort has resulted in novel and generic approaches applicable to any language, as well as in the optimization of existing techniques or systems. It is worth highlighting that the community working on speech science and technology in IL speaking countries has already reached world-class level in many areas and has continuously increased in size in the last 15 years.
Speech technology proposed in the context of a non-Iberian language (e.g., English) may not be directly applicable to IL. All linguistic and paralinguistic dimensions, from phonetics to pragmatics, are amongst the features that certainly distinguish IL from others considered in speech science and technology research. As a result, original work and optimization of existing techniques and systems may be necessary in many areas of Iberian spoken language research.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to present recent progress and significant advances in all areas of speech science and technology research in the context of IL. Submitted papers must address topics specific to IL and/or issues raised by analyses of spoken data that shed light on speech science and linguistic theories regarding these languages. Research which deals with IL data, but makes use of standard techniques should not be submitted for this Special Issue. However, both research presenting relevant optimization of current technology and systems, and work exploring specific features of IL spoken corpora will be considered for submission.
This Special Issue is one of the first initiatives proposed by the recently created SIG-IL (ISCA Special Interest Group on Iberian Languages, URL http://www.il-sig.org). The purposes of the SIG-IL are to promote research activities on IL, to sponsor and/or organise meetings, workshops and other events on related topics, and to make speech corpora publicly available by promoting joint evaluation efforts. Furthermore, the SIG-IL is also strongly committed to encouraging world-class research within its community in order to contribute with new ideas to the field of speech science and technology. Original, previously unpublished submissions for the following areas, involving IL and detailing the language-specific aspects, are encouraged:
Topics
o Linguistics, Phonology and Phonetics
o Prosody
o Paralinguistic & Nonlinguistic Information in Speech
o Discourse & Dialogue
o Speech Production
o Speech Perception
o Physiology & Pathology
o Spoken Language Acquisition, Development and Learning
o Spoken Language Generation & Synthesis
o Language/Dialect Identification
o Speech and Speaker Recognition: acoustic, language and pronunciation modeling.
o Spoken Language Understanding
o Multi-modal / Multi-lingual Processing
o Spoken Language Extraction/Retrieval
o Spoken Language Translation
o Spoken/Multi-modal Dialogue Systems
o Spoken Language Resources and Annotation
o Evaluation and Standardization
o Spoken Language Technology for the Aged and Disabled (e-inclusion)
o Spoken Language Technology for Education (e-learning)
o Interdisciplinary Topics in Speech and Language
o New Applications
Guest Editors
Isabel Trancoso INESC-ID, Portugal
Nestor Becerra-Yoma Univ. de Chile, Chile
Plinio A. Barbosa Univ. of Campinas, Brazil
Rubén San-Segundo UPM, Spain
Kuldip Plaiwal Griffith University, Australia
Important Dates
Submission deadline: May 31st, 2007
Notification of acceptance: October 31st, 2007
Final manuscript due: December 30th, 2007
Tentative publication date: March, 2008
Submission Procedure
Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Speech Communication Journal for electronic submission (http://ees.elsevier.com/specom). During submission authors must select the Section “Special Issue Paper”, not “Regular Paper”, and the title of the special issue should be referenced in the “Comments” (Special Issue on Iberian Languages) page along with any other information.

Papers accepted for FUTURE PUBLICATION in Speech Communication

Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com/ for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Free access for all to the titles and abstracts of all volumes and even by clicking on Articles in press and then Selected papers.

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FUTURE CONFERENCES

Publication policy: Hereunder, you will find very short announcements of future events. The full call for participation can be accessed on the conference websites
See also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org/) on conferences and workshops.

FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

INTERSPEECH 2007-EUROSPEECH
August 27-31,2007,Antwerp, Belgium
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves, K.U.Nijmegen
Website
INTERSPEECH 2007 is the eighth conference in the annual series of INTERSPEECH events and also the tenth biennial EUROSPEECH conference. The conference is jointly organized by scientists from the Netherlands and Belgium, and will be held in Antwerp, Belgium, August 27-31, 2007, under the sponsorship of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
The INTERSPEECH meetings are considered to be the top international conferences in spoken language processing, with more than 1000 attendees from universities, industry, and government agencies. The conference offers the prospect of meeting the future leaders of our field, exchanging ideas, and exploring opportunities for collaboration, employment, and sales through keynote talks, tutorials, technical sessions, exhibits, and poster sessions.
In recent years the INTERSPEECH meetings have taken place in a number of exciting venues including most recently Pittsburgh, Lisbon, Jeju Island (Korea), Geneva, Denver, Aalborg (Denmark), and Beijing.
CALL FOR PAPERS
AREAS AND TOPICS OF INTEREST:
Interspeech is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on Speech Science and Speech Technology and it solicits papers in the following areas and topics:
A.Human speech production, perception and communication
Phonology and phonetics
Discourse and dialogue
Prosody (production, perception, prosodic structure)
Paralinguistic and nonlinguistic cues (e.g. emotion and expression)
Speech production
Speech perception
Physiology and pathology
Spoken language acquisition, development and learning
B.Speech and Language technology
Speech and audio processing
Speech enhancement
Speech coding and transmission
Spoken language generation and synthesis
Speech recognition
Spoken language understanding
Accent and language identification
Cross-lingual and multi-lingual processing
Multimodal/multimedia signal processing
Speaker characterization and recognition
C.Spoken language systems and applications
Dialogue systems
Systems for information retrieval
Systems for translation
Applications for aged and handicapped persons
Applications for learning and education
Other applications
D.Resources, standardization and evaluation
Spoken language resources and annotation
Evaluation and standardization
PAPER SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers (including figures and references) via the conference website by March 23, 2007 midnight at the International Date Line West. Since the conference takes place early this year, the paper submission deadline will not be postponed by any significant amount of time.
The paper preparation guidelines can be found on the conference website. They stipulate that authors may submit multimedia files to illustrate their contribution. These multimedia files will have to be incorporated in one ZIP archive.
The conference will host several Special Sessions (see conference website). If authors want their paper to be considered for one of these Sessions, they can specify that during paper submission. Irrespective of this specification, all papers will follow the same electronic review procedure.
Authors will have to declare that their contribution is original and not being submitted for publication elsewhere (e.g., another conference, workshop, or journal).
Each corresponding author will be notified by e-mail of the acceptance or rejection of his paper by May 25, 2007. Minor updates of accepted papers will be allowed during May 25 - June 3, 2007.
More information is available on the conference website
IMPORTANT DATES
Full paper submission deadline: March 23, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance/rejection May 25, 2007
Early registration deadline: June 22, 2007
Further information via website or email.
ORGANIZERS
Professor Dirk Van Compernolle (General Chair)
Professor Lou Boves (General Co-Chair)
c/o Annitta De Messemaeker
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Department of Electrical Engineering
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10
B3001 Heverlee
Belgium
Fax: +32 16 321723
Email
Website

INTERSPEECH 2008-ICSLP
September 22-26, 2008, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Chairman: Denis Burnham, MARCS, University of West Sydney.

INTERSPEECH 2009-EUROSPEECH
Brighton, UK,
Chairman: Prof. Roger Moore, University of Sheffield.

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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

Third ITRW on NON-LINEAR SPEECH PROCESSING (NOLISP'07)

May 22-25, 2007 , Paris, France
Website
Many specifics of the speech signal are not well addressed by the conventional models currently used in the field of speech processing. The purpose of the workshop is to present and discuss novel ideas, work and results related to alternative techniques for speech processing, which depart from mainstream approaches.
SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are invited to submit a 3 to 4-page paper proposal in English, which will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee. Final papers will be due 1 month after the workshop, for inclusion in the CD-ROM proceedings. A special issue in Speech Communication (Elsevier) will follows.
KEY DATES
Submission (full paper): 15 January 2007
Notification of acceptance: 23 February 2007
Workshop: 22-25 May 2007
Final (revised) paper: 25 June

6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop (SSW-6) (

University of Bonn (Germany), August 22-24, 2007
A satellite of INTERSPEECH 2007 (Antwerp)in collaboration with SynSIG and IfK (University of Bonn)
Organized shortly after the 16th International Congress on Phonetic Sciences (Saarbrücken, Germany, August 6-10, 2007). Like its predecessors in Autrans (France) 1990, New Paltz (NY, USA) 1994, Jenolan (Australia) 1998, Pitlochry (UK) 2001, and Pittsburgh (PA, USA) 2004, SSW-6 will cover all aspects of speech synthesis and adjacent fields, such as:
TOPICS (updated list)
* Text processing for speech synthesis
* Prosody Generation for speech synthesis
* Speech modeling for speech synthesis applications
* Signal processing for speech synthesis
* Concatenative speech synthesis (diphones, polyphones, unit selection)
* Articulatory synthesis
* Statistical parametric speech synthesis
* Voice transformation/conversion/adaptation for speech synthesis
* Expressive speech synthesis
* Multilingual and/or multimodal speech synthesis
* Text-to-speech and content-to-speech
* Singing speech synthesis
* Systems and applications involving speech synthesis
* Techniques for assessing synthetic speech quality
* Language resources for speech synthesis
* Aids for the handicapped involving speech synthesis.
Deadlines (updated)
* Full-paper submission (up to 6 pages) - May 1, 2007
* Notification of acceptance - June 25, 2007
* Deadline for paper modification - July 15, 2007
Please send your papers, preferably as PDF files, as an e-mail attachment. Further information can soon be obtained from the < a href="http://www.isca-speech.org/ssw6"> website of the workshop,
Contact
Prof. Wolfgang Hess

8th Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial), Antwerp, Belgium

Antwerp, September 2-3, 2007
Held immediately following Interspeech 2007
Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Sydney, Lisbon, Boston, Sapporo, Philadelphia, Aalborg, and Hong Kong, this workshop spans the ACL and ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA.
Topics of Interest
We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation or
analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three themes:
1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems
Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, information retrieval including topics like:
· Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
· Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
. (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
· Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:
· Dialogue management models;
· Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
· Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
· Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;
2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology
Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:
· Annotation tools and coding schemes;
· Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
· Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
· Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies;
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:
· The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
· Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure;
· Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
· Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature.
Submissions
The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers for full plenary presentation as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations.
· Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, examples, references, etc. In addition to this, two additional pages are allowed as an appendix which may include extended example discourses or dialogues, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.
· Short papers and demo descriptions should aim to be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.). Please use the official ACL style files. Submission/Reviewing will be managed by the START system. Link to follow. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGdial 07 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, etc.
Important Dates (subject to change)
Submission May 2, 2007
Notification June 13, 2007
Final submissions July 6, 2007
Workshop September 2-3, 2007
Websites
Workshop website:To be announced
Submission website:To be announced
Sigdial website
Interspeech 2007 website
Email
Program Committee (confirmed)
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University, Netherlands (co-chair)
Tim Paek, Microsoft Research, USA (co-chair)
Simon Keizer, Tilburg University, Netherlands (local chair)
Wolfgang Minker, University of Ulm, Germany
David Traum, USC/ICT, USA

CfP-SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education
ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop

The Summit Inn, Farmington, Pennsylvania USA October 1-3, 2007.
Website
Speech and natural language processing technologies have evolved from being emerging new technologies to being reliable techniques that can be used in real applications. One worthwhile application is Computer-Assisted Language Learning. This is not only helpful to the end user, the language learner, but also to the researcher who can learn more about the technology from observing its use in a real setting. This workshop will include presentations of both research projects and real applications in the domain of speech and language technology in education.
IMPORTANT DATES
Full paper deadline: May 1, 2007.
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2007.
Early registration deadline: August 1, 2007.
Preliminary programme available: September 1, 2007.
Workshop will take place: October 1-3, 2007.
LOCATION
The workshop will be held in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. In early October the vegetation in the Highlands puts on a beautiful show of colors and the weather is still not too chilly. The event will take place at the Summit Inn, situated on one of the Laurel Ridges. It is close to the Laurel Caverns where amateur spelunkers can visit the underground caverns. The first night event will be a hayride and dinner at a local winery and the banquet will take place at Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderful Fallingwater.
TOPICS
The workshop will cover all topics which come under the purlieu of speech and language technology for education. In accordance with the spirit of the ITRWs, the upcoming workshop will focus on research and results, give information on tools and welcome prototype demons
trations of potential future applications. The workshop will focus on research issues, applications, development tools and collaboration. It will be concerned with all topics which fit under the purview of speech and language technology for education. Papers will discuss theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, persistent difficulties, general research tools and techniques. Papers that critically evaluate approaches or processing strategies will be especially welcome, as will prototype demonstrations of real-world applications.
The scope of acceptable topic interests includes but is not limited to:
- Use of speech recognition for CALL
- Use of natural language processing for CALL
- Use of spoken language dialogue for CALL
- Applications using speech and/or natural language processing for CALL
- CALL tutoring systems
- Assessment of CALL tutors

ORGANIZATION-CONTACT
The workshop is being organized by the new ISCA Special Interest Group, SLaTE. The general chair is Dr. Maxine Eskenazi from Carnegie Mellon University .
PROGRAMME
As per the spirit of ITRWs, the format of the workshop will consist of a non-overlapping mixture of oral, poster and demo sessions. Internationally recognized experts from pertinent areas will deliver several keynote lectures on topics of particular interest. All poster sessions will be opened by an oral summary by the session chair. A number of poster sessions will be succeeded by a discussion session focussing on the subject of the session. The aim of this structure is to ensure a lively and valuable workshop for all involved. Furthermore, the organizers would like to encourage researchers and industrialists to bring along their applications, as well as prototype demonstrations and design tools where appropriate. The official language of the workshop is English. This is to help guarantee the highest degree of international accessibility to the workshop. At the opening of the workshop hardcopies and CD-ROM of the abstracts and proceedings will be available.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We seek outstanding technical articles in the vein discussed above. For those who intend to submit papers, the deadline is May 1, 2007. Following preliminary review by the committee, notification will be sent regarding acceptance/rejection. Interested authors should send full 4 page camera-ready papers.
REGISTRATION FEE
The fee for the workshop, including a booklet of Abstracts, the Proceedings on CD-ROM is:
- $325 for ISCA members and
- $225 for ISCA student members with valid identification
Registrations after August 1, 2007 cannot be guaranteed.
ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION INFORMATION
All meals except breakfast for the two and a half days as well as the two special events are included in this price. Hotel accommodations are $119 per night , and breakfast is about $10. Upon request we will furnish bus transport from the Greater Pittsburgh Airport and from Pittsburgh to Farmington at a cost of about $30. ISCA membership is 55 Euros. You must be a member of ISCA to attend this workshop.

ITRW on Evidence-based Voice and Speech Rehabilitation in Head & Neck Oncology

May 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2008
Cancer in the head and neck area and its treatment can have debilitating effects on communication. Currently available treatment options such as radiotherapy, surgery, chemo-radiation, or a combination of these can often be curative. However, each of these options affects parts of the vocal tract and/or voice to a more or lesser degree. When the vocal tract or voice no longer functions optimally, this affects communication. For example, radiotherapy can result in poor voice quality, limiting the speaker’s vocal performance (fatigue from speaking, avoidance of certain communicative situations, etc.). Surgical removal of the larynx necessitates an alternative voicing source, which generally results in a poor voice quality, but further affects intelligibility and the prosodic structure of speech. Similarly, a commando procedure (resection involving portions of the mandible / floor of the mouth / mobile tongue) can have a negative effect on speech intelligibility. This 2 day tutorial and research workshop will focus on evidence-based rehabilitation of voice and speech in head and neck oncology. There will be 4 half day sessions, 3 of which will deal with issues concerning total laryngectomy. One session will be devoted to research on rehabilitation of other head and neck cancer sites. The chairpersons of each session will prepare a work document on the specific topic at hand (together with the two keynote lecturers assigned), which will be discussed in a subsequent round table session. After this there will be a 30’ poster session, allowing 9-10 short presentations. Each presentation consists of maximally 4 slides, and is meant to highlight the poster’s key points. Posters will be visited in the subsequent poster visit session. The final work document will refer to all research presently available, discuss its (clinical) relevance, and will attempt to provide directions for future research. The combined work document, keynote lectures and poster abstracts/papers will be published under the auspices of ISCA.
Organizers
Prof. dr. Frans JM Hilgers
Prof. dr. Louis CW Pols, PhD
dr. Maya van Rossum.
Sponsoring institutions:
Institute of Phonetic Sciences - Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication,
The Netherlands Cancer Institute – Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital
Dates and submission details as well as a website address will be announced in a later issue.

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA

CFP- ETSI Workshop: Speech and Noise in Wideband Communication

22nd & 23rd May 2007, at ETSI Headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France.
As new types of voice coders, noise cancellation algorithms, transmission technologies and consequently transmission impairments enter the scene and convergence becomes ever more a reality, the standardization community faces new challenges.
Being organised by TC STQ, STF 294 and Mesaqin, under contract to ETSI, the main objectives of the workshop are to:
* Discuss the status, latest advances and trends in wideband speech and audio coding, in particular in the presence of interfering sounds and noise
* Present the results of STF 294: Improving the quality of eEurope wideband speech applications by developing a standardised performance testing and evaluation methodology for background noise transmission
* Exchange information and establish relationships between research, state and industrial organizations involved in the topic
Topics that will be addressed will include speech and audio wideband coding, noise suppression and its artefacts, and quality assessment.
A round table discussion will permit participants to offer views on the current issues and challenges that we will be facing in the future.
Participation in the workshop is free of charge, and open to everyone.
Candidate speakers are invited to send an abstract of their presentation to Jan Holub by Friday 16th March 2007.
For further details, consult the workshop Website For registration please see our web

CfP-Special session at Interspeech 2007: Novel techniques for the NATO non-native military air traffic controller database (nn-matc)

Following a series of special interest sessions and (satellite) workshops, at Lisbon (1995), Leusden (NL, 1999) and Aalborg (2001), the NATO research task group on speech and language technology, RTO IST031-RTG013, organizes a special session at Interspeech 2007. After having studied various aspects of speech in noise, speech under stress, and non-native speech, the research task group has been studying the effects of all of these factors on various speech technologies.
To this end, the task group has collected a corpus of military Air Traffic Control communication in Belgian air space. This speech material consists predominantly of non-native English speech, under varying noise and channel conditions. The database has been annotated at several levels:
* word transcriptions, which allow research to be conducted on automatic speech recognition and named entity extraction,
* Speaker turns, identified by call signs, allowing for research in speaker recognition and clustering and tracking of conversations.
The database consists of 16 hours of training speech, plus one hour of development and evaluation test sets.
The NATO research task group is making this annotated speech database available for speech researchers, who want to develop novel algorithms for this challenging material. These new algorithms could include noise-robust speaker recognition, robust speaker and accent adaptation for ASR, and context driven named entity detection. In order to facilitate a common task, we have written a suggested test and evaluation plan to guide researchers. At the special session we will discuss research results on this common data set.
More information on the special session, the database and the evaluation plan can be found on the web-site
Submission
Researchers who are interested in contributing to this special session are invited to submit a paper according to the regular submission procedure of INTERSPEECH 2007, and to select `Novel techniques for the NATO non-native Air Traffic Control database' in the special session field of the paper submission form. The paper submission deadline is March 23, 2007.
Contact
Session organizer: David van Leeuwen
TNO Human Factors
P. O. Box 23
3769 ZG Soesterberg
The Netherlands

CfP SPECOM 2007

The 12th International Conference on Speech and Computer
October 15-18, 2007
Organized by Moscow State Linguistic University
General Chair:
Prof. Irina Khaleeva (Moscow State Linguistic University)
Chair:
Prof. Rodmonga Potapova (Moscow State Linguistic University)
SPECOM'07 is the twelfth conference in the annual series of SPECOM events. It is organized by Moscow State Linguistic University and will be held in Moscow, Russia, under the sponsorship of Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), Ministry of Education and Science of Russian Federation, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and others. SPECOM'07 will cover various aspects of speech science and technology. The program of the conference will include keynote lectures by internationally renowned scientists, parallel oral and poster sessions and an exhibition. The sci-tech exhibition that will be held during the conference will be open to companies and research institutions. The official language of the Conference will be English.
Important Dates
Paper submission opening February 1, 2007
Full paper deadline April 25, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance May 25, 2007
Conference October 15-18, 2007
Topics
· Speech recognition
· Speech coding and transmission
· Spoken language understanding
· Cross-lingual and multi-lingual processing
· Multimodal and multimedia signal processing
· Speaker identification and verification
· Emotional state identification
· Accent and language identification
· Speech discourse analysis and modeling
· Forensic phonetics systems
· Language and speech systems in industry
· Speech production and perception
· Spontaneous speech perception modeling
· TTS systems
· Speech dialog systems
· Conceptual models for natural spoken language
· Linguistic and paralinguistic communication strategies
· Automatic speech translation systems
· New technologies in linguadidactics
· Speech and language resources
· Perspectives of evolution of speech technologies
PAPER SUBMISSION
The deadline for full paper submission (4-6 pages) is April 25, 2007. Papers are to be sent by e-mail to specom2007@mail.ru. All manuscripts must be in English. Please note that the size of a single letter must not exceed 10 Megabytes (that is, the total size of all the attached files should not be greater than 7 Megabytes to leave room for recoding operations performed by the e-mail software). In case the paper files are larger than 7 Megabytes, it is recommended to pack them into a split WinRar or WinZip archive and send part by part in a series of letter.
All the papers will be reviewed by an international scientific committee. Each author will be notified by e-mail of the acceptance or rejection of her/his paper by May 30, 2007. Minor updates of accepted papers will be allowed during May 30 - June 15, 2007.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Submission of a paper or poster is more likely to be accepted if it is original, innovative, and contributes to the practice of worldwide scientific communication. Quality of work, clarity and completeness of the submitted materials will be considered.
REGISTRATION
Registration will be available at the Conference on arrival. The registration fees are planned to be approximately as follows:
Regular 500 EUR
Students/PG Students 200 EUR
NIS (New Independent States), Regular 300 EUR
NIS, Students/PG Students 100 EUR
Russia, Regular 150 EUR
Russia, Students/PG Students (no Proceedings) Free Extra Copy of Proceedings (hard copy) 20 EUR
Extra Proceedings CD/DVD 10 EUR
Information regarding accommodation costs will be available later. All the registration and accommodation payments will be accepted in cash during the registration procedure on arrival.
PAPER PREPARATION GUIDELINES
In the following you will find guidelines for preparing your full paper to SPECOM'07 electronically.
· To achieve the best viewing experience both for the Proceedings and the CD (or DVD), we strongly encourage you to use Times Roman font. This is needed in order to give the Proceedings a uniform look. Please use the attached printable version of this newsletter as a model.
· Authors are requested to submit PDF files of their manuscripts, generated from the original Microsoft Word sources. PDF files can be generated with commercially available tools or with free software such as PDFCreator.
· Paper Title - The paper title must be in boldface. All non-function words must be capitalized, and all other words in the title must be lower case. The paper title is centered.
· Authors' Names - The authors' names (italicized) and affiliations (not italicized) appear centered below the paper title.
· Abstract - Each paper must contain an abstract that appears at the beginning of the paper.
· Major Headings - Major headings are in boldface.
· Sub Headings - Sub headings appear like major headings, except that they are in italics and not bold face.
· References - Number and list all references at the end of the paper. The references are numbered in order of appearance in the document. When referring to them in the text, type the corresponding reference number in square brackets as shown at the end of this sentence [1].
· Illustrations - Illustrations must appear within the designated margins, and must be positioned within the paper margins. Caption and number every illustration. All half-tone or color illustrations must be clear when printed in black and white. Line drawings must be made in black ink on white paper.
· Do NOT include headers and footers. The page numbers, session numbers and conference identification will be inserted automatically in a post processing step, at the time of printing the Proceedings.
· Apart from the paper in PDF format, authors can upload multimedia files to illustrate their submission. Multimedia files can be used to include materials such as sound files or movies. The proceedings CD (DVD) will NOT contain readers or players, so only widely accepted file formats should be used, such as MPEG, Windows WAVE PCM (.wav) or Windows Media Video (.wmv), using only standard codecs to maximize compatibility. Authors must ensure that they have sufficient author rights to the material that they submit for publication. Archives (RAR, ZIP or ARJ format) are allowed. The archives will be unpacked on the CD (DVD), so that authors can refer to the file name of the multimedia illustration from within their paper. The submitted files will be accessible from the abstract card on the CD (DVD) and via a bookmark in the manuscript. We advise to use SHORT but meaningful file names. The total unzipped size of the multimedia files should be reasonable. It is recommended that they do not exceed 32 Megabytes.
· Although no copyright forms are required, the authors must agree that their contribution, when accepted, will be archived by the Organizing Committee.
· Authors must proofread their manuscripts before submission and they must proofread the exact files which they submit.
POSTERS AND PRESENTATIONS
Only electronic presentations are accepted. PowerPoint presentations can be supplied on CD, DVD, FD or USB Flash drives. Designated poster space will be wooden or felt boards. The space allotted to one speaker will measure 100 cm (width) x 122 cm (height). Posters will be attached to the boards using pushpins. Pins will be provided. Thanks for following all of these instructions carefully! If you have any questions or comments concerning the submission, please don't hesitate to contact the conference organizers. Please address all technical issues or questions regarding paper submission or presentation to our technical assistant < a href="mailto:specomtech@yandex.ru">Nikolay Bobrov .

CFP IEEE ASRU 2007

Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop
The Westin Miyako Kyoto, Japan
December 9 -13, 2007
Conference website
The tenth biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) cooperated by ISCA will be held during December 9-13, 2007. The ASRU workshops have a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting to discuss problems of common interest in automatic speech recognition and understanding.
WORKSHOP TOPICS
Papers in all areas of human language technology are encouraged to be submitted, with emphasis placed on:
- automatic speech recognition and understanding technology
- speech to text systems
- spoken dialog systems
- multilingual language processing
- robustness in ASR
- spoken document retrieval
- speech-to-speech translation
- spontaneous speech processing
- speech summarization,
- new applications of ASR.
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE TECHNICAL PROGRAM
The workshop program will consist of invited lectures, oral and poster presentations, and panel discussions. Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the ASRU 2007 website . All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The website will provide you with further details. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.
TENTATIVE DATES
July, 2007 Camera-ready submission deadline
August, 2007 Paper acceptance/rejection notices emailed
September, 2007 Demonstration proposal deadline
October, 2007 Workshop advance registration deadline
December 9-13, 2007 Workshop
REGISTRATION AND INFORMATION
Registration will be handled via the ASRU 2007 website .
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
General Chairs:
Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Inst. Tech.)
Tatsuya Kawahara (Kyoto Univ.)
Technical Chairs:
Jean-Claude Junqua (Panasonic)
Helen Meng (Chinese Univ. Hong Kong)
Satoshi Nakamura (ATR)
Publication Chair:
Timothy Hazen, MIT, USA
Publicity Chair:
Tomoko Matsui, ISM, Japan
Demonstration Chair:
Kazuya Takeda, Nagoya U, Japan

Call for Papers (Preliminary version) Speech Prosody 2008

Campinas, Brazil, May 6-9, 2008
Speech Prosody 2008 will be the fourth conference of a series of international events of the Special Interest Groups on Speech Prosody (ISCA), starting by the one held in Aix-en Provence, France, in 2002. The conferences in Nara, Japan (2004), and in Dresden, Germany (2006) followed the proposal of biennial meetings, and now is the time of changing place and hemisphere by trying the challenge of offering a non-stereotypical view of Brazil. It is a great pleasure for our labs to host the fourth International Conference on Speech Prosody in Campinas, Brazil, the second major city of the State of São Paulo. It is worth highlighting that prosody covers a multidisciplinary area of research involving scientists from very different backgrounds and traditions, including linguistics and phonetics, conversation analysis, semantics and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, acoustics, speech synthesis and recognition, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, speech therapy, language teaching, and related fields. Information: sp2008_info@iel.unicamp.br. Web site: http://sp2008.org. We invite all participants to contribute with papers presenting original research from all areas of speech prosody, especially, but nor limited to the following. Scientific Topics
Prosody and the Brain
Long-Term Voice Quality
Intonation and Rhythm Analysis and Modelling
Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Prosody
Cross-linguistic Studies of Prosody
Prosodic variability
Prosody in Discourse
Dialogues and Spontaneous Speech
Prosody of Expressive Speech
Perception of Prosody
Prosody in Speech Synthesis
Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding
Prosody in Language Learning and Acquisition
Pathology of Prosody and Aids for the Impaired
Prosody Annotation in Speech Corpora
Others (please, specify)
Organising institutions
Speech Prosody Studies Group, IEL/Unicamp | Lab. de Fonética, FALE/UFMG | LIACC, LAEL, PUC-SP
Important Dates
Call for Papers: May 15, 2007
Full Paper Submission: Sept. 30, 2007
Notif. of Acceptance: Nov. 30, 2007
Early Registration: Dec. 20, 2007
Conference: May 6-9, 2008

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FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS


2nd CFP 1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2007)

Tarragona Spain
March 29 - April 4 2007
Website
Extended submission deadline: December 7th, 2006
AIMS
2007 intends to become a major conference in theoretical computer s cience and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications that is being developed at the hos t institute since 2001, it will reserve significant room for young com puter scientists at the beginning of their career. LATA 2007 will aim at attracting scholars from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics,systems biology,language technology,arti ficial intelligence, etc)
SCOPE
Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include but are not limited to
- words, languages and automata
- grammars (Chomsky hierarchy contextual, multidimensional, unifi cation, categorial, etc)
- grammars and automata architectures
- combinatorics on words
- language varieties and semigroups
- algebraic language theory
- computability
- computational,descriptional, communication and parameterized comp lexity
- patterns and codes
- regulated rewriting
- trees, tree languages and tree machines
- term rewriting
- graphs and graph transformation
- power series
- fuzzy and rough languages
- cellular automata
- DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing
- quantum=2C chemical and optical computing - biomolecular nanotechnology
- automata and logic
- automata for verification
- automata, concurrency and Petri nets
- parsing
- weighted machines
- foundations of finite state technology
- grammatical inference and learning
- symbolic neural networks
- text retrieval and pattern recognition
- string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinform atics
- mathematical evolutionary genomics
- language-based cryptography
- compression
- circuit theory and applications
- language theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artifici al life
STRUCTURE
LATA 2007 will consist of
- 2 invited tutorials
- refereed contributions
- open sessions for discussion in specific subfields
- young sessions on professional issues
INVITED SPEAKERS
Volker Diekert (UStuttgart), Equations: From Words to Graph Products (tutorial)
Nissim Francez and Michael Kaminski (Technion) ,Extensions of Pregroup Grammars and Their Correlated Automata
Eric Graedel (RWTH Aachen), Infinite Games (tutorial)
Neil Immerman (UMass.Amherst),Nested Words
Helmut Jorgensen (UWestern Ontario), Synchronization and Codes (tent ative title)
SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 pages and should be formatted a ccording to the usual LNCS article style=2E Submissions have to be sent through the webpage
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: extended to December 7th, 2006
Application for funding (PhD students):December 15 2006
Notification of funding acceptance or rejection: December 31,2006
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: January 31 2007
Early registration: February 15 2007
Final version of the paper for the pre-proceedings: February 28 2007
Starting of the conference: March 29 2007
Submission to the proceedings volume: May 15 2007

Colloque parole-Laboratoire des sciences de la parole- Charleroi - Parentville (Belgique)

A l'occasion de l'inauguration de leur "Laboratoire des sciences de la parole" Didier Demolin et Bernard Harmegnies organisent les 30 et 31 mars 2007 les premières "Journées des sciences de la parole", à Charleroi - Parentville (Belgique).
Date limite pour la soumission des contributions : 12 février 2007.
Thèmes: synthèse de parole, origine des langues, imagerie et parole, phonétique, phonologie, méthodes et techniques d'étude de la production et de la perception de la parole, didactique de l'oral, développement du langage, sociolinguistique, etc.
Informations: Website
. Contacts:Email
Bourses AFCP disponibles.

ICASSP 2007

2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
April 15-20, 2007
Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.
conference website
Tutorial Proposals Due August 4, 2006
Special Session and Panel Proposals Due August 4, 2006
Notification of Special Session & Tutorial Acceptance September 8, 2006
TOPICS
* Audio and electroacoustics
* Bio imaging and signal processing * Design and implementation of signal processing systems
* Image and multidimensional signal processing
* Industry technology tracks
* Information forensics and security
* Machine learning for signal processing
* Multimedia signal processing
* Sensor array and multichannel systems
* Signal processing education
* Signal processing for communications
* Signal processing theory and methods
* Speech processing
* Spoken language processing
Submission of Papers
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers , including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.
Tutorial, Special Session, and Panel Proposals
Tutorials will be held on April 15 and 16, 2007. Brief proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2006, to Hideaki Sakai by email and must include title, outline, contact information for the presenter, and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants together with a short biography of the presenter and a list of publications related to the proposal. Special session and panel proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2006, to Phil Chou through the the ICASSP 2007 website and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited speakers.
Important Deadlines
Tutorial Proposals Due: August 4, 2006
Special Session and Panel Proposals Due: August 4, 2006
Notification of Special Session & Tutorial Acceptance: September 8, 2006
Submission of Camera-Ready Papers: September 29, 2006
Notification of Acceptance (by email): December 15, 2006
Author's Registration Deadline: February 2, 2007
Chairs
General Chairs
K. J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland, College Park
Todd Reed, University of Hawaii
Technical Program Chairs
Anthony Kuh, University of Hawaii
Yih-Fang Huang, University of Notre Dame

NAACL HLT 2007 Preliminary Call for Papers

Human Language Technologies:
The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
April 22-27, 2007, Rochester, New York
Conference website
General Conference Chair: Candace Sidner (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories)
Program Co-Chairs:
Tanja Schultz (Carnegie Mellon University)
Matthew Stone (Rutgers University)
ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Local Arrangements: James Allen, Len Schubert, and Dan Gildea (University of Rochester)
NAACL HLT 2007 continues the tradition of the combined Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. The conference covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. NAACL HLT 2007 will feature full papers, late-breaking (short) papers, demonstrations, and a doctoral consortium, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and workshops. The conference is organized by the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), who is advised by a board representing the IR and speech communities and North American HLT funding agencies.
Topics of Interest:
The conference invites the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in disciplines that could impact human language processing systems, with a special focus on theories and methods that enable compelling combinations of human language technologies (e.g., Speech with Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.). Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Computational analysis of language Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, dialogue, discourse, style
- Speech processing, including:
Speech recognition and speech generation
Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech
- Information retrieval, text classification, and information filtering/recommendation Text data mining, information extraction, text summarization, and question answering
- Multimodal representations and processing
- Statistical and learning techniques for language, including
Corpus-based language modeling
Lexical and knowledge acquisition
- Development of language resources, including
Lexicons and ontologies
Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
- Language generation and text planning
- Multilingual processing, including
Machine translation of speech and text
Cross-language information retrieval
Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
- Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including
Conversational systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral intervention
Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans and human-robot conversation
Language-enhanced platforms for interactive narrative and digital entertainment
- Evaluation, including
Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings
Submission information:
Full papers: Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work and should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding eight pages, including references. Each submission will be judged chiefly on the strength of the argument it provides in support of its contribution, through e.g. experimental evaluation, theoretical analysis, or critical engagement with HLT. Reviewing will be double-blind; each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.
Late-breaking (short) papers: Submissions describing original, unpublished work can be submitted as short papers with a later deadline. The submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding four pages, including references. Reviewing will be double-blind; each submission will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. Short paper submissions may be accepted for oral presentation in plenary OR for presentation in a poster session.
Demonstration, doctoral consortium, tutorial, and workshop proposals: Submission instructions will be available later.
Multiple-submission policy: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information at submission time. In the event of multiple acceptances, authors must notify the program chairs by January 5, 2007, indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. HLT-NAACL 2007 cannot accept for publication work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.
Important Dates
Oct 13, 2006 Full paper submissions due
Dec 22, 2006 Full paper notification of acceptance
Jan 18, 2007 Short paper submissions due
Feb 22, 2007 Short Paper notification of acceptance
Mar 5, 2007 Camera-ready full/short papers due
Apr 22-28, 2007 Conference
For more information.

Rochester: NAACL-HLT 2007 - Call for Doctoral Consortium

Web info
April 22, 2007
Rochester, NY
Application Deadline: Jan 18, 2007
1. Call for Participation
Following the success of last year, the Doctoral Consortium at NAACL-HLT 2007 will provide an opportunity for a group of senior Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in the fields of natural language processing, speech technology, and information retrieval. The event is also an opportunity for students to develop the skills necessary to effectively communicate one's research in preparation for future job talks.
The Doctoral Consortium will be held as a workshop on April 22, 2007, immediately before the start of the main conference. Students will present their work and get feedback from a panel of experienced researchers. The event will also include a panel presentation on professional development topics relevant to students pursuing research careers in academia or industry.
Students will participate in a poster session held during the main conference and will have a short paper discussing their research published in the companion volume of the proceedings. Each student's professional biography, research abstract, and photograph will also be included in a face book to be distributed to all attendees of the main NAACL-HLT 2007 conference.
The consortium has the following objectives: (1) to provide feedback on participants' research and on the presentation of their work to others; (2) to develop a supportive community of scholars; (3) to support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths; and (4) to contribute to the NAACL-HLT conference goals through interaction with other researchers and participation in conference events.
There is a possibility that students who participate in the Doctoral Consortium may be able to receive an allowance for basic conference registration, travel, and hotel. The Doctoral Consortium organizers are currently applying for funding for such travel support. Updates will be available on the Doctoral Consortium website.
NAACL-HLT 2007 continues the combination of the Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working to enable natural language human-computer interaction, and providing services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction. For further information on the main conference.
2. Eligibility for Participation
The event is designed for senior Ph.D. students who are in the last few years of their doctoral program (who have already settled on a research direction and who have likely already submitted a thesis proposal). Students who are conducting research on all aspects of human language processing are invited to apply. Topics include (but are not limited to):
+ Computational analysis of language
- Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, dialogue, discourse, and style
+ Speech processing, including:
- Speech recognition and speech generation
- Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech
+ Information retrieval, text classification, and information filtering/recommendation
- Text data mining, information extraction, text summarization, and question answering
+ Multimodal representations and processing
+ Statistical and learning techniques for language, including
- Corpus-based language modeling
- Lexical and knowledge acquisition
+ Development of language resources, including
- Lexicons and ontologies
- Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
+ Language generation and text planning
+ Multilingual processing, including
- Machine translation of speech and text
- Cross-language information retrieval
- Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
+ Intelligent systems for natural language interaction, including
- Conversational systems for collaboration, tutoring and behavioral intervention
- Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans and human-robot conversation
- Language-enhanced platforms for interactive narrative and digital entertainment
+ Evaluation, including
- Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
- Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings
As part of the application process, students will submit a short paper summarizing their research goals, completed work, and future directions. This paper should be the basis for the student's presentation at the Doctoral Consortium event, which should follow the format of an abbreviated job talk. Thus, the paper should give an overview of the student's research and highlight his or her contributions; the paper may include citations to previous publications that describe more specific aspects of the student's research.
The short papers accepted for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title material on the first page.
Students who are submitting papers on specific portions of their work to the main conference are also invited to apply to the Doctoral Consortium. In this case, the short paper for the Doctoral Consortium must give an overview of the student's dissertation research, and the paper for the main conference should focus on a specific piece of this work.
3. Application Procedure
Applications should contain the following four elements:
(1) A cover letter (under 2-pages) describing the student's progress in his or her degree program, expected date of graduation, plans after graduation, and what he or she hopes to gain from the Doctoral Consortium. The letter should contain the student's name, department, school, contact information, name of advisor, advisor's e-mail address, and a short statement affirming that the student meets the eligibility requirements specified in Section 2 of this Call for Participation.
(2) The student's Curriculum Vitae (including a list of publications).
(3) A short paper written by the student summarizing his or her research goals, completed work, and future directions. This paper should be the basis for the student's presentation at the Doctoral Consortium event, and it should give an overview of the student's research and highlight his or her major contributions.
(4) A letter of recommendation from the student's advisor. The student's advisor should produce a PDF file of the recommendation letter and e-mail it by Jan 18, 2007.
The student should send email by Jan 18, 2007, with three attachments in PDF format: the cover letter, the Curriculum Vitae, and the short paper.
The short paper should follow the format of "short papers" submitted to the main NAACL-HLT 2007 conference. It should follow the two-column format of NAACL/ACL proceedings and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year's conference. They will be available through the Doctoral Consortium homepage (listed below). A description of the format will also be available in case you are unable to use the style files directly. Papers must conform to the official NAACL-HLT 2007 style guidelines, and we reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font size restrictions. Submissions should be in PDF format and must include all fonts, so that the paper will print (not just view) anywhere.
Further details on the submission procedure and formatting instructions may be found at the Doctoral Consortium homepage.
If students are accepted to the Doctoral Consortium, they will also be asked to submit a short professional biography, research abstract, and photograph to be included in the face book to be distributed to all participants at the NAACL-HLT 2007 conference. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice.
4. Important Dates
All application materials must be received by 11:59pm (23:59) PST (Pacific Standard Time) on Jan 18, 2007. Late submissions will be automatically disqualified. Acknowledgment will be e-mailed soon after receipt.
Application deadline: Jan 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance: Feb 22, 2007
Camera-ready papers due: Mar 5, 2007
Doctoral Consortium Event: April 22, 2007
NAACL-HLT 2007 Conference: April 22-27, 2007
5. Contact Information
Doctoral Consortium Co-chairs:
Jackson Liscombe (Columbia University)
Phil Michalak (University of Rochester)
Contact the co-chairs of the Doctoral Consortium.
Faculty Advisor:
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University)

NAACL HLT 2007- CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS

Rochester, New York, USA
Conference: April 22-27, 2007
Submission deadline: Jan 18, 2007 http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/
Demo Co-Chairs:
Bob Carpenter, Alias I, Inc.
Amanda Stent, Stony Brook University
Jason D. Williams, AT&T Labs - Research
Proposals are invited for the NAACL HLT 2007 Demonstrations Program. This program is aimed at offering first-hand experience with new systems, providing opportunities to exchange ideas gained from creating systems, and collecting feedback from expert users. It is primarily intended to encourage the early exhibition of research prototypes, but interesting mature systems are also eligible.
Accepted proposals will be presented during the NAACL HLT 2007 Demonstrations Program. In addition, a plenary session in the NAACL HLT main conference will be reserved for proposals of exceptional quality and of broad interest.
Submission of a demonstration proposal on a particular topic does not preclude or require a separate submission of a paper on that topic; it is possible that some but not all of the demonstrations will illustrate concepts that are described in companion papers.
AREAS OF INTEREST
We encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of software and hardware related to all areas of human language technology. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, natural language, speech, and retrieval systems for:
- Speech recognition and generation;
- Speech retrieval and summarization;
- Rich transcription of speech;
- Interactive dialogue;
- Information retrieval, filtering, and extraction;
- Document classification, clustering, and summarization;
- Language modeling, text mining, and question answering;
- Machine translation;
- Multilingual and cross-lingual processing;
- Multimodal user interface;
- Mobile language-enabled devices;
- Tools for Ontology, Lexicon, or other NLP resource development;
- Methods for evaluation;
- Unusual techniques, or applications to other domains.
Please refer to the NAACL HLT 2007 CFP for a more detailed but not necessarily an exhaustive list of relevant topics. (also above in this ISCApad)
SUBMISSION FORMAT
A demo proposal should consist of the following parts:
- An extended abstract of up to two pages, including the title, authors, full contact information, and technical content to be demonstrated. It should give an overview of what the demonstration is aimed to achieve, how the demonstration illustrates novel ideas or late-breaking results, and how it relates to other systems or projects described in the context of other research (i.e., references to related literature).
- A detailed requirement description of hardware, software, and network access expected to be provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be flexible in their requirements (possibly preparing different demos for different logistical situations). Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely must be provided with. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but at this point we cannot guarantee anything beyond the space and power supply.
- A concise outline of the demo script, including the accompanying narrative, and either a web address to access the demo or visual aids (e.g., screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). The demo script should be no more than 6 pages.
The demo abstract must be submitted electronically in the Portable Document Format (PDF). It should follow the format guidelines for the main conference papers. Authors are encouraged to use the style files provided on the NAACL HLT 2007 website.
SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
Demo proposals should be submitted electronically to the demo ] co-chairs at naaclhlt2007demos@gmail.com.
REVIEWING
Demo proposals will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to the conference, innovation, presentation, and potential logistical constraints. Demonstrations will also be evaluated on the underlying techniques or science they illustrate, but will not be expected to contribute new approaches.
PUBLICATION
The accepted demo abstracts will be published in the Companion Volume to the Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2007 Conference.
FURTHER DETAILS
Further details on the date, time, and format of the demonstration session(s) will be determined and provided at a later date. Please send any inquiries to the demo co-chairs at naaclhlt2007demos@gmail.com.
Please check for latest updates.
IMPORTANT DATES
Jan 18, 2007 Submission deadline
Feb 22, 2007 Notification of acceptance
Mar 1, 2007 Submission of final demo related literature
Apr 22-27, 2007 Conference
All submissions or camera-ready copies are due by 11:59pm EST on the = date specified above.

Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology

April 26, 2007
Rochester, NY
Call for Papers
In the recent years, we have seen rapid adoption of dialog systems in commercial applications. They range from telephone-based services, in-car interactive systems, to online conversational service agents and talking characters in computer games. Open-standard platforms such as VoiceXML have been adopted by the industry, and become the driving force for the faster adoption of dialog applications. The widespread dialog applications in industry setting pose challenges for researchers in both industrial and academic worlds. Progress from academic world has not benefited the real world applications to a satisfactory extent. This is partly due to different research interests and priorities from the two camps: one is heavily driven by imminent daily needs from the end customers; the other is largely driven by academic curiosity towards understanding the nature of human-human and human-machine dialogs. The two research agenda lead to somewhat different performance and evaluation metrics. The purpose of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to bring industrial and academic researchers together to share their experiences and visions in the dialog technology development, and to identify topics that are of interest to both camps.
Topics
We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of dialog systems. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Robustness and error handling in dialog systems
Adaptive dialog systems
Scalability of dialog systems
Domain portability issues
Methodology and tools for use case and dialog flow design
Performance evaluation methods and metrics
Comparison of statistical and non-statistical approaches in terms of effort and performance
Challenging issues for the future research
The application and limitations of open standards such as VoiceXML and SALT
In depth discussion of dialog systems successfully deployed in industrial applications, which include but are not limited to:
Call centers
Internet service
Automotive
Mobile devices
Computer games
Desktop applications
Other topics
Submissions
We invite academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to submit original research papers, well-written surveys, or papers describing deployed systems to the workshop. The papers must not exceed 8 pages in length including references and should be prepared using the HLT-NAACL format. The reviewing process will be blind, so authors' names, affiliations, and all self-references should not be included in the paper. Submissions should be sent through the HLT submission page (http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsdialog/).
Important Dates:
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2007
Acceptance Notification: February 17, 2007
Camera-ready Copy: February 24, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007
Organizing Committee
Fuliang Weng, Bosch Research
Ye-Yi Wang, Microsoft Corporation
Gokhan Tur, SRI International
Junling Hu, Bosch Research
Program Committee
James Allen, University of Rochester
Mark Fanty, Nuance Communications
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, ICSI, UC Berkeley
Juan Huerta, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM
Michael Johnston, AT&T Labs
Yun-Cheng Ju, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Dekang Lin, Google Labs, Google
Helen Meng, CUHK
Tim Peak, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Stanley Peters, Stanford University
Roberto Pieracini, SpeechCycle
Stephanie Seneff, MIT
Lenhart Schubert, University of Rochester
Steve Young, Cambridge University
Question and Comments: Please contact Fuliang Weng

CALL FOR PAPERS AND INTERACTIVE DEMONSTRATIONS--
A C[H]ORD: VOCAL INTERACTION IN ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES, GAMES, AND MORE

to be held as an official part of the CHI 2007 conference on Sunday, 29 April 2007 in San Jose, California, and we cordially invite you to take part in it.
Website
The research on vocal interaction has primarily been focused on the use of systems for speech recognition and synthesis. While speech recognition and synthesis can be successfully used in various domains, they can be unsuitable for certain scenarios such as in applications requiring immediate and continuous control and those involving users with speech impairments.
This workshop aims to discuss the state-of-the-art in vocal interaction methods that go beyond word recognition by exploiting the information within non-verbal vocalizations. Among others, we will discuss different ways in which non-verbal vocal parameters (e.g. pitch, volume, timbre, etc.) may be used as either primary or additional source of input into interactive systems.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Demonstration of systems or interaction techniques incorporating non-verbal vocal interaction
* Augmentation or emulation of conventional input devices
* Applications in assistive technologies, education, entertainment, and art
* Speech and language therapy and disability compensation
* Psychological aspects of non-verbal interaction
* Physiological limitations, such as resolution of vocal parameters or fatigue that may occur when producing the sounds
* Social and cross-cultural issues
Short, 4-page position papers addressing topics of the workshop will be reviewed by an international program committee and selected based on their quality, innovation, and the potential for fostering discussion.
Contributors to this workshop will be invited to submit an extended paper for a special issue of the journal UNIVERSAL ACCESS IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY.
The workshop will be a full-day event and will consist of presentations of position papers, demonstration of systems, as well as group discussions. At least one author of an accepted paper needs to register for the workshop and for at least one day of the conference (either day from Monday to Thursday).
Please visit our website for the list of the program committee members. IMPORTANT DATES
Papers due: 12 January 2007 (5pm Pacific Time)
Acceptance / rejection notices: 1 February 2007
Camera-ready papers: 15 February 2007
Registration deadline: 9 April 2007
Workshop held: 29 April 2007
Main program of CHI 2007: 30 April -- 3 May 2007
Journal paper manuscripts due: 31 May 2007
Journal publication: Late 2007
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please set your papers in the 2-column ACM format. LaTeX and MS Word templates are available here or here
Your paper should not exceed the length of four pages. Please send your papers in PDF format by email. Your submissions need not be anonymized. Additionally, you are encouraged to submit video(s) of your system that demonstrates its functionality and interaction methods. Please do not send this file as attachment to your message. Instead, please put the file on a non-public WWW page and send us its URL. Your video should not exceed 50 MB of file size and 5 minutes of length.
Don't hesitate to contact us regarding any questions or concerns.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Workshop organizers:
common e-mail address
Adam J Sporka , (Czech Technical University in Prague); telephone (+420) 603-287-605 (CET zone)
Susumu Harada (University of Washington)
Sri H Kurniawan (University of Manchester)
Workshop website
CHI 2007 website for workshop participants

Last CFP-Fifth International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, CBMI-2007

June 25-27, 2007, Bordeaux, France
The Workshop is supported by IEEE, EURASIP, European research networks COST292 and Muscle, INRIA, CNRS, Region d'Aquitaine, University Bordeaux 1, IBM
Topics
Multimedia indexing and retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
Multimedia content extraction
Matching and similarity search
Construction of high level indices
Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
Content-based search techniques
Multimedia data mining
Presentation tools
Meta-data compression and transformation
Handling of very large scale multimedia database
Organisation, summarisation and browsing of multimedia documents
Applications
Evaluation and metrics
Paper submission
Perspective contributors are invited to sub