============================================================================ ISCApad number 69 February 16th 2004 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, The regular date of issue is the first week of each month. Do not forget to send the information you want to display for the members in time to be included (last week of each month). Chris Wellekens TABLE OF CONTENTS ================= *ISCA News *COurses, internships, data bases, softwares *Job openings *Journals and Books *Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW) *Future ISCA supported events *Future Speech Science and technology events ============================================================================= ISCA NEWS ========= - * Third CHRISTIAN BENOIT AWARD * * deadline April 30th, 2004 ************************************************************** The Christian Benoît 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, and 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. The third award will be delivered this year to ANY PROJECT IN THE FIELD OF AUDIO VISUAL 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 Prix Benoît 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 (perrier@icp.inpg.fr ) and received by Friday April 30th, 2004. 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 ICSLP'2004 Conference in Jeju (Jeju Island, Korea). Travel expenses for attendance at the Award ceremony will be provided by the Christian Benoît Association. For further information, please contact Pascal Perrier. ** The Christian Benoît 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 Benoît, 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 -New development on membership services : online access to the Speech Communication journal at a discounted rate. The online subscription gives members access not only to the current year's volumes but also to the Speech Communication archive dating back to 1995. If you are interested in subscribing either to the paper version alone or to the paper version+online access, please indicate this on the renewal form (http://www.isca-speech.org/Apply_member.html ) and will be billed directly by Elsevier. Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version only: 85 EUR Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version + online access*: 95 EUR Institutional Member, paper version only : 550 EUR -ISCApad publishes now a list of accepted papers for publication in Speech Communication. These papers can be also viewed on the website ofb bScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) if your institution has subscribed to Speech Communication. -ISCA Grants are available for students attending meetings. Even if no information on the grants is advertised on the conference announcement,students may apply. For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org ============================================================================== COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES ============================= -German-French Summerschool on Cognitive and physical models of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction sponsored by the German French University (DFH) Saarbrucken will be held from the 19th-24th of September 2004 in Lubmin, Germany (Baltic Sea). (see attached file) -The Center for Language and Speech processing at the Johns Hopkins University CLSP/JHU is offering a unique summer internship Opportunity, which we would like you to bring to the attention of your best students In the current junior class. Only two weeks remain for students to apply for these internships. This internship is unique in the sense That the selected students will participate in cutting edge research as full Members alongside leading scientists from industry, academia, and the Government. The exciting nature of the internship is the exposure of the Undergraduate students to the emerging fields of language engineering, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR),natural language processing (NLP), machine translation (MT), and speech synthesis (ITS). We are specifically looking to attract New talent into the field and, as such, do not require the students to have prior knowledge of language engineering technology. Please take a few moments to nominate suitable bright students who may be interested in this internship. On-line applications for the program can be found at along with additional information regarding plans for the 2004 Workshop and information on past workshops. The application deadline is February 13, 2004. If you have questions, please contact us by phone (410-516-4237), e-mail (sporterfield@jhu.edu) or via the Internet http://www.clsp.jhu.edu Sincerely, Frederick Jelinek J.S. Smith Professor and Director Project Descriptions for this =ummer 1. Dialetical Chinese Speech Recognition ----------------------------------------------------------------=-------------------------------------- There are eight major dialectal regions in China. In addition to Mandarin (Northern China), there is Wu (Southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai), Yue (Guangdong, Hong Kong, Nanning Guangxi), Min (Fujian,Shantou Guangdong, Haikou Hainan, Taipei Taiwan), Hakka (Meixian Guangdong, Hsin-chu Taiwan), Xiang (Hunan), Gan (Jiangxi), Hui (Anhui), and Jin (Shanxi). These dialects can be further divided into more than 40 sub-categories. Although the Chinese dialects share a written language and "standard" Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) is widely spoken in most regions, speech is still strongly influenced by the native dialects. This great linguistic diversity poses severe problems for automatic speech and language technology. Automatic speech recognition, for instance, relies to a great extent on the consistent pronunciation and usage of words within a language. But in Chinese, word-usage, pronunciation, and even syntax and grammar vary =epending on the speaker's dialect. As a result speech recognition systems =onstructed to process Mandarin perform poorly for the great majority of the population. The goal of our summer project is to develop a general framework to model phonetic, lexical, and pronunciation variability in spoken Chinese. We will investigate several ways in which a modest amount of transcribed speech in a particular dialect can be used to adapt the acoustic and lexical models originally estimated on Mandarin speech to improve recognition accuracy for that dialect. 2.Landmark Based Speech Recognition ------------------------------------ Humans can transcribe conversational speech with nearly perfect accuracy; the best automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems currently have word error rates over 20% on conversational speech transcription. =hat can we do to improve automatic speech recognition? This project seeks to bring together new ideas from linguistics with new ideas from graphical models and support vector machines in order to catch human speech recognition performance by better modeling what happens in =he brain when humans listen to speech. Specifically, this project will focus on two aspects of human speech communication that are not well modeled by current ASR: Asynchrony between manner of articulation ,the type of a sound, e.g., stop, fricative, vowel) and place of articulation (the shape of the lips and tongue when a sound is produced, e.g., lip rounding, position of the tongue tip). Asynchrony will be modeled by creating a dictionary of dynamic Bayesian networks . one for each word in the English language :each designed to learn word-dependent synchronization between manner and place. Extra attention to consonant releases and closures. During the lip closure of a [p], there is no sound: in order to determine that the stop is a [p], a human listener must pay special attention to the 50ms immediately before stop closure and immediately after release. Current ASR systems pay attention uniformly to the signal at all times. This workshop will develop discriminative classifiers (support vector machines) that detect and classify perceptually important events in the signal such as consonant releases and closures. Our goal will be to provide new information that was =navailable to the original recognizer, thus improving the accuracy of the automatic speech recognition system. 3. Joint Visual-Text Modeling for Multimedia Retrieval ------------------------------------------------------ The ability to search for text in large databases and on the web has added tremendous value to our lives. Yet, these capabilities are not yet extensible to searching for images or video clips, unless the images are accompanied by text in the form of captions. Wouldn't it be great if one could describe (in words) a picture we are looking for in a database or on the web, and get back images and video-clips that match? Wouldn't it be great to have a multimedia Google? This proposal is about Multimedia Information Retrieval.content-based search of video-stream archives . using combined techniques from image processing and text processing. Today.s systems for Multimedia information Retrieval approach this by either only focusing on the text (speech) or the video part. In this project, we will work on combining these distinct approaches in a mathematically consistent framework. Our main idea is to use automatic techniques to identify object-regions in images and characterize their shape, color and texture in an approximate way, and simultaneously perform automatic speech recognition in the audio component of the video. We will then use machine learning and language modeling techniques to automatically identify typical visual objects that are frequently seen together with keywords, e.g. a checkered black-and-white blob along with the name Yasser Arafat (recall that Arafat usually wears a checkered head-scarf). These joint statistical will be used to construct a unified visual-text model. We plan to investigate several modeling techniques from language processing and apply it to a vocabulary of ordinary words and visual tokens. The approaches that we develop will be benchmarked against leading systems =n the latest NIST evaluations on Multimedia Retrieval. Participating in this project gives you an opportunity to work with top people from industrial and academic research, and to advance the state of the art in multimedia retrieval. -MSDR2003 now in the ISCA Archive As you might know, the ISCA Workshop on Multilingual Spoken Document Retrieval (MSDR2003) was planned to be held Hong Kong in April 2003 but had to be cancelled due to the SARS epidemia which hit parts of South East Asia at that time. The proceedings of this workshop containing 17 full papers, which were ready at the time of the workshop, have now been released and are available in the ISCA Online Archive (abstracts accessible for everybody, full papers for ISCA members only). - Call to members:: ISCA is looking to improve its website (www.isca-speech.=rg ) and would very much welcome feedback from its members. If you have a few minutes to spend browsing through the current site, we'd be very grateful for any feedback that you could provide on its style and content. Please send your comments by email to the ISCA Secretary, Valerie Hazan, at the following address: val@phon.ucl.ac.uk -Information on on-going theses could be very useful for thesis supervisors, researchers as well as PhD students. A list of speech theses is available at http://HLTheses.elsnet.org ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update ************************************** We are happy to announce that a new Spoken Language Resource is now available in our catalogue: S0156 ANITA (Audio eNhancement In Telecom Applications) ANITA (Audio eNhancement In secured Telecommunication Applications) consists of 41 recordings (17 males and 24 females) stored on 13 CDs. It consists of voice recordings in 4 languages (English, French, German and Spanish), noise recordings (sirens, engines, roadworks, crowds, trains, etc.), and real condition recordings (voices and mixed noises), in English. Each language consists of 60 phonetically rich sentences (normal and stress and in panic conditions), letters and numerals (normal and stress and in panic conditions) and a 10 minute text (normal conditions). More information about this resource and many others is available in our on-line catalogue, at www.elda.fr . - ELRA / ELDA 55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 / Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30 URL: or =========================================================================== JOB OPENINGS (have also a look at http://www;isca-speech.org Jobs as well as http://www.elsnet.org Jobs) =========================================================================== 1. TWO POSITIONS at Institut Eurecom (Last call). Department: Multimedia Communications . Description: Eurecom () is an international teaching and research institute , founded in 1991 as a joint initiative by Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST- Paris). It welcomes students from several engineering schools and universities ENST Paris, ENST Brittany, INT Evry, EPFL, ETHZ (Zurich), Helsinki University of Technology, Politecnico di Torino...They receive an education in Communications Systems (Networking, Multimedia, Security, Mobile Communications, Web services...) Professors, lecturers and PhD students conduct research in these domains. Speech processing is under the responsibility of Professor Chris Wellekens in the Dpt Multimedia Communications. Spoken languages at the Institute are French end English for the lectures. English is the usual language for research exchanges. Speech research involves speaker identification using speaker clustering or eigenvoices, phonemic variabilities of lexicons, optimal feature extraction, Bayesian networks and variational techniques, navigation in audio databases (segmentation in speakers, wordspotting,...). The following jobs are open in the framework of a EU project that will start by February 2004. First Job description: POST DOC or RESEARCH ENGINEER The European project DIVINES, a STREP/ 6th FP has been accepted by the Commission and will start in January 2004. Eight labs and companies are partners: Multitel (B), Eurecom (F), France Telecon R/D (F), University of Oldenburg (D), Babeltechnologies (B), Loquendo (I), Politecnico di Torino (I), LIA (F). The aim of the project is to analyse the reasons why recognizers are unable to reach the human recognition rates even in the case of lack of semantic content. All weaknesses will be analyzed at the level of feature extraction, phone and lexical models. Focus will be put on intrinsic variabilities of speech in quiet and noisy environment as well as in read and spontaneous speech. The analysis will not be restricted to tests on several databases with different features and models but will go into the detailed behavior of the algorithms and models. Suggestions of new solutions will arise and be experimented. The duration of the project is for 3 years. The Speech group is looking for a Post-doc student who acquired a hands-on practice of speech processing. He/she must have an excellent practice of signal and speech analysis as well as a good knowledge of optimal classification using Bayesian criteria. He/she must be open-minded to original solutions proposed after a rigorous analysis of the low level phenomena in speech processing. Fluency in english is mandatory (write, understand and speak). He/she should be able to represent Eurecom at the periodical meetings. Ability to work in a small team is also required. Application. -send a detailed resume (give details on your activity since your PhD graduation) -send a copy of your thesis report (either as a a printed document or as a CDROM) DO NOT attach your thesis in an e-mail! -send a copy of your diploma -send the names and email addresses of two referees. -send the list of your publications (you must have several) to Professor Chris J. Wellekens, Dpt of Multimedia Communications, 2229 route des Cretes, BP 193, F-06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France 2nd Job description at Eurecom: Ph.D. STUDENT The European project DIVINES, a STREP/ 6th FP has been accepted by the Commission and will start in January 2004. Eight labs and companies are partners: Multitel (B), Eurecom (F), France Telecon R/D (F), University of Oldenburg (D), Babeltechnologies (B), Loquendo (I), Politecnico di Torino (I), LIA (F). The aim of the project is to analyse the reasons why recognizers are unable to reach the human recognition rates even in the case of lack of semantic content. All weaknesses will be analyzed at the level of feature extraction, phone and lexical models. Focus will be put on intrinsic variabilities of speech in quiet and noisy environment as well as in read and spontaneous speech. The analysis will not be restricted to tests on several databases with different features and models but will go into the detailed behavior of the algorithms and models. Suggestions of new solutions will arise and be experimented. The duration of the project is for 3 years. The Speech group is looking for a top level PhD student who has a good knowledge of speech processing. Preference is for a student who worked in speech in his/her predoctoral school or worked on a speech project for his graduation project. He/she must have an excellent practice of signal and speech analysis as well as a good knowledge of optimal classification using Bayesian criteria. Fluency in english is mandatory (write, understand and speak). Ability to work in a small team is also required. Application. -send a detailed resume -send a copy of your graduation project report or Master thesis (either as a printed document or as a CDROM) DO NOT attach your report in an e-mail! -send a copy of your diploma -send the names and email addresses of two referees. -send the list of your publications (if any) to Professor Chris J. Wellekens, Dpt of Multimedia Communications, 2229 route des Cretes, BP 193, F-06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, FRANCE Additional informations Contact Professor Chris Wellekens at christian.wellekens@eurecom.fr . () 2. Postdoctoral Positions in Multimodal Interaction and Systems Applications are invited from recent PhDs for postdoctoral positions on a new research project that is modeling aspects of multimodal interaction and human performance, as well as designing and prototyping new multimodal systems. Project research areas include user modeling of multimodal interaction, user/system learning and adaptive multimodal processing, collaborative multimodal interaction, multimodal dialogue and processing techniques, mobile and multimodal-multisensor interface design, and other topics. Applicants are encouraged to apply who have a broad interest in issues related to cognitive science and quantitative user modeling, linguistics and natural language processing, machine learning and adaptive interface design, and computational processing and system development of varied multimodal input (e.g., speech, vision, pen). Applicants with experience participating in multidisciplinary team-oriented research also are especially encouraged. This work is being conducted in a state-of-the-art laboratory facility at the Center for Human-Computer Communication (CHCC) at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in the Portland metropolitan area. Priority will be given to applications received by July 1st, 2003, although positions will remain open until filled. Postdoctoral salary range and benefits are competitive, and positions are for 1-2 years with renewals possible. To apply, submit a resume, xerox of graduate transcripts, names and contact information for 3 references, and a brief statement of research/career interests to: Deb DeShais, Center Administrator Center for Human-Computer Communication (CHCC) Department of Computer Science Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) 20,000 N.W. Walker Road Beaverton, Oregon 97006 FAX: (503) 748-1875; Ph: (503) 748-1248 For general CHCC information & publications, see: http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CHCC. For further information or to apply via email, contact: deshais@cse.ogi.edu. Women and minority applicants encouraged to apply. 3. Postdoctoral position in the field of automatic speech recognition The Speech Processing Group of INRS-Telecommunications (a part of the University of Quebec, and located in Montreal, Canada - http:\\www.inrs-telecom.uquebec.ca) invites applications for a post-doctoral position in the area of automatic speech recognition. The research is part of a larger effort to design efficient natural dialogue systems using both English and French speech. Specifically, we aim to develop novel techniques to render speech recognition more efficient and with increased accuracy. Our relatively small research group offers freedom to examine new ideas, without the constraints of simply pursuing incremental modifications to existing systems. Desired profile: The highly qualified applicant should possess a Ph.D. degree in the field of speech signal processing. He/she should be familiar with spectral analysis techniques, statistical modeling, natural language processing, and acoustic-phonetics. Programming skills are essential (C, Matlab, etc.), and a familiarity with UNIX platforms is helpful. We offer a challenging research environment. The applicant will work in a long-standing research group in a modern technological environment, in the telecommunications capital of Canada. Montreal remains the most active region in Canada for speech recognition research, with four local companies dedicated to the field, besides our own university labs. Our INRS facilities offer interaction with other related fields, since we do research in image processing, protocols, radiotelephony, and software engineering. We are well known in the speech field, presenting papers at virtually all of the major speech conferences during the last two decades. Send your CV (including the names and contact information of three references), bibliography and how to contact you by mail/fax/email/phone to: Prof. Douglas O'Shaughnessy INRS-EMT (Telecommunications) Place Bonaventure, Box 6900 800 de la Gauchetiere Ouest Montreal, Quebec Canada H5A 1K6 telephone: 514-875-1266 x2012 fax: 514-875-0344 E-mail: dougo@inrs-emt.uquebec.ca URL: 4. The Interactive Systems Labs (ISL) at the University of Karlsruhe and at Carnegie Mellon University has several immediate openings at all levels in the area of Automatic Speech Recognition and Acoustic Modeling The successful candidate(s) are expected to make successful contributions to the state-of-the art of modern recognition systems. He/she will participate in the design, development and exploration of innovative methods, algorithms and techniques toward acoustic and language modeling leading to improvements in recognizer performance. A primary focus of the research will be to develop robust high-performance algorithms for the recognition of spontaneous, conversational speech. Candidates interested in application-oriented research for the integration and fusion of such recognizers in multimodal interfaces and computing and communication services are also encouraged to apply. The Interactive Systems Labs operates in two locations, University of Karlsruhe, Germany and at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. International joint and collaborative research at and between our centers is common and encouraged, and offers greater international exposure and activity. The focus of our research is to develop better communication and computing services that take advantage of an understanding of the human context and activities. Two examples of the laboratories work are speech-translation systems and multimodal user interfaces. The former has led to the JANUS system, one of the first speech translation systems proposed. Other multilingual and multimodal systems include portable speech translators, video conferencing speech translators, meeting browsers and lecture tracker, multimodal dialog systems and navigation aids for tourists, machine translation of text, speech and OCR and computer support of human-human interaction. We seek qualified candidates at all levels with a B.S., M.S. or PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or related fields. For candidates with Bachelor or Master's degrees, the position offers the opportunity to work toward a PhD degree. A record of academic achievements, relevant experience and knowledge in relevant areas, good programming skills are expected. Outstanding candidates at the post-doctoral or junior faculty level are also encouraged to apply. Post-doctoral positions offer the opportunity to engage in teaching and research, build and organize a research team; develop an academic career and publication record in a well-equipped, supportive, international and state-of-the art environment. The University of Karlsruhe and Carnegie Mellon University are equal opportunity employers. Questions or on-line applications may be directed to Florian Metze, Tel. +49-721-608-4734 E-Mail: metze@ira.uka.de , WWW: Applications should be sent to: Prof. A. Waibel Director, Interactive Systems Labs Fakultät für Informatik Universität Karlsruhe Am Fasanengarten 5 D-76131 Karlsruhe Germany _________________________________________________________________________________ 5.Speech Tech Positions at Multitel, Belgium - Junior speech technologies engineer - Experienced speech technologies engineer * MULTITEL: MULTITEL () is a competency center that has stepped out from the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium (). The activities include innovative research and developement in the fields of speech processing, image processing, telecommunications and networking. MULTITEL has a strong expertise in speech technologies through participation to national and international research and development projects. * Positions and profiles: Multitel is seeking to strenghten its Speech Technologies Group. Candidates with M.S. or Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and related fields are invited to submit their application. The candidates will be fluent in english and willing to learn french. Junior candidates (B.S. or M.S. degree) are sought. They will have good programming skills (C/C++), autonomy and the required ability to work in an team. Qualifications and knowledge in the relevant fields of signal processing, speech processing, statistical inference, data mining and human-computer interfaces are highly encouraged. We also seek candidates with Ph.D. degree or similar R&D experience in the academia or industry (> 4 years). We expect candidates with hand-on experience an a demonstrated record of achievements in pre-competitive and/or applied research in the relevant fields of sound and speech processing, ASR decoding technology, voice-driven systems, natural language processing applied to ASR. The position will offer the opportunity to exploit and extend your talents in applied research projects with a pan-european dimension (EC supported and Eureka projects). These positions offer competitive salary and benefits. * Applications (Ref. 2004/01) You are invited to fax and send applications including an application letter with a statement of R&D interests, and a CV to the following address (please include the reference number in you application letter) :=MULTITEL asbl Service du recrutement Parc Scientifique Initialis Avenue Copernic, 1 7000 MONS BELGIUM Fax: +32(0)65/37.47.29 6.PhD positions at the Computer Science Dpt of the University of Sheffield (UK) Funding is available for the following PhD projects: 1. Learning to recognise speech in everyday noisy environments 2. Simultaneous talk in conversation: a natural laboratory for investigating speech processing 3. Automatic classification of merchant ship acoustic signatures See http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin/rs2004.pdf for details. For further information and an application form, please contact Professor Martin Cooke Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street Sheffield S1 4DP Email: =m.cooke@dcs.shef.ac.uk ), Head of Department, Professor Phil Green (p.green@dcs.shef.ac.uk ), Speech Technology, Professor Mike Holcombe (m.holcombe@dcs.shef.ac.uk ), Theoretical Computer Science For further details of this post, see www.jobs.ac.uk (it will appear there around 14th Feb) or email jobs@sheffield.ac.uk quoting ref R3207. Closing date for applications: 5th March 2004. -8.New Job Opportunities at ELRA/ELDA EVALUATION DEPARTMENT ELDA has been strongly expanding its activities in the evaluation of Human Language Technologies (HLT). The evaluation department at ELDA exists to promote HLT evaluation activities in Europe, and to act as a clearing house for this area with the support of a network of evaluation units based on a large number of European institutes, both public research centres and private companies. In the context of two projects, funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme for the Information Society, ELDA is seeking to fill a number of positions: 1/ Department director: He/she will be in charge of managing ELDA's activities related to evaluation and co-ordinating the work of the evaluation team and the ELRA network of evaluation centres. Profile: > - Advanced degree in computer science, computational linguistics, > library and information science, knowledge management or similar fields > - Experience and/or good knowledge of the evaluation programmes in > Europe, the US and Japan > - Experience in project management, including the management of > European projects > - Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular the > ability to supervise members of a multidisciplinary team > - Proficiency in English > > 2/ Junior engineers: > > The junior engineers will be involved in the specific activities of HLT > evaluation at ELDA in the framework of the European and international > projects mentioned above. > > Profile: > - Advanced degree in computer science, computational linguistics, > library and information science, knowledge management or similar fields > - Good knowledge of development under UNIX/Linux, including Perl > - Good knowledge of the evaluation programmes in Europe, the US > and Japan - Experience in project management, including the management of European projects - Ability to work independently and as part of a team - Proficiency in English Applications will be considered until the positions are filled. However, a final decision will be made by the end of January 2004. The positions are based in Paris and candidates should have the citizenship (or residency papers) of a European Union country. Salary: Commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should email, fax, or post a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to: Khalid CHOUKRI ELRA / ELDA 55-57, rue Brillat Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: +33 1 43 13 33 33; Fax: +33 1 43 13 33 30 Email: choukri@elda.fr Websites: www.elda.fr or www.elra.info The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies. The Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) is ELRA's operational body. ELDA identifies, collects, markets, evaluates and distributes language resources, and organises the evaluation of HLT, along with the dissemination of general information in the field of HLT. ================================================================================= JOURNALS and BOOKS ==================== -Call for Papers: Special Issue of Speech Communication on Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems Editors: Rolf Carlson, KTH Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University Marc Swerts, University of Antwerp and Tilburg University Spoken dialogue systems in real applications as well as research have attracted increased attention in recent years. Given the limitations of current speech technologies, both in recognition and understanding and in generation, this interest in `real' systems has led to an increased awareness of the problems raised by system errors. These errors may lead to increased confusion for both users and the system in the rest of the dialogue. The need to devise better strategies for detecting and dealing with problems in human-machine dialogues has become critical for spoken dialogue systems. After a workshop held in August 2003 on this topic (), we are now soliciting journal papers not only from workshop participants but also from other researchers for a special issue on "Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems." Submissions are invited on the following broad topic areas: What can we learn from errors in human-human and wizard-of-Oz systems that will help us to handle error in human-machine dialogue systems? How do systems detect when a dialogue is `going wrong'? How do they define such conditions? What factors are the key contributors to and indicators of `bad' dialogues? How do systems identify their own errors? What are the most important causes of such errors, from the user side (e.g. out-of-vocabulary words, non-native accent or dialect, disfluencies, hyperarticulated speaking style, gender, age, lack of experience with the system) and from the system side (e.g. inappropriate prompts, poor confidence modeling, dialog modeling failures)? How difficult is it to determine the causes of particular errors? How can we predict which dialogues will be successful? How should we define `success'? What features can best predict it? How can we evaluate system success? How can we compare different error-handling strategies? What mechanisms can be devised to allow systems to recover from error gracefully? Can we develop adaptive strategies to identify patterns of error and respond accordingly? What sorts of behavior do users exhibit when faced with system errors? Can these be taken into account in error handling? What measures (better prompts, anticipation of likely error, better help information) can be taken to minimize potential errors? Important Dates: Submissions due: February 1, 2004 First Notification of Decisions: May 1, 2004 Submission requirements: Papers should follow the submissions requirements for Speech Communications submissions, as specified at . ____________________________________________________________________________________ - Elsevier, the publisher of the official ISCA journal Speech Communication, has one series of print copies of all volumes of Speech Communication available for a research institute that is active in speech research, but is not in a position to acquire the full archive itself. Parties who are interested in this offer are requested to state their interest to Hilde van der Togt (h.togt@elsevier.com ), who is as a Publishing Editor responsible for the journal in Elsevier. ISCA and the Speech Communication Editors will collaborate with Elsevier to select the deserving institute amongst applicants. -IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing is preparing a special issue on Data Mining of Speech, Audio and Dialog. Submission deadline: July 1st, 2004 (see CFP in attached documents) -Papers accepted for future publication in Speech Communication. Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Click on Publications, then on Speech Communication and on Articles in press. The list of papers in press appear and a .pdf file for each paper is available. 1. Sung-Wan Yoon, Hong-Goo Kang, Young-Cheol Park and Dae-Hee Youn, An efficient transcoding algorithm for G.723.1 and G.729A speech coders: interoperability between mobile and IP network*1, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 1 February 2004, . 2.Sherif Abdou and Michael S. Scordilis, Beam search pruning in speech recognition using a posterior probability-based confidence measure, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 January 2004. 3.V. Kamakshi Prasad, T. Nagarajan and Hema A. Murthy, Automatic segmentation of continuous speech using minimum phase group delay functions, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 January 2004, 4. Chaojun Liu and Yonghong Yan, Robust state clustering using phonetic decision trees, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 January 2004, 5. Jinsong Zhang and Keikichi Hirose, Tone nucleus modeling for Chinese lexical tone recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 12 February 2004, 6.Dong Kook Kim and Nam Soo Kim, Rapid online adaptation using speaker space model evolution, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, 7.Mustafa N. Kaynak , Qi Zhi , Adrian David Cheok , Kuntal Sengupta , Zhang Jian and Ko Chi Chung, Lip geometric features for human-computer interaction using bimodal speech recognition: comparison and analysis, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 12 February 2004, 8. Stephanie Seneff, The use of subword linguistic modeling for multiple tasks in speech recognition*1, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 20 December 2003, 9. Ari Heikkinen, Development of a 4 kbit/s hybrid sinusoidal/CELP speech coder, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 December 2003, 10.Andrew N. Pargellis, Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo and Chin-Hui Lee, An automatic dialogue generation platform for personalized dialogue applications, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 5 December 2003, 11.Jan Zera, Speech intelligibility measured by adaptive maximum-likelihood procedure, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 December 2003, 12. Stephen Cox and Lluis Vinagre, Modelling of confusions in aircraft call-signs, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 December 2003, 13.Javier Ramírez, José C. Segura, Carmen Benítez, Ángel de la Torre and Antonio Rubio, Efficient voice activity detection algorithms using long-term speech information, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2003, 14. Caroline L. Smith, Topic transitions and durational prosody in reading aloud: production and modeling, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 23 October 2003, 15. Caroline Menezes, Bryan Pardo, Donna Erickson and Osamu Fujimura, Changes in syllable magnitude and timing due to repeated correction, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 13 September 2002, . ============================================================================== FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES ================================ -Interspeech (ICSLP)-2004 , Jeju, KOREA, OCTOBER 5-9, 2004 (see CFP in attached files) -Interspeech (Eurospeech)-2005, Lisbon, Portugal,September 4-8, 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKHOPS (ITRW) ================================================== Publication policy: Hereunder, you will find very short announcements of future events. The full call for participation appears in attached files ext#.doc or ext#.pdf only once and later referred to a previous issue of ISCApad. See also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops. - 2004: A Speaker Odyssey, http://www.odyssey04.org/ UPMadrid 31May/4June 2004 - 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg USA June 14-16 2004 http://www.ssw5.org (see ISCApad68) -InSTIL/ICALL Symposium 2004 NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems 17-19 June 2004 Venice, Italy Submission deadline: February 21st, 2004 (see ISCApad 66) -Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing October 2-3, 2004 Jeju, Korea -NOLISP'05: Non linear speech processing, April 19-22 April 2005, Barcelona, Spain organized by Cost 277 Contact person: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy (faundez@eupmt.es) (see ISCApad 66 ) =========================================================================== FUTURE ISCA SUPPORTED EVENTS ============================ - Speech Prosody 2004, the second International Conference on Prosody Date: March 23 (Tuesday) to 26 (Friday), 2004 Venue: Nara New Convention Center, Nara, Japan Contact person: Keikichi HIROSE e-mail: pro-office@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp Web: http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sp2004/ (see ISCApad 56)) - International Symposium on Tonal Aspect of Languages: Emphasis on Tone Languages (Tonal Symposium China 2004), March 28-30, 2004, Beijing, R.P.China A satellite of Speech Prosody 2004 Organizer: The Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Symposium website: http:\\www.tal2004.com - Biometrics on the Internet March 25 - 26, 2004, Vigo, Spain - The XXVth Journées d'Etude sur la Parole (JEP) Fes, Morocco, April 19-22 2004. (in conjunction with TALN 2004 (Traitement automatique des langues naturelles)). contact: Noel Nguyen (mailto:jep-taln@lpl.univ-aix.fr) URL: http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/ electronic list: http://mailup.univ-mrs.fr/wws/info/jep-taln (see ISCApad 61) - 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue April 30 - May 1, 2004, Boston, USA - ICA 2004 International Congress on Acoustics April 4-9, 2004 Kyoto Japan Theme: Acoustic science for quality of life http://www.ica2004.or.jp/ Congress secretariat: Dpt of of Environmental Psychology Graduate School of Human Sciences Osaka University 1-2 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871 Japan Fax: +81 6 6879 8025 Email: secretariat@ica2004.or.jp (see ISCApad 63) - HLT-NAACL Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Speech Indexing and Retrieval Boston, May 6 Deadline FEBRUARY 8th 2004 (see CFP in ISCApad 68) - LREC2004 Lisbon (Portugal) 24-30 May 2004 Chairman: Khaled Choukri choukri@elda.fr http://www.lredc-conf.org (see ISCApad 62) - 4th International SALTMIL (ISCA SIG) LREC workshop on First Steps for Language Documentation of Minority Languages: Computational Linguistic Tools for Morphology, Lexicon and Corpus Compilation 24 May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal (see ISCApad 68) - Affective Dialog Systems (ADS'04) Kloster Irsee, Germany June 14-16, 2004 http://www.sigmedia.org/ADS04 (see ISCApad 66) extended deadline January 31 2004 -International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation September 30 - October 1, 2004, Kyoto, Japan -4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'04) December 16-18, 2004, Hong Kong, China ============================================================================= FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS =========================================== - The 1st International Joint Conference of Natural Language Processing organized by the Asia Federation of NLP associations (AFNLP) Website: www.cipsc.org.cn/IJCNLP-04/ Main Conference: March 22-24, 2004 Workshops: March 25, 2004 Sanya, Hainan island, China http://www.regenttour.com/chinaplanner/hainan/ (see ISCApad 66) - The 4th Workshop on Asian Language Resources (sattelite workshop of AFNLP) () Extension of paper submission deadline: Paper submission deadline: January 3, 2004 (extended) Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2004 (extended) Camera ready papers due: January 24, 2004 Workshop date: March 25, 2004 (Thursday) - 2nd COST 275 Workshop Call for Papers Second COST275 Workshop on BIOMETRICS ON THE INTERNET: Fundamentals, Advances and Applications 25-26 March 2004, Vigo (Spain) http://cost275.gts.tsc.uvigo.es (see ISCApad 68 for important updated informations) - HLT/NAACL 2004 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics http://www.hlt-naacl04.org May 2-7, 2004 Boston, Mass USA (see ISCApad 64) - HLT/NAACL 2004 Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems The Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts May 7, 2004 (see ISCApad 67) - HLT/NAACL 2004 Student Research Workshop at The Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2-7, 2004 Boston, Massachusetts, USA Submission deadline: February 8th, 2004 (extended) Notification: March 1, 2004 Camera-ready papers: March 15, 2004 Tentative workshop date: May 2, 2004 (final date will be posted on web site) - Voice World Europe 3rd annual conference and exhibition 5 - 6 May 2004 (see attached document) www.voice-world.com - HIGHER-LEVEL LINGUISTIC AND OTHER KNOWLEDGE FOR AUTOMATIC SPEECH PROCESSING (Workshop in conjunction with NAACL/HLT 2004) The Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts Thursday, May 6, 2004 (see ISCApad 68) - ICASSP 2004, Montreal, CANADA, MAY 17-21, 2004 http://icassp2004.org - From sound to sense: Fifty+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication 12-13 June at MIT Cambridge , MA, USA http://www.rle.mit.edu/soundto sense/ (see CFP in attached files to ISCpad 68) - Incremental parsing: bringing engineering and cognition together Workshop at ACL 2004 Barcelona Spain 25 july 2004 (see ISCApad 68) - Inter-Noise 2004, 33rd International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering, Prague, Czech Republic, 2004, August 22 - 25. Abstract submission with the deadline January 31, 2004. (see ISCApad 68) - EUSIPCO 2004. 12th European Signal Processing Conference. September 7-10, 2004 Vienna, Austria http://www.nt.tuwien.ac.at/eusipco2004/ Chair: Prof. Wolfgang Mecklenbrauker, Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering Vienna University of Technology Gusshausstrasse 25/389 A-1040 Vienna w.mecklenbraeuker@tuwien.ac.at (see ISCApad 63) - German-French Summerschool on Cognitive and physical models of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction sponsored by the German French University (DFH) Saarbrucken. 19th-24th of September 2004 in Lubmin, Germany (Baltic Sea). contact: sommer_org@zas.gwz-berlin.de (see attached file) - Seventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2004) http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/tsd2004/ (see ISCApad 67) Brno, Czech Republic, 8-11 September 2004 - CLEF 2004 Workshop 16-17 september 2004 (see attached files to ISCApad 68) Evaluation campaign. - 2004 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP 04) http://mmsp.unisi.it September 29-October 1 2004 Sienna Italy - ACM Multimedia 2004 October 10-15, New York, NY USA http://www.mm2004.org (see attached document to ISCApad68) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------