Message of Isabel Trancoso, ISCA President

     
It is with great pleasure that I announce the ISCA Scientific Achievement Medalist for 2008: 
Hiroya Fujisaki. Prof. Fujisaki has contributed to the speech research community in so many 
aspects, in speech analysis, synthesis and prosody, that it will be a very hard task for me 
to summarize his long list of achievements. He is also the founder of the ICSLP series of 
conferences which, being now fully integrated as one of ISCA's yearly conferences, will 
have its 10th anniversary this year. I hope that you will all join me in Brisbane for 
INTERSPEECH2008, to hear his plenary talk and pay him the homage he deserves for 
his great contribution to our community. 
 
This is obviously not the only reason for traveling to Australia. There will be plenty of 
good reasons! The organizing team of IS2008 has been working very hard to have yet 
another wonderful conference. One of the innovations of this conference is a two-tier 
submission system, in which authors can select whether to submit a 4-page full paper, 
or a 1-page short paper, which will be reviewed and published in this short format. 
You'll see all the details in the upcoming call for papers, but I hope you'll like this 
experiment of the IS2008 team, whose main goal is to achieve a greater differentiation 
between journal and conference papers.
 
Isabel Trancoso.
President
 
 
 
 

Editor: Chris Wellekens

 Dear Members,

The  coming months will be quite busy for most of us: plenty of conferences, workshops, submission of proposals, project reviews and so on.  However, please take time to read this issue since we have made some changes in response to reader suggestions:

We have changed the order of presentation of our different sections to emphasize Interspeech conferences and ITRWd. A small bug remains in the issue where sections to be deleted appear under the heading NA. Sorry for that: we will fix it soon.

You will notice that the number of calls for papers in special issues of Journals has significantly increased.

I remind you that if you are the author of a new book, it can be advertised in ISCApad.

Professor em. Chris Wellekens

Institut Eurecom

ISCA News

• ISCA Scientific Achievement Medalist 2008

  ISCA Scientific Achievement Medal for 2008  It is with great pleasure that I announce the ISCA Medalist for 2008 - Hiroya Fujisaki. Prof. Fujisaki has contributed to the speech research community in so many aspects, in speech analysis, synthesis and prosody, that it will be a very hard task for me to summarize his long list of achievements. He is also the founder of the ICSLP series of conferences which, being now fully integrated as one of ISCA's yearly conferences, will have its 10th anniversary this year.

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• ISCA Fellows

  ISCA Fellows, Call for Nominations
  
  In 2007, ISCA will begin its Fellow Program to recognize and honor  outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the field  of speech science and technology.  To qualify for this  distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or  more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field.  Nominations  may be made by any ISCA member (see Nomination Form).  The nomination  must be accompanied by references from three current ISCA Fellows (or, during the first three years of the program, by ISCA Board members). A Fellow may be recognized by his/her outstanding technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA.  The candidate's technical contribution should be summarized in the nomination in terms of publications, patents, projects, prototypes and their impact in the community.
  
  Fellows will be selected by a Fellow Selection Committee of nine members who each serve three-year terms.  In the first year of the program, the Committee will be formed by ISCA Board members.  Over the next three years, one third of the members of the Selection Committee will be replaced by ISCA Fellows until the Committee consists entirely of ISCA Fellows.  Members of the Committee will be chosen by the ISCA Board.
   
  The committee will hold a virtual meeting during June to evaluate the current years nominations.
   
  Nominations should be submitted on the form provided at http://www.isca-speech.org/fellows.html.  Nominations should be submitted before April 1st 2008.

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• GOOGLE SCHOLAR AND ISCA ARCHIVE

  
  Google Scholar and the ISCA Archive
  
  The indexing of the ISCA Archive (http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/) by the Google Scholar search engine (http://scholar.google.com/) is now thorough enough to be quite useful, so this seems like a good time to give an overview of the service.  Google Scholar is a research literature search engine that provides full-text search for ISCA papers whose full text cannot be searched with other search engines. Google Scholar's citation tracking shows what papers have cited a particular paper, which can be very useful for finding follow-up work, related work and corrections.  More details about these and other features are given below.
  
  The titles, author lists, and abstracts of ISCA Archive papers are all on the public web, so they can be searched by a general-purpose search engine such as Google.  However, the full texts of most ISCA papers are password protected and thus cannot be searched with a general-purpose search engine.  Google Scholar, through an arrangement with ISCA, has access to the full text of ISCA papers. Google Scholar has similar arrangements with many other publishers.  (On the other hand, general-purpose search engines index all sorts of web pages and other documents accessible through the public web, many of which will not be in the Google Scholar index.  So it's often useful to perform the same search using both Google Scholar and a general-purpose search engine.)
  
  Google Scholar automatically extracts citations from the full text of papers. It uses this information to provide a "Cited by" list for each paper in the Google Scholar index.  This is a list of papers that have cited that paper. Google Scholar also provides an automatically generated "Related Articles" list for each paper.  The "Cited by" and "Related Articles" lists are powerful tools for discovering relevant papers.  Furthermore, the length of a paper's "Cited by" list can be used as a convenient (although imperfect) measure of the paper's impact.  Discussions about the subtleties of using Google Scholar to measure impact can be found at http://www.harzing.com/resources.htm#/pop_gs.htm and http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/07/google_scholar_as_a_measure_of.html.
  
  It's possible to restrict Google Scholar searches to papers published by ISCA by using Google Scholar's Advanced Search feature and entering "ISCA" in the "Return articles published in" field.  If "ISCA" is entered in that field, and nothing is entered in the main search field, then the search results will show what ISCA papers are the most highly cited.
  
  It should be noted that that there are many papers on ISCA-related topics which are not in the Google Scholar index.  For example, it seems many ICPhS papers are missing.  And old papers which have been scanned in from paper copies will either not have their full contents indexed, or will be indexed using imperfect OCR technology. Furthermore, as of November 2007 the indexing of the ISCA Archive by Google Scholar is still not 100% complete.  There are a few different areas which are not perfectly indexed, but the biggest planned improvement is to start using OCR for the ISCA papers which have been scanned in from paper copies.
  
  There may be a time lag between when a new event is added to the ISCA Archive in the future and when it appears in the Google Scholar index. This time lag may be longer than the usual lag of general-purpose search engines such as Google, because ISCA must create Google Scholar catalog data for every new event and because the Google Scholar index seems to update considerably more slowly than the Google index.
  
  Acknowledgements: ISCA's arrangement with Google Scholar is a project of students Rahul Chitturi, Tiago Falk, David Gelbart, Agustin Gravano, and Francis Tyers, ISCA webmaster Matt Bridger, and ISCA Archive coordinator Wolfgang Hess.  Our thanks to Google's Christian DiCarlo and Darcy Dapra, and the rest of the Google Scholar team.
  

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SIG's activities

•  

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

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Future ISCA conferences and workshops

• INTERSPEECH 2008

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

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• INTERSPEECH 2009

  Brighton, UK,
  Conference Website
  Chairman: Prof. Roger Moore, University of Sheffield.

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• INTERSPEECH 2010

  Chiba, Japan
  Conference Website
  ISCA is pleased to announce that INTERSPEECH 2010 will take place in Makuhari-Messe, Chiba, Japan, September 26-30, 2010. The event will be chaired by Keikichi Hirose (Univ. Tokyo), and will have as a theme "Towards Spoken Language Processing for All - Regardless of Age, Health Conditions, Native Languages, Environment, etc."

   

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• ITRW on Evide\nce-based Voice and Speech Rehabilitation in Head & Neck Oncology

   

   

    

  ISCA Workshop

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

  Amsterdam, May 15-16, 2008

  Evidence-based Voice and Speech Rehabilitation is of increasing relevance in Head & Neck Oncology. The number of patients requiring treatment for cancer in the upper respiratory and vocal tract keeps rising. Moreover, treatment - whether it concerns an "organ preservation protocol" or traditional surgery and radiotherapy - negatively impacts the function of organs vital for communication. A "function preservation treatment" does, unfortunately, not yet exist. This workshop seeks to assemble the latest and most relevant knowledge on evidence-based voice and speech rehabilitation. Aside from the main topic (voice and speech rehabilitation after total laryngectomy), other areas, such as vocal issues in early-stage larynx carcinoma, and various stages of oral / oropharyngeal carcinoma will be addressed.

  The workshop comprises four topical sessions (see below). Each session includes two keynote lectures plus a round-table discussion and (maximally 10) poster presentations pertinent to the session's topic. A work document, based on the keynote lectures, will form the basis for each round-table discussion. This work document will contain all presently available research evidence, discuss its (clinical) relevance and will formulate directions and areas of interest for future research. The keynote lectures, work documents and poster papers are to be compiled into Workshop Proceedings, and will be published under ISCA flag (website: http://www.isca-speech.org/). It is our aim to make these Proceedings available at the workshop. This will result in a useful and traceable ‘State of the Art' handbook/CD/web publication.

  Prof. Dr. Frans JM Hilgers

  Prof. Dr. Louis CW Pols

  Dr. Maya van Rossum

  Venue:

   

  Tinbergen lecture hall, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam

   

  More information can be obtained from the website www.fon.hum.uva.nl/webhnr/

  Organization:

  Prof. Dr. Frans JM Hilgers

  Prof. Dr. Louis CW Pols

  Dr. Maya van Rossum

   

  Institute of Phonetic Sciences - Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam

  Department of Head and Neck Oncology and Surgery

  The Netherlands Cancer Institute - Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital

  Department of Otolaryngology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam

   

  International Faculty

   

  Prof. Philip C Doyle, PhD                University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

  Prof. Tanya L Eadie, PhD                University of Washington, Seattle, USA

  Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Eysholdt             University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

  Prof. Britta Hammarberg, PhD        Karolinska University, Stockholm, Sweden

  Prof. Jeffrey P Searle, PhD             University of Kansas, Kansas City, USA

   

  Local Faculty

  Dr. Annemieke H Ackerstaff ²

  Dr. Corina J van As-Brooks ²

  Dr. Michiel WM van den Brekel ^2,3

  Prof. Dr. Frans Hilgers ^{1,2, 3}

  Petra Jongmans, MA ^{1, 2}

  Lisette van der Molen, MA ²

  Prof. Dr. Louis CW Pols ¹

  Dr. Maya van Rossum ^{2, 4}

  Dr. Irma M Verdonck-de Leeuw ⁵

   

  ¹ Institute of Phonetic Sciences/Amsterdam Center of Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam

  ² The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam

  ³ Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam

  ⁴ University Medical Center Leiden

  ⁵ Free University Medical Center, Amsterdam

  Course secretariat: Mrs. Marion van Zuilen

  The Netherlands Cancer Institute

  Plesmanlaan 121 1066CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  Telephone +3120-512-2550; Fax +3120-512-2554

   e-mail to f.hilgers@nki.nl or kno@nki.nl

   

   

   

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• ITRW on Speech analysis and processing for knowledge discovery

  June 4 - 6, 2008
  Aalborg, Denmark
  Workshop website
  Humans are very efficient at capturing information and messages in speech, and they often perform this task effortlessly even when the signal is degraded by noise, reverberation and channel effects. In contrast, when a speech signal is processed by conventional spectral analysis methods, significant cues and useful information in speech are usually not taken proper advantage of, resulting in sub-optimal performance in many speech systems. There exists, however, a vast literature on speech production and perception mechanisms and their impacts on acoustic phonetics that could be more effectively utilized in modern speech systems. A re-examination of these knowledge sources is needed. On the other hand, recent advances in speech modelling and processing and the availability of a huge collection of multilingual speech data have provided an unprecedented opportunity for acoustic phoneticians to revise and strengthen their knowledge and develop new theories. Such a collaborative effort between science and technology is beneficial to the speech community and it is likely to lead to a paradigm shift for designing next-generation speech algorithms and systems. This, however, calls for a focussed attention to be devoted to analysis and processing techniques aiming at a more effective extraction of information and knowledge in speech.
  Objectives:
  The objective of this workshop is to discuss innovative approaches to the analysis of speech signals, so that it can bring out the subtle and unique characteristics of speech and speaker. This will also help in discovering speech cues useful for improving the performance of speech systems significantly. Several attempts have been made in the past to explore speech analysis methods that can bridge the gap between human and machine processing of speech. In particular, the time varying aspects of interactions between excitation and vocal tract systems during production seem to elude exploitation. Some of the explored methods include all-pole and polezero modelling methods based on temporal weighting of the prediction errors, interpreting the zeros of speech spectra, analysis of phase in the time and transform domains, nonlinear (neural network) models for information extraction and integration, etc. Such studies may also bring out some finer details of speech signals, which may have implications in determining the acoustic-phonetic cues needed for developing robust speech systems.
  The Workshop:
  G will present a full-morning common tutorial to give an overview of the present stage of research linked to the subject of the workshop
  G will be organised as a single series of oral and poster presentations
  G each oral presentation is given 30 minutes to allow for ample time for discussion
  G is an ideal forum for speech scientists to discuss the perspectives that will further future research collaborations.
  Potential Topic areas:
  G Parametric and nonparametric models
  G New all-pole and pole-zero spectral modelling
  G Temporal modelling
  G Non-spectral processing (group delay etc)
  G Integration of spectral and temporal processing
  G Biologically-inspired speech analysis and processing
  G Interactions between excitation and vocal tract systems
  G Characterization and representation of acoustic phonetic attributes
  G Attributed-based speaker and spoken language characterization
  G Analysis and processing for detecting acoustic phonetic attributes
  G Language independent aspects of acoustic phonetic attributes detection
  G Detection of language-specific acoustic phonetic attributes
  G Acoustic to linguistic and acoustic phonetic mapping
  G Mapping from acoustic signal to articulator configurations
  G Merging of synchronous and asynchronous information
  G Other related topics
  Call for papers. Notification of review:
  The submission deadline is edxtended to February 14, 2008.
  Registration
  Fees for early and late registration for ISCA and non-ISCA members will be made available on the website during September 2007.
  Venue:
  The workshop will take place at Aalborg University, Department of Electronic Systems, Denmark. See the workshop website for further and latest information.
  Accommodation:
  There are a large number of hotels in Aalborg most of them close to the city centre. The list of hotels, their web sites and telephone numbers are given on the workshop website. Here you will also find information about transportation between the city centre and the university campus.
  How to reach Aalborg:
  Aalborg Airport is half an hour away from the international Copenhagen Airport. There are many daily flight connections between Copenhagen and Aalborg. Flying with Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) or one of the Star Alliance companies to Copenhagen enables you to include Copenhagen-Aalborg into the entire ticket, and this way reducing the full transportation cost. There is also an hourly train connection between the two cities; the train ride lasts approx. five hours
  Organising Committee:
  Paul Dalsgaard, B. Yegnanarayana, Chin-Hui Lee, Paavo Alku, Rolf Carlson, Torbjørn Svendsen,
  Important dates
  Submission of full and final: January 31, 2008 on the Website
  http://www.es.aau.dk/ITRW/
  Notification of review results: No later than March 30., 2008.

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• ITRW on Experimental Linguistics

  August 2008, Athens, Greece
  Website
  Prof. Antonis Botinis

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• ITRW on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing AVSP 2008

   International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing AVSP 2008

  
  Dates: 26-29 September 2008
  Location: Moreton Island, Queensland, Australia
  Website: http://express.hid.ri.cmu.edu/AVSP2008/Main.html
  
  AVSP 2008 will be held as an ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop at
  Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort on Moreton Island from the 26-29
  September 2008. AVSP 2008 is a satellite conference to Interspeech 2008,
  being held in Brisbane from the 22-26 September 2008. Tangalooma is
  located at close distance from Brisbane, so that attendance at AVSP 2008
  can easily be combined with participation in Interspeech 2008.
  
  Auditory-visual speech production and perception by human and machine is
  an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic field which has attracted
  speech scientists, cognitive psychologists, phoneticians, computational
  engineers, and researchers in language learning studies. Since the
  inaugural workshop in Bonas in 1995, Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
  workshops have been organised on a regular basis (see an overview at the
  avisa website). In line with previous meetings, this conference will
  consist of a mixture of regular presentations (both posters and oral),
  and lectures by invited speakers.
  
  Topics include but are not limited to:
  - Machine recognition
  - Human and machine models of integration
  - Multimodal processing of spoken events
  - Cross-linguistic studies
  - Developmental studies
  - Gesture and expression animation
  - Modelling of facial gestures
  - Speech synthesis
  - Prosody
  - Neurophysiology and neuro-psychology of audition and vision
  - Scene analysis
  
  Paper submission:
  Details of the paper submission procedure will be available on the
  website in a few weeks time.
  
  Chairs:
  Simon Lucey
  Roland Goecke
  Patrick Lucey

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• ITRW on Robust ASR

  Santiago, Chile
  October-November 2008
  Dr. Nestor Yoma

   

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Books, Databases, Softwares

• Reviewing a book?

  The author of the book Advances in Digital Speech Transmission told me that you might be interested in doing a review of her book. If so I would be pleased to send you a free review copy. Please just answer to this email and let me know the address where I can send to book to.
  
  Martin, Rainer / Heute, Ulrich / Antweiler, Christiane
  Advances in Digital Speech Transmission
  
  1. Edition - January 2008
  99.90 Euro
  2008. 572 Pages, Hardcover
  - Practical Approach Book -
  ISBN-10: 0-470-51739-5
  ISBN-13: 978-0-470-51739-0 - John Wiley & Sons
  
  Best regards
  
  Tina Heuberger
  ----------------------------------------------------
  Public Relations Associate
  Physical Sciences and Life Sciences Books
  Wiley-Blackwell
  Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA
  Boschstr. 12
  69469 Weinheim
  Germany
  phone +49/6201/606-412
  fax +49/6201/606-223
  mailto:theuberger@wiley-vch.de

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• Books

  
  

  La production de la parole
  Author: Alain Marchal, Universite d'Aix en Provence, France
  Publisher: Hermes Lavoisier
  Year: 2007

  Speech enhancement-Theory and Practice
  Author: Philipos C. Loizou, University of Texas, Dallas, USA
  Publisher: CRC Press
  Year:2007

  Speech and Language Engineering
  Editor: Martin Rajman
  Publisher: EPFL Press, distributed by CRC Press
  Year: 2007

  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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• News from LDC

  LDC2008T04
  -  OntoNotes Release 2.0  -
  
  LDC2008T05
  -  Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0  -
  
  -  2007 Member Survey Responses  -
  
  -  2008 Publications Pipeline  -
  
  

  ---

  
  New Publications
  

  
  (1) The OntoNotes project is a collaborative effort between BBN Technologies, the University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. The goal of the project is to annotate a large corpus comprising various genres of text (news, conversational telephone speech, weblogs, use net, broadcast, talk shows) in three languages (English, Chinese, and Arabic) with structural information (syntax and predicate argument structure) and shallow semantics (word sense linked to an ontology and coreference).

  OntoNotes Release 1.0 contains 400k words of Chinese newswire data and 300k words of English newswire data. The current release, OntoNotes Release 2.0, adds the following to the corpus: 274k words of Chinese broadcast news data and 200k words of English broadcast news data. The current goals call for annotation of over a million words each of English and Chinese, and half a million words of Arabic over five years. OntoNotes builds on two time-tested resources, following the Penn Treebank for syntax and the Penn PropBank for predicate-argument structure. Its semantic representation will include word sense disambiguation for nouns and verbs, with each word sense connected to an ontology, and coreference.  OntoNotes Release 2.0 is distributed on one DVD-ROM.

  2008 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2008 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Nonmembers may license this data for US$4500.

  *

   

  (2) The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) Project is located at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  The goal of the project is to develop a large scale corpus annotated with information related to discourse structure. Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 contains annotations of discourse relations and their arguments on the one million word Wall Street Journal (WSJ) data in Treebank-2 (LDC95T7).

  The PDTB focuses on encoding discourse relations associated with discourse connectives, adopting a lexically grounded approach for the annotation. The corpus provides annotations for the argument structure of Explicit and Implicit connectives, the senses of connectives and the attribution of connectives and their arguments. The lexically grounded approach exposes a clearly defined level of discourse structure which will support the extraction of a range of inferences associated with discourse connectives.

  The PDTB annotates semantic or informational relations holding between two (and only two) Abstract Objects (AOs), expressed either explicitly via lexical items or implicitly via adjacency. For the former, the lexical items anchoring the relation are annotated as Explicit connectives. For the latter, the implicit inferable relations are annotated by inserting an Implicit connective that best expresses the inferred relation.

  Explicit connectives are identified from three grammatical classes: subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when), coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, or), and discourse adverbials (e.g., however, otherwise). Arguments of connectives are simply labeled Arg2 for the argument appearing in the clause syntactically bound to the connective, and Arg1 for the other argument.  In addition to the argument structure of discourse relations, the PDTB also annotates the attribution of relations (both explicit and implicit) as well as of each of their arguments.

  The current release contains 40600 discourse relations annotations, distributed into the following five types: Explicit Relations, Implicit Relations, Alternative Lexicalizations, Entity Relations, and No Relations.  Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 is distributed via web download.

  2008 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2008 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Nonmembers may license this data for US$1000.

   

  2007 Member Survey Responses
  
  

  Please click here to access a summary of the responses to Questions 1-15 of the 2007 Member Survey. These questions were sent to all survey recipients.
  
  We also received many suggestions for future releases, among them:
  
     * More African language publications
     * Gigaword corpora in additional languages
     * More annotated data for a greater variety of uses
     * More parallel text corpora
     * Web blogs and chat room data
  
  As you will see elsewhere in this newsletter, several corpora that would satisfy these needs are prospective 2008 publications.
  
  The winner of the blind drawing for the $500 benefit for survey responses received by January 14, 2008 is Richard Rose of McGill University. Congratulations!
  
  To all survey respondents: As promised, a more detailed analysis of the survey will be arriving within the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

  2008 Publications Pipeline
  

   

  Membership Year (MY) 2008 is shaping up to be another productive one for the LDC. We anticipate releasing a balanced and exciting selection of publications.  Here is a glimpse of what is in the pipeline for MY2008. (Disclaimer:  unforeseen circumstances may lead to modifications of our plans.  Please regard this list as tentative).

  • BLLIP 1994-1997 News Text Release 1 - automatic parses for the North American News Text Corpus - NANT (LDC95T21). The parses were generated by the Charniak and Johnson Reranking Parser which was trained on Wall Street Journal (WSJ) data from Treebank 3 (LDC99T42). Each file is a sequence of n-best lists containing the top n parses of each sentence with the corresponding parser probability and reranker score.  The parses may be used in systems that are trained off labeled parse trees but require more data than found in WSJ.  Two versions will be released:  a complete 'Members-Only' version which contains parses for the entire NANT Corpus and a 'Non Member' version for general licensing which includes all news text except data from the Wall Street Journal.
  • Chinese Proposition Bank -  the goal of this project is to create a corpus of text annotated with information about basic semantic propositions. Predicate-argument relations are being added to the syntactic trees of the Chinese Treebank Data. This release contains the predicate-argument annotation of 81,009 verb instances (11,171 unique verbs) and 14,525 noun instances (1,421 unique nouns). The annotation of nouns are limited to nominalizations that have a corresponding verb.
  • English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb - contains translations for 6597 English verbs and defines 9716 Tamil verbs. Each entry contain the following: the English entry or head word; the Tamil equivalent (in Tamil script and transliteration); the verb class and transitivity specification; the spoken Tamil pronunciation (audio files in mp3 format); the English definition(s); additional Tamil entries (if applicable); example sentences or phrases in Literary Tamil, Spoken Tamil (with a corresponding audio file) and an English translation; and Tamil synonyms or near-synonyms, where appropriate.
  • GALE Phase 1 Arabic Blog Parallel Text -  contains a total of 102K words (222 files) of Arabic blog text selected from 33 sources. Blogs consist of posts to informal web-based journals of varying topical content. Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification.  Files were translated according to LDC's GALE Translation guidelines.
  • GALE Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel Text - contains a total of 313K characters (277 files) of Chinese blog text selected from 8 sources. Blogs consist of posts to informal web-based journals of varying topical content. Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification.  Files were translated according to the LDC's GALE Translation guidelines.
  • GALE Phase 1 Arabic Newsgroup Parallel Text - contains a total of 178K words (264 files) of Arabic newsgroup text selected from 35 sources. Newsgroups consist of posts to electronic bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, discussion groups and similar forums. Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification.  Files were translated according to LDC's GALE Translation guidelines.
  • GALE Phase 1 Chinese Newsgroup Parallel Text - contains a total of 240K characters (112 files) of Chinese newsgroup text selected from 25 sources. Newsgroups consist of posts to electronic bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, discussion groups and similar forums. Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification.  Files were translated according to the LDC's GALE Translation guidelines.
  • Hindi WordNet -  first wordnet for an Indian language. Similar in design to the Princeton Wordnet for English, it incorporates additional semantic relations to capture the complexities of  Hindi.  The WordNet contains 28604 synsets and 63436 unique words. Created by the NLP group at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, it is inspiring construction of wordnets for many other Indian languages, notably Marathi.
  • LCTL Bengali Language Pack  - a set of linguistic resources to support technological improvement and development of new technology for the Bengali language created in the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) project which covered a total of _ languages. Package components are: 2.6 million tokens of monolingual text, 500,000 tokens of parallel text, a bilingual lexicon with 48,000 entries, sentence and word segmenting tools, an encoding converter, a part of speech tagger, a morphological analyzer, a named entity tagger and 136,000 tokens of named entity tagged text, a Bengali-to-English name transliterator, and a descriptive grammar created by a PhD research linguist. About 30,000 tokens of the parallel text are English-to-LCTL translations of a "Common Subset" corpus, which will be included in all additional LCTL Language Packs.
  • North American News Text Corpus (NANT) Reissue - as a companion to BLLIP 1994-1997 News Text Release 1, LDC will reissue the North American News Text Corpus (LDC95T21).  Data includes news text articles from several sources (L.A.Times/Washington Post, Reuters General News, Reuters Financial News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) that has been formatted with TIPSTER-style SGML tags to indicate article boundaries and organization of information within each article.  Two versions will be released:  a complete 'Members-Only' version which contains all previously released NANT articles and a 'Non Member' version for general licensing which includes all news text except data from the Wall Street Journal.
  
  As a reminder, MY2007 will remain open for joining through December 31, 2008 and MY2008 through December 31, 2009.  Take note that some of our current discounts on Membership Fees will be no longer be effective after March 1, 2008.  Please see our Announcements page for complete details.
  
  

  ---

  
  Ilya Ahtaridis
  Membership Coordinator
  --------------------------------------------------------------------
  

   Linguistic Data Consortium                     Phone: (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania                       Fax: (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810                         ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104                      http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/

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• Question Answering on Speech Transcripts (QAst)

  The QAst organizers are pleased to announce the release of the development dataset for
  the CLEF-QA 2008 track "Question Answering on Speech Transcripts" (QAst).
  We take this opportunity to launch a first call for participation in
  this evaluation exercise.
  
  QAst is a CLEF-QA track that aims at providing an evaluation framework
  for QA technology on speech transcripts, both manual and automatic.
  A detailed description of this track is available at:
  http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~qast <http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~qast>
  
  It is the second evaluation for the QAst track.
  Last year (QAst 2007), factual questions had been generated for two
  distinct corpora (in English language only). This year, in addition to
  factual questions,
  some definition questions are generated, and five corpora covering three
  different languages are used (3 corpora in English, 1 in Spanish and 1
  in French).
  
  Important dates:
  
  # 15 June 2008: evaluation set released
  # 30 June 2008: submission deadline
  
  The pilot track is organized jointly by the Technical University of
  Catalonia (UPC), the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution
  Agency (ELDA) and Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les
  Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI).
  
  If you are interested in participating please send an email to Jordi
  Turmo (turmo_AT_lsi.upc.edu) with "QAst" in the subject line.
  

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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)

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• Speech Engineer/Senior Speech Engineer at Microsoft, Mountain View, CA,USA

  Job Type: Full-Time
  Send resume to Bruce Buntschuh
    Responsibilities:
  Tellme, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, is a company that is focused on delivering the highest quality voice recognition based applications while providing the highest possible automation to its clients. Central to this focus is the speech recognition accuracy and performance that is used by the applications. The candidate will be responsible for the development, performance analysis, and optimization of grammars, as well as overall speech recognition accuracy, in a wide variety of real world applications in all major market segments. This is a unique opportunity to apply and extend state of the art speech recognition technologies to emerging spaces such as information search on mobile devices.
  Requirements:
  · Strong background in engineering, linguistics, mathematics, machine learning, and or computer science.
  · In depth knowledge and expertise in the field of speech recognition.
  · Strong analytical skills with a determination to fully understand and solve complex problems.
  · Excellent spoken and written communication skills.
  · Fluency in English (Spanish a plus).
  · Programming capability with scripting tools such as Perl.
  Education:
  MS, PhD, or equivalent technical experience in an area such as engineering, linguistics, mathematics, or computer science.

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• Speech Technology and Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Redmond WA, USA

    

  Speech Technology and Software Development Engineer

  Speech Technologies and Modeling

  Speech Component Group

  Microsoft Corporation

  Redmond WA, USA

  Please contact: Yifan.Gong@microsoft.com

  Microsoft's Speech Component Group has been working on automatic speech recognition (SR) in real environments. We develop SR products for multiple languages for mobile devices, desktop computers, and communication servers. The group now has an open position for speech scientists with a software development focus to work on our acoustic and language modeling technologies. The position offers great opportunities for innovation and technology and product development.
  
  Responsibilities:
  
  ·     Design and implement speech/language modeling and recognition algorithms to improve recognition accuracy.
  ·     Create, optimize and deliver quality speech recognition models and other components tailored to our customers' needs.
  ·     Identify, investigate and solve challenging problems in the areas of recognition accuracy from speech recognition system deployments.
  ·     Improve speech recognition language expansion engineering process that ensures product quality and scalability.
  
  Required competencies and skills:
  
  ·     Passion about speech technology and quality software, demonstrated ability relative to the design and implementation of speech recognition algorithms.
  ·     Strong desire for achieving excellent results, strong problem solving skills, ability to multi-task, handle ambiguities, and identify issues in complex SR systems.
  ·     Good software development skills, including strong aptitude for software design and coding. 3+ years of experience in C/C++ and programming with scripting languages are highly desirable.
  ·     MS or PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or related disciplines, with strong background in speech recognition technology, statistical modeling, or signal processing.
  ·     Track record of developing SR algorithms, or experience in linguistic/phonetics, is a plus.

   

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• PhD Research Studentship in Spoken Dialogue Systems- Cambridge UK

  Applications are invited for an EPSRC sponsored studentship in Spoken Dialogue Systems leading to the PhD degree. The student will join a team lead by Professor Steve Young working on statistical approaches to building Spoken Dialogue Systems. The overall goal of the team is to develop complete working end-to-end systems which can be trained from real data and which can be continually adapted on-line. The PhD work will focus specifically on the use of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for dialogue modelling and techniques for learning and adaptation within that framework. The work will involve statistical modelling, algorithm design and user evaluation. The successful candidate will have a good first degree in a relevant area. Good programming skills in C/C++ are essential and familiarity with Matlab would be useful.
  The studentship will be for 3 years starting in October 2007 or January 2008. The studentship covers University and College fees at the Home/EU rate and a maintenance allowance of 13000 pounds per annum. Potential applicants should email Steve Young with a brief CV and statement of interest in the proposed work area

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• AT&T - Labs Research: Research Staff Positions - Florham Park, NJ

   

  AT&T - Labs Research is seeking exceptional candidates for Research Staff positions. AT&T is the premiere broadband, IP, entertainment, and wireless communications company in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world. Our researchers are dedicated to solving real problems in speech and language processing, and are involved in inventing, creating and deploying innovative services. We also explore fundamental research problems in these areas. Outstanding Ph.D.-level candidates at all levels of experience are encouraged to apply. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in research, a collaborative spirit and strong communication and software skills. Areas of particular interest are                 

  • Large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition
  • Acoustic and language modeling
  • Robust speech recognition
  • Signal processing
  • Speaker recognition
  • Speech data mining
  • Natural language understanding and dialog
  • Text and web mining
  • Voice and multimodal search

  AT&T Companies are Equal Opportunity Employers. All qualified candidates will receive full and fair consideration for employment. More information and application instructions are available on our website at http://www.research.att.com/. Click on "Join us". For more information, contact Mazin Gilbert (mazin at research dot att dot com).

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• Research Position in Speech Processing at UGent, Belgium

    Background

  Since March 2005, the universities of Leuven, Gent, Antwerp and Brussels have joined forces in a big research project, called SPACE (SPeech Algorithms for Clinical and Educational applications). The project aims at contributing to the broader application of speech technology in educational and therapeutic software tools. More specifically, it pursues the automatic detection and classification of reading errors in the context of an automatic reading tutor, and the objective assessment of disordered speech (e.g. speech of the deaf, dysarthric speech, ...) in the context of computer assisted speech therapy assessment. Specific for the target applications is that the speech is either grammatically and lexically incorrect or a-typically pronounced. Therefore, standard technology cannot be applied as such in these applications.

  Job description

  The person we are looking for will be in charge of the data-driven development of word mispronunciation models that can predict expected reading errors in the context of a reading tutor. These models must be integrated in the linguistic model of the prompted utterance, and achieve that the speech recognizer becomes more specific in its detection and classification of presumed errors than a recognizer which is using a more traditional linguistic model with context-independent garbage and deletion arcs.  A challenge is also to make the mispronunciation model adaptive to the progress made by the user.

  Profile

  We are looking for a person from the EU with a creative mind, and with an interest in speech & language processing and machine learning. The work will require an ability to program algorithms in C and Python. Having experience with Python is not a prerequisite (someone with some software experience is expected to learn this in a short time span). Demonstrated experience with speech & language processing and/or machine learning techniques will give you an advantage over other candidates.

  The job is open to a pre-doctoral as well as a post-doctoral researcher who can start in November or December. The job runs until February 28, 2009, but a pre-doctoral candidate aiming for a doctoral degree will get opportunities to do follow-up research in related projects. 

  Interested persons should send their CV to Jean-Pierre Martens (martens@elis.ugent.be). There is no real deadline, but as soon as a suitable person is found, he/she will get the job.

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• Summer Inter positions at Motorola Schaumburg Illinois USA

  Motorola Labs - Center for Human Interaction Research (CHIR) located in Schaumburg Illinois, USA, is offering summer intern positions in 2008 (12 weeks each).

  CHIR's mission:

  Our research lab develops technologies that provide access to rich communication, media and information services effortless, based on natural, intelligent interaction. Our research aims on systems that adapt automatically and proactively to changing environments, device capabilities and to continually evolving knowledge about the user.

  Intern profiles:

  1) Acoustic environment/event detection and classification.

  Successful candidate will be a PhD student near the end of his/her PhD study and is skilled in signal processing and/or pattern recognition; he/she knows Linux and C/C++ programming. Candidates with knowledge of acoustic environment/event classification are preferred.

  2) Speaker adaptation for applications on speech recognition and spoken document retrieval.

  The successful candidate must currently be pursuing a Ph.D. degree in EE or CS with complete understanding and hand-on experience on automatic speech recognition related research. Proficiency in Linux/Unix working environment and C/C++ programming. Strong GPA. A strong background in speaker adaptation is highly preferred.

  3) Development of voice search-based web applications on a smartphone

  We are looking for an intern candidate to help create an "experience" prototype based on our voice search technology. The app will be deployed on a smartphone and demonstrate intuitive and rich interaction with web resources. This intern project is oriented more towards software engineering than research. We target an intern with a master's degree and strong software engineering background. Mastery of C++ and experience with web programming (AJAX and web services) is required. Development experience on Windows CE/Mobile desired.

  4) Integrated Voice Search Technology For Mobile Devices.

  Candidate should be proficient in information retrieval, pattern recognition and speech recognition. Candidate should program in C++ and script languages such as Python or Perl in Linux environment. Also, he/she should have knowledge on information retrieval or search engines.

  We offer competitive compensation, fun-to-work environment and Chicago-style pizza.

  If you are interested, please send your resume to:

  Dusan Macho, CHIR-Motorola Labs

  Email:  dusan.macho@motorola.com

  Tel: +1-847-576-6762

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• Nuance: Software engineer speech dialog tools

   

  In order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

  SOFTWARE ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOGUE TOOLS

  As part of our team, you will be creating solutions for voice user interfaces for embedded applications on mobile and automotive platforms.

  OVERVIEW:

  - You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR R&D team, developing technology, tools, and run-time software to enable our customers to develop and test embedded speech applications. Together with our team of speech and language experts, you will work on natural language dialogue systems for our customers in the Automotive and Mobile sector.

  - You will work either at Nuance's Office in Aachen, a beautiful, old city right in the heart of Europe with great history and culture, or at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the vibrant and picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Both Aachen and Ghent offer some of the most spectacular historic town centers in Europe, and are home to large international universities.

  - You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  - You will work on the development of tools and solutions for cutting edge speech and language understanding technologies for automotive and mobile devices.

  - You will work on enhancing various aspects of our advanced natural language dialogue system, such as the layer of connected applications, the configuration setup, inter-module communication, etc.

  - In particular, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing, and documentation of tools such as GUI and XML applications that are used to develop, configure, and fine-tune advanced dialogue systems.

  QUALIFICATIONS:

  - You have a university degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, computational linguistics, or a related field.

  - You have very strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally also for embedded applications.

  - You have experience with Python or other scripting languages.

  - GUI programming experience is a strong asset.

  The following skills are a plus:

  - Understanding of communication protocols

  - Understanding of databases

  - Understanding of computational agents and related frameworks (such as OAA).

  - A background in (computational) linguistics, dialogue systems, speech processing, grammars, and parsing techniques, statistics and machine learning, especially as related to natural language processing, dialogue, and representation of information

  - You can work both as a team player and as goal-oriented independent software engineer.

  - You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

  - You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

  - You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

  - Knowledge of other languages is a plus.

  CONTACT:

  Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

  Deanna Roe                  Deanna.roe@nuance.com

  Please make sure to document to us your excellent software engineering skills.

  ABOUT US:

  Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

   

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• Nuance: Speech scientist London UK

   

  Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 2000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

  To strengthen our International Professional Services team, based in London, we are currently looking for a

                              Speech Scientist, London, UK

  Nuance Professional Services (PS) has designed, developed, and optimized thousands of speech systems across dozens of industries, including directory search, call center automation, applications in telecom, finance, airline, healthcare, and other verticals; applications for video games, mobile dictation, enhanced search services, SMS, and in-car navigation.  Nuance PS applications have automated approximately 7 billion phone conversations for some of the world's most respected companies, including British Airways, Vodafone, Amtrak, Bank of America, BellCanada, Citigroup, General Electric, NTT and Verizon.

  The PS organization consists of energetic, motivated, and friendly individuals.  The Speech Scientists in PS are among the best and brightest, with PhDs from universities such as Cambridge (UK), MIT, McGill, Harvard, Penn, CMU, and Georgia Tech, and having worked at research labs such Bell Labs, Motorola Labs, and ATR (Japan), culminating in over 300 years of Speech Science experience and covering well over 20 languages.

  Come and join Nuance PS and work on the latest technology from one of the prominent speech recognition technology providers, and make a difference in the way the world communicates.

  Job Overview

  As a Speech Scientist in the Professional Services group, you will work on automated speech recognition applications, covering a broad range of activities in all project phases, including the design, development, and optimization of the system.  You will:

  • Work across application development teams to ensure best possible recognition performance in deployed systems
  • Identify recognition challenges and assess accuracy feasibility during the design phase,
  • Design, develop, and test VoiceXML grammars and create JSPs, Java, and ECMAscript grammars for dynamic contexts
  • Optimize accuracy of applications by analyzing performance and tuning statistical language models, pronunciations, and acoustic models, including identifying areas for improvement by running the recognizer offline
  • Contribute to the generation and presentation of client-facing reports
  • Act as technical lead on more intensive client projects
  • Develop methodologies, scripts, procedures that improve efficiency and quality
  • Develop tools and enhance algorithms that facilitate deployment and tuning of recognition components
  • Act as subject matter domain expert for specific knowledge domains
  • Provide input into the design of future product releases

       Required Skills

  • MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Physics, Mathematics, or related field (or equivalent)
  • Strong analytical and problem solving skills and ability to troubleshoot issues
  • Good judgment and quick-thinking
  • Strong programming skills, preferably Perl or Python
  • Excellent written and verbal communications skills
  • Ability to scope work taking technical, business and time-frame constraints into consideration
  • Works well in a team and in a fast-paced environment

  Beneficial Skills

  • Strong programming skills in either Perl, Python, Java, C/C++, or Matlab
  • Speech recognition knowledge
  • Strong pattern recognition, linguistics, signal processing, or acoustics knowledge
  • Statistical data analysis
  • Experience with XML, VoiceXML, and Wiki
  • Ability to mentor or supervise others
  • Additional language skills, eg French, Dutch, German, Spanish
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• Nuance: Research engineer speech engine

   

  n order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

   RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH ENGINE

  As part of our team, you will be creating solutions for voice user interfaces for embedded applications on mobile and automotive platforms.

   OVERVIEW:

  - You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR R&D team, developing, improving and maintaining core ASR engine algorithms for our customers in the Automotive and Mobile sector.

  - You will work either at Nuance's Office in Aachen, a beautiful, old city right in the heart of Europe with great history and culture, or at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the vibrant and picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Both Aachen and Ghent offer some of the most spectacular historic town centers in Europe, and are home to large international universities.

  - You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  - You will work on the developing, improving and maintaining core ASR engine algorithms for cutting edge speech and natural language understanding technologies for automotive and mobile devices.

  - You will work on the design and development of more efficient, flexible ASR search algorithms with high focus on low memory and processor requirements.

  QUALIFICATIONS:

  - You have a university degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, computational linguistics, or a related field. PhD is a plus.

  - A background in (computational) linguistics, speech processing, ASR search, confidence values, grammars, statistics and machine learning, especially as related to natural language processing.

  - You have very strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally also for embedded applications.

  The following skills are a plus:

  - You have experience with Python or other scripting languages.

  - Broad knowledge about architectures of embedded platforms and processors.

  - Understanding of databases

  - You can work both as a team player and as goal-oriented independent software engineer.

  - You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

  - You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

  - You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

  - Knowledge of other languages is a plus.

  CONTACT:

  Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

  Deanna Roe                  Deanna.roe@nuance.com

  Please make sure to document to us your excellent software engineering skills.

  ABOUT US:

  Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

   

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• Nuance RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOG SYSTEMS:

   

  In order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

      RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

  As part of our team, you will be creating speech technologies for embedded applications varying from simple command and control tasks up to natural language speech dialogues on mobile and automotive platforms.

  OVERVIEW:

  -You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR research and production team, creating technology, tools and runtime software to enable our customers develop embedded speech applications. In our team of speech and language experts, you will work on natural language dialogue systems that define the state of the art.

  - You will work at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Ghent has one of the most spectacular historic town centers of Europe and is known for its unique vibrant yet cozy charm, and is home to a large international university.

  - You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America, and Asia.  You may occasionally be asked to travel.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  - You will work on the development of cutting edge natural language dialogue and speech recognition technologies for automotive embedded systems and mobile devices.

  - You will design, implement, evaluate, optimize, and test new algorithms and tools for our speech recognition systems, both for research prototypes and deployed products, including all aspects of dialogue systems design, such as architecture, natural language understanding, dialogue modeling, statistical framework, and so forth.

  - You will help the engine process multi-lingual natural and spontaneous speech in various noise conditions, given the challenging memory and processing power constraints of the embedded world.

  QUALIFICATIONS:

  - You have a university degree in computer science, (computational) linguistics, engineering, mathematics, physics, or a related field. A graduate degree is an asset.

  -You have strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally for embedded applications. Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages is a plus. [HQ1] 

  - You have experience in one or more of the following fields:

       dialogue systems

       applied (computational) linguistics

       natural language understanding

       language generation

       search engines

       speech recognition

       grammars and parsing techniques.

       statistics and machine learning techniques

       XML processing

  -You are a team player, willing to take initiative and assume responsibility for your tasks, and are goal-oriented.

  -You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

  -You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

  -You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

  -Knowledge of other languages is a strong asset.

  CONTACT:

  Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

   

  Deanna Roe                  Deanna.roe@nuance.com

  ABOUT US:

  Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

   

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• Research Position in Speech Processing at Nagoya Institute of

   

  Research Position in Speech Processing at Nagoya Institute of

  Technology, Japan

  Nagoya Institute of Technology is seeking a researcher for a

  post-doctoral position in a new European Commission-funded project

  EMIME ("Efficient multilingual interaction in mobile environment")

  involving Nagoya Institute of Technology and other five European

  partners, starting in March 2008 (see the project summary below).

  The earliest starting date of the position is March 2007. The initial

  duration of the contract will be one year, with a possibility for

  prolongation (year-by-year basis, maximum of three years). The

  position provides opportunities to collaborate with other researchers

  in a variety of national and international projects. The competitive

  salary is calculated according to qualifications based on NIT scales.

  The candidate should have a strong background in speech signal

  processing and some experience with speech synthesis and recognition.

  Desired skills include familiarity with latest spectrum of technology

  including HTK, HTS, and Festival at the source code level.

  For more information, please contact Keiichi Tokuda

  (http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/).

   

  About us

  Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT), founded on 1905, is situated in

  the world-quality manufacturing area of Central Japan (about one hour

  and 40 minetes from Tokyo, and 36 minites from Kyoto by Shinkansen).

  NIT is a highest-level educational institution of technology and is

  one of the leaders of such institutions in Japan. EMIME will be

  carried at the Speech Processing Laboratory (SPL) in the Department of

  Computer Science and Engineering of NIT. SPL is known for its

  outstanding, continuous contribution of developing high-performance,

  high-quality opensource software: the HMM-based Speech Synthesis

  System "HTS" (http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/), the large vocabulary

  continuous speech recognition engine "Julius"

  (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/), and the Speech Signal Processing

  Toolkit "SPTK" (http://sp-tk.sourceforge.net/). The laboratory is

  involved in numerous national and international collaborative

  projects. SPL also has close partnerships with many industrial

  companies, in order to transfer its research into commercial

  applications, including Toyota, Nissan, Panasonic, Brother Inc.,

  Funai, Asahi-Kasei, ATR.

  Project summary of EMIME

  The EMIME project will help to overcome the language barrier by

  developing a mobile device that performs personalized speech-to-speech

  translation, such that a user's spoken input in one language is used

  to produce spoken output in another language, while continuing to

  sound like the user's voice. Personalization of systems for

  cross-lingual spoken communication is an important, but little

  explored, topic. It is essential for providing more natural

  interaction and making the computing device a less obtrusive element

  when assisting human-human interactions.

  We will build on recent developments in speech synthesis using hidden

  Markov models, which is the same technology used for automatic speech

  recognition. Using a common statistical modeling framework for

  automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis will enable the use

  of common techniques for adaptation and multilinguality.

  Significant progress will be made towards a unified approach for

  speech recognition and speech synthesis: this is a very powerful

  concept, and will open up many new areas of research. In this

  project, we will explore the use of speaker adaptation across

  languages so that, by performing automatic speech recognition, we can

  learn the characteristics of an individual speaker, and then use those

  characteristics when producing output speech in another language.

  Our objectives are to:

  1. Personalize speech processing systems by learning individual

  characteristics of a user's speech and reproducing them in

  synthesized speech.

  2. Introduce a cross-lingual capability such that personal

  characteristics can be reproduced in a second language not spoken

  by the user.

  3. Develop and better understand the mathematical and theoretical

  relationship between speech recognition and synthesis.

  4. Eliminate the need for human intervention in the process of

  cross-lingual personalization.

  5. Evaluate our research against state-of-the art techniques and in a

  practical mobile application.

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• C/C++ Programmer Munich, Germany

  Digital publishing AG is one of Europe's leading producers of  interactive software for foreign language training. In our e- learning courses we want to place the emphasis on speaking and  spoken language understanding.  In order to strengthen our Research & Development Team in Munich,  Germany, we are looking for experienced C or C++ programmers with  at least 3 years experience in the design and coding of  sophisticated software systems under Windows.   

  We offer   

  -a creative working atmosphere in an international team of   software engineers, linguists and editors working on    challenging research projects in speech recognition and    speech dialogue systems  

  - participation in all phases of a product life cycle, as we    are interested in the fast transfer of research results    into products.  

  - the possibility to participate in international scientific    conferences.   

  - a permanent job in the center of Munich.  

  - excellent possibilities for development within our fast    growing company.    

  - flexible working times, competitive compensation and    arguably the best espresso in Munich.   

  We expect  

  -several years of practical experience in software    development in C or C++ in a commercial or academic    environment.  

  -experience with parallel algorithms and thread    programming.  

  -experience with object-oriented design of software    systems.  

  -good knowledge of English or German.   

  Desirable is  

  -experience with optimization of algorithms.  

  -experience in statistical speech or language    processing, preferably speech recognition, speech    synthesis, speech dialogue systems or chatbots.  

  -experience with Delphi or Turbo Pascal.   

  Interested? We look forward to your application:  (preferably by e-mail)   

  digital publishing AG  

  Freddy Ertl  f.ertl@digitalpublishing.de  

  Tumblinger Straße 32  

  D-80337 München Germany 

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• Speech and Natural Language Processing Engineer at M*Modal, Pittsburgh.PA,USA

   

  Speech and Natural Language Processing Engineer

  
  M*Modal is a fast-moving speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Our portfolio of conversational speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies is widely recognized as the most advanced in the industry. We are a leading innovator in the field of conversational documentation services (CDS) - where speech recognition and natural language understanding are combined in a unique setup targeted to truly understand conversational speech and turn it directly into actionable and meaningful data. Our proprietary speech understanding technology - operating on M*Modal's computing grid hosted in our national data center - is already redefining the way clinical information is captured in healthcare.

  
  We are seeking an experienced and dedicated speech and natural language processing engineer who wants to push the frontiers of conversational speech understanding. Join our renowned research and development team, and add to our unique blend of scientific and engineering excellence.
  
  

  Responsibilities:

  • You will be working with other members of the R&D team to continuously improve our speech and natural language understanding technologies.
  • You will participate in designing and implementing algorithms, tools and methodologies in the area of automatic speech recognition and natural language processing/understanding.
  • You will collaborate with other members of the R&D team to identify, analyze and resolve technical issues.

   

  Requirements:
  
  

  • Solid background in speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and information extraction.
  • 2+ years of experience participating in software development projects
  • Proficient with Java, C++ and scripting (e.g. Python, Perl, ...)
  • Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
  • Integrate and communicate well in small R&D teams
  • Masters degree in CS or related engineering fields
  • Experience in a healthcare-related field a plus

   

  In June 2007 M*Modal moved to a great new office space in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh.  We are excited to be growing and are looking for individuals who have a passion for the work they do and are interested in becoming a member of a dynamic work group of smart passionate drivers who also know how to have fun.

   

  M*Modal offers a top-notch benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, short-term disability, matching 401K savings plan, holidays, paid-time-off and tuition refund.  If you would like to be considered for this opportunity, please send your resume and cover letter to Mary Ann Gamble at maryann.gamble@mmodal.com. 

   

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• Senior Research Scientist -- Speech and Natural Lgage Processing at M*Modal, Pittsburgh, PA,USA

   

  Senior Research Scientist -- Speech and Natural Language Processing

  
  M*Modal is a fast-moving speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Our portfolio of conversational speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies is widely recognized as the most advanced in the industry. We are a leading innovator in the field of conversational documentation services (CDS) - where speech recognition and natural language understanding are combined in a unique setup targeted to truly understand conversational speech and turn it directly into actionable and meaningful data. Our proprietary speech understanding technology - operating on M*Modal's computing grid hosted in our national data center - is already redefining the way clinical information is captured in healthcare.

  
  We are seeking an experienced and dedicated senior research scientist who wants to push the frontiers of conversational speech understanding. Join our renowned research and development team, and add to our unique blend of scientific and engineering excellence.
  
  

  Responsibilities:

  • Plan and perform research and development tasks to continuously improve a state-of-the-art speech understanding system
  • Take a leading role in identifying solutions to challenging technical problems
  • Contribute original ideas and turn them into product-grade software implementations
  • Collaborate with other members of the R&D team to identify, analyze and resolve technical issues

   

  Requirements:
  
  

  • Solid research & development background with 3+ years of experience in speech recognition research, covering at least two of the following topics: speech processing, acoustic modeling, language modeling, decoding, LVCSR, natural language processing/understanding, speaker verification/identification, audio mining
  • Working knowledge of Machine Learning, Information Extraction and Natural Language Processing algorithms
  • 3+ years of experience participating in large-scale software development projects using C++ and Java.
  • Excellent analytical, problem-solving and communication skills
  • PhD with focus on speech recognition or Masters degree with 3+ years industry experience working on automatic speech recognition
  • Experience and/or education in medical informatics a plus
  • Working experience in a healthcare related field a plus

   

  
  

  In June 2007 M*Modal moved to a great new office space in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh.  We are excited to be growing and are looking for individuals who have a passion for the work they do and are interested in becoming a member of a dynamic work group of smart passionate drivers who also know how to have fun.

   

  M*Modal offers a top-notch benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, short-term disability, matching 401K savings plan, holidays, paid-time-off and tuition refund.  If you would like to be considered for this opportunity, please send your resume and cover letter to Mary Ann Gamble at maryann.gamble@mmodal.com. 

   

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• Postdoc position at LORIA, Nancy, France

  Building an articulatory model from ultrasound, EMA and MRI data

   

  Postdoctoral position

   

   

  Research project

  An articulatory model comprises both the visible and the internal mobile articulators which are involved in speech articulation: the lower jaw, tongue, lips and velum) as well as the fixed walls (the palate, the rear wall of the pharynx). An articulatory model is dynamic since the articulators deform during speech production. Such a model has a potential interest in the field of language learning by providing visual feedback on the articulation conducted by the learner, and many other applications.

  Building an articulatory model is difficult because the different articulators have to be detected from specific image modalities: the lips are acquired through video, the tongue shape is acquired through ultrasound imaging with a high frame rate but these 2D images are very noisy. Finally, 3D images of all articulators can be obtained with MRI but only for sustained sounds (as vowels) due to the long acquisition time of MRI images.

  The subject of this post-doc is to construct a dynamic 3D model of the entire vocal tract by merging the 3D information available in the MRI acquisitions and temporal 2D information provided by the contours of the tongue visible on the ultrasound images or X-ray images.

  We are working on the construction of an articulatory model within the European project ASPI (http://aspi.loria.fr/ ).

  We already built an acquisition system which allows us to obtain synchronized data from ultrasound, MRI, video and EM modalities.

  Only a few complete articulatory models are currently available in the world and a real challenge in the field is to design set-ups and easy-to-use methods for automatically building the model of any speaker from 3D and 2D images. Indeed, the existence of more articulatory models would open new directions of research about speaker variability and speech production.

   

  Objectives

  The aim of the subject is to build a deformable model of the vocal tract from static 3D MRI images and 2D dynamic 2D sequences. Previous works have been conducted on the modelling of the vocal tract, and especially of the tongue (M. Stone[1] O. Engwall[2]). Unfortunately, important human interaction is required to extract tongue contours in the images. In addition, only one image modality is often considered in these works, thus reducing the reliability of the model obtained.

  The aim of this work is to provide automatic methods for segmenting features in the images as well as methods for building a parametric model of the 3D vocal tract with these specific aims:

  • The segmentation process is to be guided by prior knowledge on the vocal tract. In particular shape, topologic as well as regularity constraints must be considered.
  • A parametric model of the vocal tract has to be defined (classical models are linear and built from a principal component analysis). Special emphasis must be put on the problem of matching the various features between the images.
  • Besides classical geometric constraints, both the building and the assessment of the model will be guided by acoustic distances in order to check for the adequation between the sound synthesized from the model and the sound realized by the human speaker.

   

  Skill and profile

  The recruited person must have a solid background in computer vision and in applied mathematics. Informations and demonstrations on the research topics addressed by the Magrit team are available at http://magrit.loria.fr/  

   

  References

  [1] M. Stone : Modeling tongue surface contours from Cine-MRI images. Journal of Speech, language, hearing research, 2001.

  [2]:P. Badin, G. Bailly, L. Reveret: Three-dimensional linear articulatory modeling of tongue, lips and face based on MRI and video images, Journal of Phonetics, 2002, vol 30, p 533-553

   

  Contact

  Interested candidates are invited to contact Marie-Odile Berger, berger@loria.fr, +33 3 54 95 85 01

   

  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 2008. 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 Magrit 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 2007) or being defended before end of 2008. If defence has not taken place yet, candidates must specify the tentative date and jury for the defence.

   

  Important - Useful links

  Presentation of INRIA postdoctoral positions

  To apply (be patient, loading this link takes times...)

   

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• Internships at Motorola Labs Schaumburg.

  Motorola Labs - Center for Human Interaction Research (CHIR) 

  located in Schaumburg Illinois, USA, 

  is offering summer intern positions in 2008 (12 weeks each). 

  CHIR's mission

  Our research lab develops technologies that provide access to rich communication, media and 

  information services effortless, based on natural, intelligent interaction. Our research 

  aims on systems that adapt automatically and proactively to changing environments, device 

  capabilities and to continually evolving knowledge about the user.

  Intern profiles

  1) Acoustic environment/event detection and classification. 

  Successful candidate will be a PhD student near the end of his/her PhD study and is skilled 

  in signal processing and/or pattern recognition; he/she knows Linux and C/C++ programming. 

  Candidates with knowledge of acoustic environment/event classification are preferred. 

  2) Speaker adaptation for applications on speech recognition and spoken document retrieval

  The successful candidate must currently be pursuing a Ph.D. degree in EE or CS with complete 

  understanding and hand-on experience on automatic speech recognition related research. Proficiency 

  in Linux/Unix working environment and C/C++ programming. Strong GPA. A strong background in speaker 

  adaptation is highly preferred.

  3) Development of voice search-based web applications on a smartphone 

  We are looking for an intern candidate to help create an "experience" prototype based on our 

  voice search technology. The app will be deployed on a smartphone and demonstrate intuitive and 

  rich interaction with web resources. This intern project is oriented more towards software engineering 

  than research. We target an intern with a master's degree and strong software engineering background. 

  Mastery of C++ and experience with web programming (AJAX and web services) is required. 

  Development experience on Windows CE/Mobile desired.

  4) Integrated Voice Search Technology For Mobile Devices

  Candidate should be proficient in information retrieval, pattern recognition and speech recognition. 

  Candidate should program in C++ and script languages such as Python or Perl in Linux environment. 

  Also, he/she should have knowledge on information retrieval or search engines.

  We offer competitive compensation, fun-to-work environment and Chicago-style pizza.

  If you are interested, please send your resume to:

  Dusan Macho, CHIR-Motorola Labs

  Email: dusan [dot] macho [at] motorola [dot] com

  Tel: +1-847-576-6762

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• Masters in Human Language Technology

          *** Studentships available for 2008/9 *** 

                     One-Year Masters Course in  HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY 

                                           Department of Computer Science                

                                             The University of Sheffield - UK  

  The Sheffield MSc in Human Language Technology (HLT) 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 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.  As well as readying yourself for 

  employment in the HLT industry, this course 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.  

  ***  For further details of the course, 

  see ... http://www.shef.ac.uk/dcs/postgrad/taught/hlt  

  For information on how to apply 

  see ... http://www.shef.ac.uk/dcs/postgrad/taught/apply.html 

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• PhD positions at Supelec, Paris

  Apprentissage de modèles probabilistes génératifs dans le cas de données manquantes : application à la modélisation d'utilisateurs pour l'optimisation d'interfaces homme-machine
  These
  DeadLine: 01/09/2008
  olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr
  http://ims.metz.supelec.fr/
  
  Sujet :
  Apprentissage de modèles probabilistes génératifs dans le cas de données manquantes : application à la modélisation d'utilisateurs pour l'optimisation d'interfaces homme-machine
  
  Descriptif :
  Les modèles probabilistes, tels que les réseaux bayésiens dynamiques, sont aujourd'hui très utilisés dans le cadre de problèmes faisant intervenir de l'incertitude. Ce sont des modèles qui permettent de capturer les propriétés statistiques d'un jeu de données dans une représentation paramétrique et graphique compacte. Il est ensuite possible de réaliser des opérations de raisonnement tenant compte de l'incertitude liée au caractère potentiellement stochastique du phénomène ayant généré les données à partir de cette représentation compacte plutôt que sur les données elle-même. Comme toutes les méthodes bayésiennes, les réseaux bayésiens permettent l'injection de connaissance a priori sur le phénomène générateur des données afin d'accélérer l'apprentissage et d'améliorer la qualité du modèle. Ils font partie d'une classe plus générale de modèles appelés modèles génératifs car ils permettent aussi de générer des données supplémentaires ayant les mêmes propriétés statistiques qu!
   e les données ayant servi à l'entraînement. Nous proposons ici de mettre au point une méthode d'apprentissage de tels modèles à partir de données incomplètes, c'est à dire d'un jeu de données où chaque élément peut ne pas contenir toutes les informations nécessaires à la description globale du phénomène générateur. Ces modèles auront pour but de générer de nouvelles données afin d'augmenter artificiellement la taille de la base de données initiale avec des exemples statistiquement consistants.
  
  Application :
  Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un projet ayant pour but de mettre au point des méthodes d'optimisation de stratégies d'interaction vocale entre homme et machine. Les méthodes courantes d'apprentissage de stratégie (apprentissage par renforcement) nécessitent un très grand nombre de données dont il n'est pas toujours possible de disposer. En particulier, il est difficile et coûteux d'obtenir de véritables dialogues entre des utilisateurs humains et les systèmes automatiques (serveurs vocaux etc.), surtout quand ceux-ci sont en cours de développement. Il est aussi laborieux d'annoter ces dialogues en termes de but poursuivi par l'utilisateur, de concepts transmis par une phrase etc. Une piste de solution serait d'entraîner des modèles probabilistes pouvant générer de nouveaux exemples de dialogues réalistes à partir des données dans lesquels on considère comme manquantes les informations relatives au but de l'utilisateur etc. De cette manière, on pourra utiliser des mét!
   hodes de bootstrapping améliorant la qualité des stratégies obtenues.
  
  Contexte
  Cette thèse sera financée dans le cadre d'un projet européen (CLASSiC) en collaboration avec les universités d'Edinburgh, Cambridge et Genève ainsi que France Télécom. Ce projet a pour objet la mise en oeuvre de méthodes d'apprentissage statistique pour l'optimisation de stratégies d'interaction homme-machine. Le candidat sera accueilli au sein de l'équipe IMS du campus de Metz de Supélec.
  
  Profil
  Le candidat devra disposer d'un diplôme de Master Recherche en informatique ou traitement du signal, posséder de bonnes connaissances en apprentissage automatique et en programmation C++. Une bonne pratique de l'anglais est indispensable.
  
  
  Contact :
  Olivier Pietquin (olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr)

   Méthodes bayésiennes pour la généralisation en ligne de stratégies de contrôle de systèmes stochastiques: application à l'optimisation de systèmes de dialogue homme-machine.
  These
  DeadLine: 01/09/2008
  olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr
  http://ims.metz.supelec.fr/
  
  Sujet :
  Méthodes bayésiennes pour la généralisation en ligne de stratégies de contrôle de systèmes stochastiques: application à l'optimisation de systèmes de dialogue homme-machine.
  
  Descriptif :
  L'apprentissage par renforcement est un paradigme d'apprentissage en ligne de stratégies de contrôle optimal devenu populaire durant les dernières années du fait de la progression des systèmes informatiques en terme de ressources de calcul et de mémoire. Il est particulièrement performant pour contrôler des systèmes dynamiques stochastiques complexes dans le cas d'espaces d'états et de commandes discrets. Son extension aux espaces de grande dimension voire continus et/ou hybrides fait aujourd'hui l'objet de recherches importantes. La généralisation, au sens de l'apprentissage supervisé par exemple, des politiques de contrôle est une voie prometteuse. Un des points les plus critiques est de mettre au point des méthodes de généralisation qui permettent la mise à jour en ligne, i.e. au fur et à mesure de l'utilisation du système et de l'apparition de nouvelles informations, des stratégies apprises. Il est proposé ici de mettre en ouvre des méthodes probabilistes, de type filtra!
   ge bayésien, pour réaliser cette généralisation en profitant de leur adéquation intrinsèque au problème d'apprentissage en ligne en milieu incertain.
  
  Application :
  Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un projet ayant pour but de mettre au point des méthodes d'optimisation de stratégies d'interaction vocale entre homme et machine. Les méthodes courantes d'apprentissage de stratégie (apprentissage par renforcement) nécessitent un très grand nombre de données dont il n'est pas toujours possible de disposer. En particulier, il est difficile et coûteux d'obtenir de véritables dialogues entre des utilisateurs humains et les systèmes automatiques (serveurs vocaux etc.), surtout quand ceux-ci sont en cours de développement. La généralisation à des cas non présents dans la base d'apprentissage est donc indispensable. Ces systèmes étant appelés à être utilisés de manière intensive (plusieurs millions d'appels par an), il est aussi important de faire usage de cette masse d'informations pour améliorer les performances du système. C'est pourquoi l'apprentissage en ligne est visé.
  
  Financement
  Cette thèse sera financée dans le cadre d'un projet européen (CLASSiC) en collaboration avec les universités d'Edinburgh, Cambridge et Genève ainsi que France Télécom. Ce projet a pour objet la mise en oeuvre de méthodes d'apprentissage statistique pour l'optimisation de stratégies dans les systèmes de dialogue homme-machine.
  
  Profil
  Le candidat devra disposer d'un diplôme de Master Recherche en informatique ou traitement du signal, posséder de bonnes connaissances en apprentissage automatique et en programmation C++. Une bonne pratique de l'anglais est indispensable.
  
  
  
  Contacts :
  Olivier Pietquin (olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr)
  Hervé Frezza-Buet (herve.frezza-buet@supelec.fr)

   

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• CMU; Speech Faculty Position

  Carnegie Mellon University: Language Technologies Institute
  Speech Faculty Position
  
  The Language Technologies Institute (LTI), a department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applications for a tenure or research track faculty position, starting on or around August, 2008. We are particularly interested in candidates at the Assistant Professor level for tenure track or research track, and specializing in the area of Speech Recognition. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, or a closely related subject.
  
  Preference will be given to applicants with a strong focus on new aspects of speech recognition such as finite state models, active learning, discriminative training, adaptation techniques.
  
  The LTI offers two existing speech recognition engines, JANUS and SPHINX, which are integrated into a wide range of speech applications including speech-to-speech translation and spoken dialog systems.
  
  The LTI is the largest department of its kind with more than 20 faculty and 100 graduate students covering all areas of language technologies, including speech, translation, natural language processing, information retrieval, text mining, dialog, and aspects of computational biology. The LTI is part of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, which has hundreds of faculty and students in a wide variety of areas, from theoretical computer science and machine learning to robotics, language technologies, and human-computerinteraction.
  
  Please follow the instructions for faculty applications to the School of Computer Science, explicitly mentioning LTI, at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsdean/FacultyPage/scshiringad08.html, and also notify the head of the LTI search committee by email, Alan W Black (awb@cs.cmu.edu) or Tanja Schultz (tanja@cs.cmu.edu) so that we will be looking for your application.  Electronic submissions are greatly preferred but if you wish to apply on paper, please send two copies of your application materials, to the School of Computer Science
                 
  1. Language Technologies Faculty Search Committee
     School of Computer Science
     Carnegie Mellon University
     5000 Forbes Avenue
     Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
  
                 
  Each application should include curriculum vitae, statement of research and teaching interests, copies of 1-3 representative papers, and the names and email addresses of three or more individuals who you have asked to provide letters of reference. Applicants should arrange for reference letters to be sent directly to the Faculty Search Committee (hard copy or email), to arrive before March 31, 2008. Letters will not be requested directly by the Search Committee. All applications should indicate citizenship and, in the case of non-US citizens, describe current visa status.
                 
  Applications and reference letters may be submitted via email (word or .pdf format) to lti-faculty-search@cs.cmu.edu
  
  

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• Job and PhD opportunities at Deutsche Telekom Labs

  Job and PhD Opportunities

   

  Research in Speech Technology and Usability

   

  Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-Labs, http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/) as an "An-Institut" of Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) is funded and supported by Deutsche Telekom AG, owner of the T-Mobile brand in several countries. Located in the heart of Berlin, T-Labs can offer both academic freedom and access to industry resources.

  Under the general paradigm of "usability", T-Labs researchers are currently involved in a number of academic and industrial R&D projects and are looking to expand their strengths in the area of audio processing, with a focus on recognition of distant speech, meta-data extraction as well as language and dialog modeling. Our goal is to both improve currently deployed IVR systems and to provide ideas and consulting for future voice-based services. In this setting, "word error rate" is only one optimization criterion among many and it is not our primary target to fundamentally change the core technology, but to improve and make usable, what is conceivable today.

  We are offering two- to six-year positions suitable for recent PhD in speech recognition or related fields, with a desire to further strengthen their academic credentials, but also have a strong interest in getting their research results transferred to production systems. In collaboration with the chair of quality and usability at TUB (http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_iv/institut_fuer_softwaretechnik_und_theoretische_informatik/sprofessur_usability/), we also offer the possibility to work towards a PhD within T-Labs. For these positions, previous experience in speech technology is not mandatory, but still desirable. For both tracks, you should have a strong analytical background, excellent programming skills, be self-motivated and have good communication skills. Knowledge of the German language however is not required. Interest in commercial applications of speech recognition and an understanding of business aspects is a plus.

  Depending on your interest and qualification profile, we may be able to arrange for opportunities including collaboration with external partners, too.

   

  Our current research focus is on:

  • Robustness against environmental conditions
    • Single channel de-noising, echo cancellation as preprocessing for ASR
    • Acoustic models suited for distant microphones
      • Channel adaptive/ normalized training
      • Wide context clustering for robustness against room acoustics
  • Comparisons between research toolkits and commercial toolkits using statistical language models
  • Work on real-world telephony data
    • Keyword spotting and topic detection, mainly on calls "lost" by the current IVR
    • Clustering of unknown segments for novelty detection (i.e. upcoming topics)
    • Meta-data (age, gender, emotion) extraction and processing
  • Speech recognition in smart-home environments
  • Dialog systems

   

  Your qualification profile:

  • Strong team player, good communication skills, self-motivated personality.
  • Interested in working in a strategic corporate environment.
  • Interest and/ or experience in speech processing.
  • Software skills
    • C/ C++, Tcl/ Tk, Python, Java
    • Linux and Windows
    • Research or industry ASR software
    • Office software
  • Languages
    • English
    • German a plus
  • Education
    • CS, EE, Maths, Physics and related disciplines
    • Diploma/ Masters or PhD

   

  For further information please contact:

   

  Dr. Florian Metze

  florian.metze@telekom.de

  Tel.: +49 (30) 8353-58478

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Journals

• 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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• Special Issue on Non-Linear and Non-Conventional Speech Processing-Speech Communication

  Speech Communication

  Call for Papers: Special Issue on Non-Linear and Non-Conventional Speech Processing

  Editors: Mohamed CHETOUANI, UPMC

  Marcos FAUNDEZ-ZANUY, EUPMt (UPC)

  Bruno GAS, UPMC

  Jean Luc ZARADER, UPMC

  Amir HUSSAIN, Stirling

  Kuldip PALIWAL, Griffith University

  The field of speech processing has shown a very fast development in the past twenty years, thanks to both technological progress and to the convergence of research into a few mainstream approaches. However, some specificities of the speech signal are still not well addressed by the current models. New models and processing techniques need to be investigated in order to foster and/or accompany future progress, even if they do not match immediately the level of performance and understanding of the current state-of-the-art approaches.

  An ISCA-ITRW Workshop on "Non-Linear Speech Processing" will be held in May 2007, the purpose of which will be to present and discuss novel ideas, works and results related to alternative techniques for speech processing departing from the mainstream approaches:  http://www.congres.upmc.fr/nolisp2007

  We are now soliciting journal papers not only from workshop participants but also from other researchers for a special issue of Speech Communication on "Non-Linear and Non-Conventional Speech Processing"

  Submissions are invited on the following broad topic areas:

  I. Non-Linear Approximation and Estimation  

  II. Non-Linear Oscillators and Predictors

  III. Higher-Order Statistics

  IV. Independent Component Analysis 

   V. Nearest Neighbours

   VI. Neural Networks 

   VII. Decision Trees

   VIII. Non-Parametric Models  

  IX. Dynamics of Non-Linear Systems   

   X. Fractal Methods 

   XI. Chaos Modelling  

   XII. Non-Linear Differential Equations

  All fields of speech processing are targeted by the special issue, namely :

  1. Speech Production 

  2. Speech Analysis and Modelling

  3. Speech Coding 

  4. Speech Synthesis 

  5. Speech Recognition 

  6. Speaker Identification / Verification 

  7. Speech Enhancement / Separation 

  8. Speech Perception

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• Journal of Multimedia User Interfaces

  Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces

  The development of Multimodal User Interfaces relies on systemic research involving signal processing, pattern analysis, machine intelligence and human computer interaction. This journal is a response to the need of common forums grouping these research communities. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

  • Fusion & Fission,
  • Plasticity of Multimodal interfaces,
  • Medical applications,
  • Edutainment applications,
  • New modalities and modalities conversion,
  • Usability,
  • Multimodality for biometry and security,
  • Multimodal conversational systems.

  The journal is open to three types of contributions:

  • Articles: containing original contributions accessible to the whole research community of Multimodal Interfaces. Contributions containing verifiable results and/or open-source demonstrators are strongly encouraged.
  • Tutorials: disseminating established results across disciplines related to multimodal user interfaces.
  • Letters: presenting practical achievements / prototypes and new technology components.

  JMUI is a Springer-Verlag publication from 2008.

   

  The submission procedure and the publication schedule are described at:

  www.jmui.org

  The page of the journal at springer is:

  http://www.springer.com/east/home?SGWID=5-102-70-173760003-0&changeHeader=true

  More information:

  Imre Váradi (varadi@tele.ucl.ac.be)

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• CfP CALL FOR PAPERS -- CURRENT RESEARCH IN PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS: INTERFACES WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

  CALL FOR PAPERS -- CURRENT RESEARCH IN PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS: INTERFACES WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
  
  A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues)
  
  Guest Editors: Bernard Laks and Noël Nguyen
  
  EXTENDED DEADLINE: 11 February 2008
  
  There are long-established connections between research on the sound shape of language and natural language processing (NLP), for which one of the main driving forces has been the design of automatic speech synthesis and recognition systems. Over the last few years, these connections have been made yet stronger, under the influence of several factors. A first line of convergence relates to the shared collection and exploitation of the considerable resources that are now available to us in the domain of spoken language. These resources have come to play a major role both for phonologists and phoneticians, who endeavor to subject their theoretical hypotheses to empirical tests using large speech corpora, and for NLP specialists, whose interest in spoken language is increasing. While these resources were first based on audio recordings of read speech, they have been progressively extended to bi- or multimodal data and to spontaneous speech in conversational interaction. Such changes are raising theoretical and methodological issues that both phonologists/phoneticians and NLP specialists have begun to address.
  
  Research on spoken language has thus led to the generalized utilization of a large set of tools and methods for automatic data processing and analysis: grapheme-to-phoneme converters, text-to-speech aligners, automatic segmentation of the speech signal into units of various sizes (from acoustic events to conversational turns), morpho-syntactic tagging, etc. Large-scale corpus studies in phonology and phonetics make an ever increasing use of tools that were originally developed by NLP researchers, and which range from electronic dictionaries to full-fledged automatic speech recognition systems. NLP researchers and phonologists/phoneticians also have jointly contributed to developing multi-level speech annotation systems from articulatory/acoustic events to the pragmatic level via prosody and syntax.
  
  In this scientific context, which very much fosters the establishment of cross-disciplinary bridges around spoken language, the knowledge and resources accumulated by phonologists and phoneticians are now being put to use by NLP researchers, whether this is to build up lexical databases from speech corpora, to develop automatic speech recognition systems able to deal with regional variations in the sound pattern of a language, or to design talking-face synthesis systems in man-machine communication.
  
  LIST OF TOPICS
  
  The goal of this special issue will be to offer an overview of the interfaces that are being developed between phonology, phonetics, and NLP. Contributions are therefore invited on the following topics:
  
  . Joint contributions of speech databases to NLP and phonology/phonetics
  
  . Automatic procedures for the large-scale processing of multi-modal databases
  
  . Multi-level annotation systems
  
  . Research in phonology/phonetics and speech and language technologies: synthesis, automatic recognition
  
  . Text-to-speech systems
  
  . NLP and modelisation in phonology/phonetics
  
  Papers may be submitted in English (for non native speakers of French only) or French and will relate to studies conducted on French, English, or other languages. They must conform to the TAL guidelines for authors available at http://www.atala.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=1.
  
  DEADLINES
  
  . 11 February 2008: Reception of contributions
  . 11 April 2008: Notification of pre-selection / rejection
  . 11 May 2008: Reception of pre-selected articles
  . 16 June 2008: Notification of final acceptance
  . 30 June 2008: Reception of accepted articles' final versions
  
  This special issue of Traitement Automatique des Langues will appear in autumn 2008.
  
  THE JOURNAL
  
  TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing, http://www.atala.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=1) is a forty-year old international journal published by ATALA (French Association for Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its reviewing and selection process.
  
  SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
  
  . Martine Adda-Decker, LIMSI, Orsay
  . Roxane Bertrand, LPL, CNRS & Université de Provence
  . Philippe Blache, LPL, CNRS & Université de Provence
  . Cédric Gendrot, LPP, CNRS & Université de Paris III
  . John Goldsmith, University of Chicago
  . Guillaume Gravier, Irisa, CNRS/INRIA & Université de Rennes I
  . Jonathan Harrington, IPS, University of Munich
  . Bernard Laks, MoDyCo, CNRS & Université de Paris X
  . Lori Lamel, LIMSI, Orsay
  . Noël Nguyen, LPL, CNRS & Université de Provence
  . François Pellegrino, DDL, CNRS & Université de Lyon II
  . François Poiré, University of  Western Ontario
  . Yvan Rose, Memorial University of Newfoundland
  . Tobias Scheer, BCL, CNRS & Université de Nice
  . Atanas Tchobanov, MoDyCo, CNRS & Université de Paris X
  . Jacqueline Vaissière, LPP, CNRS & Université de Paris III
  . Nathalie Vallée, DPC-GIPSA, CNRS & Université de Grenoble III

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• IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: Special Issue on Digital Forensics

  CALL FOR PAPERS
  IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
  Special Issue in Digital Forensics
  
  Guest Editors:
  Edward Delp, Purdue University (ace@ecn.purdue.edu)
  Nasir Memon, Polytechnic University (memon@poly.edu)
  Min Wu, University of Maryland, (minwu@eng.umd.edu)
  
  We find ourselves today in a "digital world" where most information 
  is created, captured, transmitted, stored, and processed in digital 
  form. Although, representing information in digital form has many 
  compelling technical and economic advantages, it has led to new 
  issues and significant challenges when performing forensics analysis 
  of digital evidence.  There has been a slowly growing body of 
  scientific techniques for recovering evidence from digital data.  
  These techniques have come to be loosely coupled under the umbrella 
  of "Digital Forensics." Digital Forensics can be defined as "The 
  collection of scientific techniques for the preservation, collection, 
  validation, identification, analysis, interpretation, documentation 
  and presentation of digital evidence derived from digital sources for 
  the purpose of facilitating or furthering the reconstruction of 
  events, usually of a criminal nature."
  
  This call for papers invites tutorial articles covering all aspects 
  of digital forensics with an emphasis on forensic methodologies and 
  techniques that employ signal processing and information theoretic 
  analysis. Thus, focused tutorial and survey contributions are 
  solicited from topics, including but not limited to, the following:
  
   . Computer Forensics - File system and memory analysis. File carving.
   . Media source identification - camera, printer, scanner, microphone
  identification.
   . Differentiating synthetic and sensor media, for example camera vs.
  computer graphics images.
   . Detecting and localizing media tampering and processing.
   . Voiceprint analysis and speaker identification for forensics.
   . Speech transcription for forensics. Analysis of deceptive speech.
   . Acoustic processing for forensic analysis - e.g. acoustical gunshot
  analysis, accident reconstruction.
   . Forensic musicology and copyright infringement detection.
   . Enhancement and recognition techniques from surveillance video/images.
  Image matching techniques for auto-matic visual evidence
  extraction/recognition.
   . Steganalysis - Detection of hidden data in images, audio, video. 
  Steganalysis techniques for natural language steganography. Detection of covert
  channels.
   . Data Mining techniques for large scale forensics.
   . Privacy and social issues related to forensics.
   . Anti-forensics. Robustness of media forensics methods against counter
  measures.
   . Case studies and trend reports.
  
  White paper submission: Prospective authors should submit white 
  papers to the web based submission system at http://
  www.ee.columbia.edu/spm/ according to the timetable. given below.  
  White papers, limited to 3 single-column double-spaced pages, should 
  summarize the motivation, the significance of the topic, a brief 
  history, and an outline of the content.  In all cases, prospective 
  contributors should make sure to emphasize the signal processing in 
  their submission.
  
  Schedule
   . White Paper Due: April 7, 2008
   . Notification of White paper Review Results: April 30, 2008
   . Full Paper Submission: July 15, 2008
   . Acceptance Notification: October 15, 2008
   . Final Manuscript Due: November 15, 2008
   . Publication Date: March 2009.

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• Special Issue on Integration of Context and Content for Multimedia Management

      CALL FOR PAPERS
                  IEEE Transactions on Multimedia            
   Special Issue on Integration of Context and Content for Multimedia Management
  =====================================================================
  
  Guest Editors:
  
  Alan Hanjalic, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  Alejandro Jaimes, IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland
  Jiebo Luo, Kodak Research Laboratories, USA
          Qi Tian, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
  
  ---------------------------------------------------
  URL: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~qitian/cfp-TMM-SI.htm
  ---------------------------------------------------
  Important dates:
  
  Manuscript Submission Deadline:       April 1, 2008
          Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: July 1, 2008
          Final Manuscript Due to IEEE:         September 1, 2008
          Expected Publication Date:            January 2009
  
  ---------------------
  Submission Procedure
  ---------------------
  Submissions should follow the guidelines set out by IEEE Transaction on Multimedia.
  Prospective authors should submit high quality, original manuscripts that have not
  appeared, nor are under consideration, in any other journals.
  
  -------
  Summary
  -------
  Lower cost hardware and growing communications infrastructure (e.g., Web, cell phones,
  etc.) have led to an explosion in the availability of ubiquitous devices to produce,
  store, view and exchange multimedia (images, videos, music, text). Almost everyone is
  a producer and a consumer of multimedia in a world in which, for the first time,
  tremendous amount of contextual information is being automatically recorded by the
  various devices we use (e.g., cell ID for the mobile phone location, GPS integrated in
  a digital camera, camera parameters, time information, and identity of the producer).
  
  In recent years, researchers have started making progress in effectively integrating
  context and content for multimedia mining and management. Integration of content and
  context is crucial to human-human communication and human understanding of multimedia:
  without context it is difficult for a human to recognize various objects, and we
  become easily confused if the audio-visual signals we perceive are mismatched. For the
  same reasons, integration of content and context is likely to enable  (semi)automatic
  content analysis and indexing methods to become more powerful in managing multimedia
  data. It can help narrow part of the semantic and sensory gap that is difficult or
  even impossible to bridge using approaches that do not explicitly consider context for
  (semi)automatic content-based analysis and indexing.
  
  The goal of this special issue is to collect cutting-edge research work in integrating
  content and context to make multimedia content management more effective. The special
  issue will unravel the problems generally underlying these integration efforts,
  elaborate on the true potential of contextual information to enrich the content
  management tools and algorithms, discuss the dilemma of generic versus narrow-scope
  solutions that may result from "too much" contextual information, and provide us
  vision and insight from leading experts and practitioners on how to best approach the
  integration of context and content. The special issue will also present the state of
  the art in context and content-based models, algorithms, and applications for
  multimedia management.
  
  -----
  Scope
  -----
  
  The scope of this special issue is to cover all aspects of context and content for
  multimedia management.
  
  Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
          - Contextual metadata extraction
          - Models for temporal context, spatial context, imaging context (e.g., camera
            metadata), social and cultural context and so on
  - Web context for online multimedia annotation, browsing, sharing and reuse
  - Context tagging systems, e.g., geotagging, voice annotation
  - Context-aware inference algorithms
          - Context-aware multi-modal fusion systems (text, document, image, video,
            metadata, etc.)
  - Models for combining contextual and content information
          - Context-aware interfaces
  - Context-aware collaboration
  - Social networks in multimedia indexing
  - Novel methods to support and enhance social interaction, including
            innovative ideas integrating context in social, affective computing, and
            experience capture.
  - Applications in security, biometrics, medicine, education, personal
            media management, and the arts, among others
  - Context-aware mobile media technology and applications
  - Context for browsing and navigating large media collections
  - Tools for culture-specific content creation, management, and analysis
  
  ------------
  Organization
  ------------
  Next to the standard open call for papers, we will also invite a limited number of
  papers, which will be written by prominent authors and authorities in the field
  covered by this Special Issue. While the papers collected through the open call are
  expected to sample the research efforts currently invested within the community on
  effectively combining contextual and content information for optimal analysis,
  indexing and retrieval of multimedia data, the invited papers will be selected to
  highlight the main problems and approaches generally underlying these efforts.
  
  All papers will be reviewed by at least 3 independent reviewers. Invited papers will
  be solicited first through white papers to ensure the quality and relevance to the
  special issue. The accepted invited papers will be reviewed by the guest editors and
  expect to account for about one fourth of the papers in the special issue.
  
  ---------
  Contacts
  ---------
  Please address all correspondences regarding this special issue to the Guest Editors
  Dr. Alan Hanjalic (A.Hanjalic@ewi.tudelft.nl), Dr. Alejandro Jaimes
  (alex.jaimes@idiap.ch), Dr. Jiebo Luo (jiebo.luo@kodak.com), and Dr. Qi Tian
  (qitian@cs.utsa.edu).
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Guest Editors:
  Alan Hanjalic, Alejandro Jaimes, Jiebo Luo, and Qi Tian

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• Speech Communication: Special Issue On Spoken Language Technology for Education.

  *CALL FOR PAPERS*
  
  Special Issue of Speech Communication
  
  on
  
  *Spoken Language Technology for Education*
  
   
  
  *Guest-editors:*
  
  Maxine Eskenazi, Associate Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
  
  Abeer Alwan, Professor, University of California at Los Angeles
  
  Helmer Strik, Assistant Professor, University of Nijmegen
  
   
  
  Language technologies have evolved to the stage where they are reliable
  enough, if their strong and weak points are properly dealt with, to be
  used for education. The creation of an application for education
  presents several challenges: making the language technology sufficiently
  reliable (and thus advancing our knowledge in the language
  technologies), creating an application that actually enables students to
  learn, and engaging the student. Papers in this special issue should
  deal with several of these issues. Although language learning is the
  primary target of research at present, papers on the use of language
  technologies for other education applications are encouraged. The scope
  of acceptable topic interests includes but is not limited to:
  
   
  
  - Use of speech technology for education
  
  - Use of spoken language dialogue for education
  
  - Applications using speech and natural language processing for education
  
  - Intelligent tutoring systems using speech and natural language
  
  - Pedagogical issues in using speech and natural language technologies
  for education
  
  - Assessment of tutoring software
  
  - Assessment of student performance
  
   
  
  *Tentative schedule for paper submissions, review, and revision**: ** *
  
  Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2008.
  
  Deadline for decisions and feedback from reviewers and editors: August
  31, 2008.
  
  Deadline for revisions of papers: November 31, 2008.
  
   
  
  *Submission instructions:*
  
  Authors should consult the "Guide for Authors", available online, at
  http://www.elsevier.com/locate/specom for information about the
  preparation of their manuscripts. Authors, please submit your paper via
  _http://ees.elsevier.com/specom_, choosing *Spoken Language Tech. *as
  the Article Type, and  Dr. Gauvain as the handling E-i-C.

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Forthcoming events supported (but not organized) by ISCA

• CFP:The International Workshop on Spoken Languages Technologies for Under- The International Workshop on Spoken Languages Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU)

  The International Workshop on Spoken Languages Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) 

  languages (SLTU) Hanoi University of Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam, 

  May 5 - May 7, 2008. 

  EXTENDED DEADLINE  30 January 2008

   Workshop Web Site :        http://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu  

  The STLU meeting is a technical conference focused on spoken language processing for 

  under-resourced languages. This first workshop will focus on Asian languages, and 

  the idea is to mainly (but not exclusively) target languages of the area (Vietnamese, 

  Khmer, Lao, Chinese dialects, Thai, etc.). However, all contributions on other 

  under-resourced languages of the world are warmly welcomed.  The workshop aims 

  at gathering researchers working on:  

  * ASR, synthesis and speech translation for under-resourced languages  

  * portability issues  * fast resources acquisition (speech, text, lexicons, parallel corpora)  

  * spoken language processing for languages with rich morphology  

  * spoken language processing for languages without separators  

  * spoken language processing for languages without writing system  

  Important dates   

  * Paper submission dqte: EXTENDED to January 30, 2008  

  * Notification of Paper Acceptance: February 20, 2008  

  * Author Registration Deadline: March 1, 2008   Scientific Committee   

  * Pr Tanja Schultz, CMU, USA  

  * Dr Yuqing Gao, IBM, USA  

  * Dr Lori Lamel, LIMSI, France  

  * Dr Laurent Besacier, LIG, France  

  * Dr Pascal Nocera, LIA, France  

  * Pr Jean-Paul Haton, LORIA, France  

  * Pr Luong Chi Mai, IOIT, Vietnam  

  * Pr Dang Van Chuyet, HUT, Vietnam  

  * Pr Pham Thi Ngoc Yen, MICA, Vietnam  

  * Dr Eric Castelli, MICA, Vietnam  

  * Dr Vincent Berment, LIG Laboratory, France  

  * Dr Briony Williams, University of Wales, UK   

  Local Organizing Committee   

  * Pr Nguyen Trong Giang, HUT/MICA  

  * Pr Ha Duyen Tu, HUT  

  * Pr Pham Thi Ngoc Yen, HUT/MICA  

  * Pr Geneviève Caelen-Haumont, MICA  

  * Dr Trinh Van Loan, HUT  

  * Dr Mathias Rossignol, MICA  

  * M. Hoang Xuan Lan, HUT

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• 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: Nov. 2nd, 2007
  Notif. of Acceptance: Dec. 14th, 2007
  Early Registration: Jan. 14th, 2008
  Conference: May 6-9, 2008
  

   

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• Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays

   CALL FOR PAPERS - HSCMA 2008
  
  Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays
  Trento, Italy, 6-8 May 2008,
  
  http://hscma2008.fbk.eu
  
  ************************************************************************
  
  Technically sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society
  
  HSCMA 2008 is an event supported by ISCA - International Speech Communication Association
  
  ************************************************************************
  
  TECHNICAL PROGRAM:
  
  Following the workshop held at Rutgers University in 2005, HSCMA 2008 aims to continue the tradition of previous workshops on Hands-free Speech Communication(HSC) and Microphone Arrays (MA). The workshop is mainly devoted to presenting recent advances in speech and signal processing techniques based upon multi-microphone systems, and to distant-talking speech communication and human/machine interaction. The organizing committee invites the international community to present and discuss state-of-the-art developments in the field.
  
  HSCMA 2008 will feature plenary talks by leading researchers in the field as well as poster and demo sessions.
  
  
  
  PAPER SUBMISSION:
  
  The technical scope of the workshop includes, but it is not limited to:
  
  * Multichannel acoustic signal processing for speech acquisition, interference mitigation and noise suppression
  
  * Acoustic source localization and separation
  
  * Dereverberation
  
  * Acoustic echo cancellation
  
  * Acoustic event detection and classification
  
  * Microphone array technology and architectures, especially for distant-talking Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and acoustic scene analysis
  
  * ASR technology for hands-free interfaces
  
  * Robust features for ASR
  
  * Feature-level enhancement and dereverberation
  
  * Multichannel speech corpora for system training and benchmarking
  
  * Microphone arrays for multimodal human/machine communication
  
  Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any technical areas relevant to the workshop and are encouraged to give demonstrations of their work.
  
  The authors should submit a two page extended abstract including text, figures, references, and paper classification categories.
  
  PDF files of extended abstracts must be submitted through the conference website located at hscma2008.fbk.eu. Comprehensive guidelines for abstract preparation and submission can also be found at the conference website.
  
  
  
  IMPORTANT DATES:
  
  Submission of two-page abstract: January 25, 2008
  
  Notification of acceptance: February 8, 2008
  
  Final manuscript submission and author's registration: March 1, 2008

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• SIGDIAL 2008 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

  SIGDIAL 2008 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
  COLUMBUS, OHIO; June 19-20 2008 (with ACL/HLT 2008)
        http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop9
  
  
       ==> NOTE: EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE! <==
  ** Submission Deadline: Mar 14 2008 **

  
  2nd CALL FOR PAPERS
  
  Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Antwerp, 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. SIGdial 2008 will
  be a workshop of ACL/HLT 2008.
  
  
  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;
  
  
  3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
  
  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:
      http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~djh/acl08/stylefiles.html
  
  Submission/Reviewing will be managed by the EasyChair 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 2008 cannot accept for publication or presentation
  work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions
  regarding submissions can be sent to the co-Chairs.
  
  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
  
  Submission        Mar 14 2008
  Notification      Apr 27 2008
  Camera-Ready   May 16 2008
  Workshop          June 19-20 2008
  
  
  WEBSITES
  
  Workshop website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop9
  Submission link: To be announced
  SIGdial organization website: http://www.sigdial.org/
  CO-LOCATION ACL/HLT 2008 website: http://www.acl2008.org/
  
  
  CONTACT
  
  For any questions, please contact the co-Chairs at:
  Beth Ann Hockey  bahockey@ucsc.edu
  David Schlangen  das@ling.uni-potsdam.de
  
  
  

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• LIPS 2008 Visual Speech Synthesis Challenge

  LIPS 2008: Visual Speech Synthesis Challenge

  LIPS 2008 is the first visual speech synthesis challenge. It will be

  held as a special session at INTERSPEECH 2008 in Brisbane, Australia

  (http://www.interspeech2008.org). The aim of this challenge is to

  stimulate discussion about subjective quality assessment of synthesised

  visual speech with a view to developing standardised evaluation procedures.

  In association with this challenge a training corpus of audiovisual

  speech and accompanying phoneme labels and timings will be provided to

  all entrants, who should then train their systems using this data. (As

  this is the first year the challenge will run and to promote wider

  participation, proposed entrants are free to use a pre-trained model).

  Prior to the session a set of test sentences (provided as audio, video

  and phonetic labels) must be synthesised on-site in a supervised room. A

  series of double-blind subjective tests will then be conducted to

  compare each competing system against all others. The overall winner

  will be announced and presented with their prize at the closing ceremony

  of the conference.

  All entrants will submit a 4/6 (TBC) page paper describing their system

  to INTERSPEECH indicating that the paper is addressed to the LIPS special

  session. A special edition of the Eurasip Journal on Speech, Audio and Music

  Processing in conjunction with the challenge is also scheduled.

  To receive updated information as it becomes available, you can join the

  mailing list by visiting

  https://mail.icp.inpg.fr/mailman/listinfo/lips_challenge. Further

  details will be mailed to you in due course.

  Please invite colleagues to join and dispatch this email largely to your

  academic and industrial partners. Besides a large participation of

  research groups in audiovisual speech synthesis and talking faces we

  particularly welcome participation of the computer game industry.

  Please confirm your willingness to participate in the challenge, submit

  a paper describing your work and join us in Brisbane by sending an email

  to sascha.fagel@tu-berlin.de, b.theobald@uea.ac.uk,

  gerard.bailly@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr

   

  Organising Committee

  Sascha Fagel, University of Technology, Berlin - Germany

  Barry-John Theobald, University of East Anglia, Norwich - UK

  Gerard Bailly, GIPSA-Lab, Dpt. Speech & Cognition, Grenoble - France

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• Human-Machine Comparisons of consonant recognition in quiet and noise

                                  Call for papers
                        =========================
  
                           Consonant Challenge:
     Human-machine comparisons of consonant recognition in quiet and noise
  
                     Interspeech, 22-26 September 2008
                           Brisbane, Australia
  
  * Update:
  All information concerning the native listener experiments and baseline 
  recognisers
  including their results can now be found and downloaded from the Consonant 
  Challenge website:
  http://www.odettes.dds.nl/challenge_IS08/
  
  * Deadline for submissions:
  The deadline and paper submission guidelines for full paper submission (4 
  pages) is April
  7th, 2008. Paper submission is done exclusively via the Interspeech 2008 
  conference website.
  Participants of this Challenge are asked to indicate the correct Special 
  Session during
  submission. More information on the Interspeech conference can be found 
  here: http://
  www.interspeech2008.org/
  
  * Topic of the Consonant Challenge:
  Listeners outperform automatic speech recognition systems at every level 
  of speech
  recognition, including the very basic level of consonant recognition. What 
  is not clear is
  where the human advantage originates. Does the fault lie in the acoustic 
  representations of
  speech or in the recogniser architecture, or in a lack of compatibility 
  between the two?
  There have been relatively few studies comparing human and automatic 
  speech recognition on
  the same task, and, of these, overall identification performance is the 
  dominant metric.
  However, there are many insights which might be gained by carrying out a 
  far more detailed
  comparison.
  
  The purpose of this Special Session is to make focused human-computer 
  comparisons on a task
  involving consonant identification in noise, with all participants using 
  the same training
  and test data. Training and test data and native listener and baseline 
  recogniser results
  will be provided by the organisers, but participants are encouraged to 
  also contribute
  listener responses.
  
  * Call for papers:
  Contributions are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:
  
  - Psychological models of human consonant recognition
  - Comparisons of front-end ASR representations
  - Comparisons of back-end recognisers
  - Exemplar vs statistical recognition strategies
  - Native/Non-native listener/model comparisons
  
  * Organisers:
  Odette Scharenborg (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands -- 
  O.Scharenborg@let.ru.nl)
  Martin Cooke (University of Sheffield, UK -- M.Cooke@dcs.shef.ac.uk)

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Future Speech Science and Technology Events

• CfP-2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2008)

  Tarragona, Spain, March 13-19, 2008
  Website http://www.grlmc.com
  AIMS:
  LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications that is being developed at the host institute since 2001, LATA 2008 will reserve significant room for young computer scientists at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting scholars from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial 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, unification, categorial, etc.)
  - grammars and automata architectures
  - extended automata
  - combinatorics on words
  - language varieties and semigroups
  - algebraic language theory
  - computability
  - computational and structural complexity
  - decidability questions on words and languages
  - patterns and codes
  - symbolic dynamics
  - 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
  - symbolic neural networks
  - quantum, chemical and optical computing
  - biomolecular nanotechnology
  - automata and logic
  - algorithms on automata and words
  - automata for system analysis and programme verification
  - automata, concurrency and Petri nets
  - parsing
  - weighted machines
  - transducers
  - foundations of finite state technology
  - grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
  - text retrieval, pattern matching and pattern recognition
  - text algorithms
  - string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics
  - mathematical evolutionary genomics
  - language-based cryptography
  - data and image compression
  - circuits and networks
  - language-theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life
  - digital libraries
  - document engineering
  STRUCTURE:
  LATA 2008 will consist of:
  - 3 invited talks (to be announced in the second call for papers)
  - 2 tutorials (to be announced in the second call for papers)
  - refereed contributions
  - open sessions for discussion in specific subfields or on professional issues
  SUBMISSIONS:
  Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 pages and should be formatted according to the usual LNCS article style. Submissions have to be sent through the web page.
  PUBLICATION:
  A volume of proceedings (expectedly LNCS) will be available by the time of the conference. A refereed volume of selected proceedings containing extended papers will be published soon after it as a special issue of a major journal.
  REGISTRATION:
  The period for registration will be open since January 7 to March 13, 2008. Details about how to register will be provided through the website of the conference.
  Early registration fees: 250 euros
  Early registration fees (PhD students): 100 euros
  Registration fees: 350 euros
  Registration fees (PhD students): 150 euros
  FUNDING:
  25 grants covering partial-board accommodation will be available for nonlocal PhD students. To apply, the candidate must e-mail her/his CV together with a copy of the document proving her/his status as a PhD student.
  IMPORTANT DATES:
  Paper submission: November 16, 2007
  Application for funding (PhD students): December 7, 2007
  Notification of funding acceptance or rejection: December 21, 2007
  Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: January 18, 2008
  Early registration: February 1, 2008
  Final version of the paper for the proceedings: February 15, 2008
  Starting of the conference: March 13, 2008
  Submission to the journal issue: May 23, 2008
  FURTHER INFORMATION:
  E-mail
  Website http://www.grlmc.com
  ADDRESS:
  LATA 2008
  Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
  Rovira i Virgili University
  Plaza Imperial Tarraco, 1
  43005 Tarragona, Spain
  Phone: +34-977-559543
  Fax: +34-977-559597

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• CfP Workshop on Empirical Approaches to Speech Rhythm

  CALL FOR PAPERS

  *** Workshop on Empirical Approaches to Speech Rhythm ***

  Centre for Human Communication

  UCL

  Abstracts due: 31st January 2008

  Workshop date: 28th March 2008

  Empirical studies of speech rhythm are becoming increasingly popular.

  Metrics for the quantification of rhythm have been applied to

  typological, developmental, pathological and perceptual questions.

  The prevalence of rhythm metrics based on durational characteristics

  of consonantal and vocalic intervals (e.g. deltaV, deltaC, %V, nPVI-

  V, rPVI-C, VarcoV and VarcoC) indicate the need for agreement about

  their relative efficacy and reliability. More fundamentally, it

  remains to be demonstrated whether such metrics really quantify

  speech rhythm, a controversial and elusive concept.

  Confirmed speakers:

  Francis Nolan (Cambridge) - keynote speaker

  Fred Cummins (UCD)

  Volker Dellwo (UCL)

  Klaus Kohler (Kiel)

  Elinor Payne (Oxford)

  Petra Wagner (Bonn)

  Laurence White (Bristol)

  Abstracts:

  We invite abstract submissions for a limited number of additional

  oral presentations, and for poster presentations. We welcome

  abstracts that address any or all of the following questions:

  - What is speech rhythm?

  - How should we measure speech rhythm?

  - Which rhythm metrics are most effective and reliable?

  - What can rhythm metrics tell us?

  - What are the limitations of rhythm metrics?

  Publication:

  It is intended that a limited number of contributions to the workshop

  may be published in a special issue of Phonetica. Initial selection

  of papers will be made after the workshop with a view to compiling a

  thematically coherent publication. Selected papers will subsequently

  be reviewed.

  Important dates:

  Abstracts must be received by: 31st January 2008

  Notification of acceptance: 15th February 2008

  Date of Workshop: 28th March 2008

  Abstract submission:

  Abstracts should be sent to: rhythm2008@phon.ucl.ac.uk. Abstracts

  should be in Word or rtf format, 12pt Times New Roman, 1.5 line

  spacing, and no longer than one page of A4. The file should be

  entitled RhythmWorkshop-[name].doc, where [name] is the last name of

  the first author. The abstract should start with:

  - the title of the abstract in bold and centered;

  - the name(s) and department(s) of the author(s) in italics and

  centered;

  - the email address(es) of the author(s), centred.

  The body of the abstract should be justified left and right.

  Further information:

  For more information and updates please check www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/

  rhythm2008. Email enquiries should be directed to

  rhythm2008@phon.ucl.ac.uk.

  On behalf of the scientific organizing committee:

  Volker Dellwo, Elinor Payne, Petra Wagner and Laurence White

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• IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processng ICASSP

   

  ICASSP 2008

  Las Vegas USA

  30 March 4 April 2008

  The world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing.

  Website: http://www.icassp2008.org/

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• Marie Curie Research Training Workshop "Sound to Sense"

  Marie Curie Research Training Network "Sound to Sense" (S2S)

  
  Beyond Short Units
  Using non segmental units and top-down models in speech recognition in humans and machines
  16th - 19th April 2008, Naples, Italy
  
  http://www.sound2sense.eu/index.php/s2s/workshop/beyond-short-units/

  The event will have a double identity: both a workshop and a doctoral school. The workshop is planned to be a succession of debates and tutorials held by invited speakers in which phoneticians and phonologists, psycholinguists and speech engineers compare their opinions on these themes.

  Workshop themes:

   

  • Fine Phonetic Detail
  • ASR and human speech recognition models based on "long" segments and-or top-down approaches
    
  • Alternative ASR acoustic models
  • Non segmental features for ASR
  • Multi-modal speech representation and analysis
  • Choosing the best analysis unit for speech processing in humans and machines
    
  • Time, duration and tempo: common clocks between the listener and the speaker
  • Constraints, interactions and relations between phonetics and "higher" linguistic levels in spoken language
  • Spoken language grammar
  • Language Modelling for ASR

  Invited speakers:

   

  • G. Coro, Milano, IT
  • P. Cosi, Padova, IT
  • U. Frauenfelder, Geneva, CH
  • S. Hawkins, Cambridge, UK
  • J. Local, York, UK
  • R. Moore, Sheffield, UK
  • L. ten Bosch, Nijmegen, NL
  • M. Voghera, Salerno, IT
  • J. Volin, Prague, CZ
  • L. White, Bristol, UK

  The workshop is mainly directed to S2S members but  contributions (posters) will be accepted from any other interested researcher.
  Those who intend to contribute to the workshop with a poster on one of the above cited themes should send an abstract (minimum two A4 pages) to:
  s2snaples@gmail.com not later than 29th February 2008, acceptation will be notified within 10th March 2008.
  The same e-mail address can be used for any further questions.

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• Expressivity in Music and Speech

  2nd CALL FOR ABSTRACTS :
  
  NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE :  February 17th, 2008
  
  Prosody and expressivity in speech and music
  
  Satellite Event around Speech Prosody 2008 / First EMUS Conference -
  Expressivity in MUsic and Speech
  http://www.sp2008.org/events.php /
  http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analyse-synthese/EMUS
  
  Campinas, Brazil, May 5th, 2008
  [Abstract submission deadline: February 17th, 2008]
  Keywords: emotion, expressivity, prosody, music, acquisition,
  perception, production,
  interpretation, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, acoustic analysis.
  
  DESCRIPTION:
  Speech and music conceal a treasure of "expressive potential" for they
  can activate sequences of varied
  emotional experiences in the listener. Beyond their semiotic
  differences, speech and music share acoustic
  features such as duration, intensity, and pitch, and have their own
  internal organization, with their own
  rhythms, colors, timbres and tones.
  The aim of this workshop is to question the connections between various
  forms of expressivity, and the
  prosodic and gestural dimensions in the spheres of music and speech. We
  will first tackle the links
  between speech and music through enaction and embodied cognition. We
  will then work on computer
  modelling for speech and music synthesis. The third part will focus on
  musicological and aesthetic
  perspectives. We will end the workshop with a round table in order to
  create a dialogue between the
  various angles used to apprehend prosody and expressivity in both speech
  and music.
  
  FRAMEWORK:
  This workshop will be the starting point of a string of events on the
  relations between language and music:
  May 16th: Prosody, Babbling and Music (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres
  et Sciences Humaines, Lyon)
  June 17-18th: Prosody of Expressivity in Music and Speech (IRCAM, Paris)
  September 25th and 26th: Semiotics and microgenesis of verbal and
  musical forms (RISC, Paris).
  Our aim is to make links between several fields of research and create a
  community interested in the
  relations between music and language. The project will be materialized
  in a final publication of the
  keynote papers of those four events.
  
  SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:
  The workshop will host about ten posters.
  Authors should submit an extended abstract to: beller@ircam.fr in pdf
  format by January 30, 2008.
  We will send an email confirming the reception of the submission. The
  suggested abstract length is
  maximum 1 page, formatted in standard style.
  The authors of the accepted abstracts will be allocated as poster
  highlights. Time will be allocated
  in the programme for poster presentations and discussions.
  Before the workshop, the extended abstracts (maximum 4 pages) will be
  made available to a broader
  audience on the workshop web site. We also plan to maintain the web page
  after the workshop and
  encourage the authors to submit slides and posters with relevant links
  to their personal web pages.
  
  KEY DATES:
  Dec 10: Workshop announcement and Call for Abstracts
  Jan 30: Abstract submission deadline
  Feb 17: New submission deadline
  Mar 28: Notification of acceptance
  Apr 25: Final extended abstracts due
  May 5: Workshop
  
  SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
  Christophe d'Alessandro (LIMSI, Orsay);
  Antoine Auchlin (University of Geneva, Linguistics Department);
  Grégory Beller (IRCAM);
  Nick Campbell (ATR, Nara);
  Anne Lacheret (MODYCO,
  Nanterre University) ;
  Sandra Madureira (PUC-SP);
  Aliyah Morgenstern (ICAR, Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences
  Humaines) ;
  Nicolas Obin (IRCAM)
  
  ORGANISERS:
  - University of Geneva, Linguistics Department (Antoine Auchlin)
  - IRCAM (Grégory Beller and Nicolas Obin)
  - MODYCO, Nanterre University (Anne Lacheret)
  - ICAR, Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (Aliyah
  Morgenstern)
  
  CONTACT :
  For questions/ suggestions about the workshop, please contact
  beller@ircam.fr
  Please refer to http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analyse-synthese/EMUS for
  up-to-date information about the workshop.
  
  PROGRAM
  http://www.sp2008.org/events/EMUS-conferences.pdf

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• CfP- LREC 2008 - 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

   

   LREC 2008
   http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008
    6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
    Palais des congres Mansour Eddhabi  
    Marrakech, Morocco
    May 26 - June 1, 2008
  
    Registration to Main Conference and Workshops&Tutorials is now OPEN   
  
  Important dates:
  Early registration deadline:                                   13 March 2008
  Final version for the Conference Proceedings:        28 March 2008
  
  Accommodation Online Booking is now OPEN
  Check the list and rates of the hotels we have booked for you in Marrakech.

   

  
  
  Conference Schedule:          
  Main Conference:                                                  28-29-30 May 2008         
  Pre-conference workshops and tutorials:                 26-27 May 2008              
  Post-conference workshops:                                  31 May - 1 June 2008

   

  Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi, MARRAKECH - MOROCCO
  MAIN CONFERENCE: 28-29-30 MAY 2008
  WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 26-27 MAY and 31 MAY- 1 JUNE 2008
  Conference web site
  The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) will be organised in 2008 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and organisations.
  CONFERENCE TOPICS
  Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs): text, speech, multimodality

  • Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs
  • Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
  • Methodologies and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
  • Ontologies and knowledge representation
  • Terminology
  • Integration between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web technologies
  • Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup
  
  Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications
  
  • For: information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, mobile communication, machine translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc.
  • In different types of interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice activated services, etc.
  • Communication with neighbouring fields of applications, e.g. e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, etc.
  • Industrial LRs requirements, user needs
  
  Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation
  
  • HLT Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
  • Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs
  • Benchmarking of systems and products Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces, interactions and dialog systems
  • Usability and user satisfaction evaluation
  
  General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
  
  • National and international activities and projects
  • Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
  • Open architectures
  • Organisational, economical and legal issues
  
  Special Highlights
  LREC targets the integration of different types of LRs - spoken, written, and other modalities - and of the respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues which are common to different types of LRs and language technologies.
  LRs are currently developed and deployed in a much wider range of applications and domains. LREC 2008 recognises the need to encompass all those data that interact with language resources in an attempt to model more complex human processes and develop more complex systems, and encourages submissions on topics such as:
  
  • Multimodal and multimedia systems, for Human-Machine interfaces, Human-Human interactions, and content processing
  • Resources for modelling language-related cognitive processes, including emotions
  • Interaction/Association of language and perception data, also for robotic systems
  PROGRAMME
  The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels. There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.
  SUBMISSIONS AND DATES
  Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations should consist of about 1500-2000 words.
  
  • Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers: 31 October 2007
  Proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.
  
  • Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 31 October 2007
  PROCEEDINGS
  The Proceedings on CD will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.
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• Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language resources for less-resourced languages

  CALL FOR PAPERS
  
  "Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language resources for less-resourced languages"
  
  LREC 2008 pre-conference workshop
  Marrakech, Morocco:  afternoon of Tuesday 27th May 2008
  Organised by the SALTMIL Special Interest Group of ISCA
  
  SALTMIL:            http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
  LREC 2008:            http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/
  Call For Papers:     http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/en/activities/lrec2008/lrec-2008-workshop-cfp.html
  Paper submission:        http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008
  
  Papers are invited for the above half-day workshop, in the format outlined below.  Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some authors may be invited to present in lecture format.
  
  Context and Focus
  
  The minority or "less resourced" languages of the world are under increasing pressure from the major languages (especially English), and many of them lack full political recognition.  Some minority languages have been well researched linguistically, but most have not, and the majority do not yet possess basic speech and language resources which would enable the commercial development of products.  This lack of language products may accelerate the decline of those languages that are already struggling to survive.  To break this vicious circle, it is important to encourage the development of basic language resources as a first step.
  
  In recent years, linguists across the world have realised the need to document endangered languages immediately, and to publish the raw data. This raw data can be transformed automatically (or with the help of volunteers) into resources for basic speech and language technology. It thus seems necessary to extend the scope of recent workshops on speech and language technology beyond technological questions of interoperability between digital resources:  the focus will be on the human aspect of creating and disseminating language resources for the benefit of endangered and non-endangered less-resourced languages.
  
  Topics
  
  The theme of "collaboration" centres on issues involved in collaborating with:
  
  * Trained researchers.
  * Non-specialist workers (paid or volunteers) from the speaker community.
  * The wider speaker community.
  * Officials, funding bodies, and others.
  
  Hence there will be a corresponding need for the following:
  
  * With trained researchers: Methods and tools for facilitating collaborative working at a distance.
  * With non-specialist workers: Methods and tools for training new workers for specific tasks, and laying the foundations for continuation of these skills among native speakers.
  * With the wider speaker community: Methods of gaining acceptance and wider publicity for the work, and of increasing the take-up rates after completion of the work.
  * With others: Methods of presenting the work in non-specialist terms, and of facilitating its progress.
  
  Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  
  * Bringing together people with very different backgrounds.
  * How to organize volunteer work (some endangered languages have active volunteers).
  * How to train non-specialist volunteers in elicitation methods.
  * Working with the speaker community: strengthening acceptance of ICT and language resources among the speaker community.
  * Working collaboratively to build speech and text corpora with few existing language resources and no specialist expertise.
  * Web-based creation of linguistic resources, including web 2.0.
  * The development of digital tools to facilitate collaboration between people.
  * Licensing issues; open source, proprietary software.
  * Re-use of existing data; interoperability between tools and data.
  * Language resources compatible with limited computing power environments (old machines, the $100 handheld device, etc.)
  * General speech and language resources for minority languages, with particular emphasis on software tools that have been found useful.
  
  Important dates
  
  29 February 2008    Deadline for submission
  17 March 2008        Notification
  31 March 2008        Final version
  27 May 2008        Workshop
  
  Organisers
  
  * Briony Williams:  Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, UK
  * Mikel Forcada:  Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
  * Kepa Sarasola:  Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country
  
  Submission information
  
  We expect short papers of max 3500 words (about 4-6 pages) describing research addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF documents by uploading to the following URL:
  
  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008
  
  The final papers should not have more than 6 pages, adhering to the stylesheet that will be adopted for the LREC Proceedings (to be announced later on the Conference web site).

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• 2nd Intl Workshop on emotion corpora for research on emotion and affect

   
  deadline for abstract : 12/02/2008
  
  Second International Workshop on EMOTION (satellite of LREC):
  
  CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT
  
              Monday, 26 May 2008
  
             in Marrakech (Morocco)
  
              In Association with
  
  6th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION
  
          LREC2008 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/
  
                  Main Conference
                  28-29-30 May 2008
  
  
  This workshop follows a first successful workshop on Corpora for research
  on Emotion and Affect at LREC 2006. The HUMAINE network of excellence
  (http://emotion-research.net/) has brought together several groups working
  on the development of emotional databases, the HUMAINE association will
  continue this effort and the workshop aims to broaden the interaction that
  has developed in that context. The HUMAINE Association portal will provide
  a range of services for individuals, such as a web presence, access to
  data, and an email news service; special interest groups will be provided
  with a working folder, a mailing list, and a discussion forum or a blog.
  Conferences, workshops and research projects in the area of
  emotion-oriented computing can be given a web presence on the portal.
  
  Papers are invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and
  affect.  They may raise one or more of the following questions. What kind
  of theory of emotion is needed to guide the area? What are appropriate
  sources? Which modalities should be considered, in which combinations?
  What are the realistic constraints on recording quality? How can the
  emotional content of episodes be described within a corpus? Which
  emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how? How should
  access to corpora be provided? What level of standardisation is
  appropriate? How can quality be assessed? Ethical issues in database
  development and access.
  
  Description of the specific technical issues of the workshop:
  Many models of emotion are common enough to affect the way teams go about
  collecting and describing emotion-related data. Some which are familiar
  and intuitively appealing are known to be problematic, either because they
  are theoretically dated or because they do not transfer to practical
  contexts. To evaluate the resources that are already available, and to
  construct valid new corpora, research teams need some sense of the models
  that are relevant to the area.
  
  
  The organising committee:
  Laurence Devillers / Jean-Claude Martin
  Spoken Language Processing group/ Architectures and Models for
  Interaction, LIMSI-CNRS,
  BP 133, 91403 Orsay Cedex, France
  (+33) 1 69 85 80 62 /  (+33) 1 69 85 81 04 (phone)
  (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 / (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 (fax)
  devil@limsi.fr / martin@limsi.fr
  http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/devil/
  http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/
  
  Roddy Cowie / School of Psychology
  Ellen Douglas-Cowie / Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Queen's
  University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
  +44 2890 974354 / +44 2890 975348  (phone)
  +44 2890 664144 / +44 2890 ******  (fax)
  http://www.psych.qub.ac.uk/staff/teaching/cowie/index.aspx
  http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/staff/douglas-cowie/
  r.cowie@qub.ac.uk / e.douglas-Cowie@qub.ac.uk
  
  Anton Batliner - Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Informatik 5)
  Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg - Martensstrasse 3
  91058 Erlangen - F.R. of Germany
  Tel.: +49 9131 85 27823 - Fax.: +49 9131 303811
  batliner@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
  http://www5.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Personen/batliner/
  
  Contact: Laurence Devillers lrec-emotion@limsi.fr
  
  -------------------------
  IMPORTANT DATES
  -------------------------
  1rt call for paper                                 21 December
  2nd call for paper                                 29 January
  Deadline for 1500-2000 words abstract submission   12 February
  Notification of acceptance                         12 March
  Final version of accepted paper                    4 April
  Workshop full-day                                  26 May
  
  --------------
  SUBMISSIONS
  ---------------
  The workshop will consist of paper and poster presentations.
  Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster must consist of about
  1500-2000 words.
  Final submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English,
  and follow the submission guidelines at LREC2008.
  
  The preferred format is MS word or pdf. The file should be submitted via
  email
  to lrec-emotion@limsi.fr
    -----------------------------
  
  As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to
  lrec-emotion@limsi.fr a brief email indicating their intention to
  participate, including their contact information and the topic they intend
  to address in their
  submissions.
  
  Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC Local Organising
  Committee.
  
  Submitted papers will be blind reviewed.
  
  --------------------------------------------------
  TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE
  --------------------------------------------------
  The workshop will consist of a full-day session,
  There will be time for collective discussions.
  For this full-day Workshop, the registration fee will
  be specified on http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

  Back to Top

• CfP ELRA Workshop on Evaluation

  CALL FOR PAPERS

  ELRA Workshop on Evaluation

  Looking into the Future of Evaluation: when automatic metrics meet

  task-based and performance-based approaches

   

  To be held in conjunction with the 6th International Language Resources

  and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008)

  27 May 2008, Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi, Marrakech

   

  Background

  Automatic methods to evaluate system performance play an important role

  in the development of a language technology system. They speed up

  research and development by allowing fast feedback, and the idea is also

  to make results comparable while aiming to match human evaluation in

  terms of output evaluation. However, after several years of study and

  exploitation of such metrics we still face problems like the following ones:

  * they only evaluate part of what should be evaluated

  * they produce measurements that are hard to understand/explain, and/or

  hard to relate to the concept of quality

  * they fail to match human evaluation

  * they require resources that are expensive to create

  etc. Therefore, an effort to integrate knowledge from a multitude of

  evaluation activities and methodologies should help us solve some of

  these immediate problems and avoid creating new metrics that reproduce

  such problems.

   

  Looking at MT as a sample case, problems to be immediately pointed out

  are twofold: reference translations and distance measurement. The former

  are difficult and expensive to produce, they do not cover the usually

  wide spectrum of translation possibilities and what is even more

  discouraging, worse results are obtained when reference translations are

  of higher quality (more spontaneous and natural, and thus, sometimes

  more lexically and syntactically distant from the source text).

  Regarding the latter, the measurement of the distance between the source

  text and the output text is carried out by means of automatic metrics

  that do not match human intuition as well as claimed. Furthermore,

  different metrics perform differently, which has already led researchers

  to study metric/approach combinations which integrate automatic methods

  into a deeper linguistically oriented evaluation. Hopefully, this should

  help soften the unfair treatment received by some rule-based systems,

  clearly punished by certain system-approach sensitive metrics.

   

  On the other hand, there is the key issue of « what needs to be measured

  », so as to draw the conclusion that « something is of good quality »,

  or probably rather « something is useful for a particular purpose ». In

  this regard, works like those done within the FEMTI framework have shown

  that aspects such as usability, reliability, efficiency, portability,

  etc. should also be considered. However, the measuring of such quality

  characteristics cannot always be automated, and there may be many other

  aspects that could be usefully measured.

   

  This workshop follows the evolution of a series of workshops where

  methodological problems, not only for MT but for evaluation in general,

  have been approached. Along the lines of these discussions and aiming to

  go one step further, the current workshop, while taking into account the

  advantages of automatic methods and the shortcomings of current methods,

  should focus on task-based and performance-based approaches for

  evaluation of natural language applications, with key questions such as:

   

  - How can it be determined how useful a given system is for a given task?

  - How can focusing on such issues and combining these approaches with

  our already acquired experience on automatic evaluation help us develop

  new metrics and methodologies which do not feature the shortcomings of

  current automatic metrics?

  - Should we work on hybrid methodologies of automatic and human

  evaluation for certain technologies and not for others?

  - Can we already envisage the integration of these approaches?

  - Can we already plan for some immediate collaborations/experiments?

  - What would it mean for the FEMTI framework to be extended to other HLT

  applications, such as summarization, IE, or QA? Which new aspects would

  it need to cover?

   

  We solicit papers that address these questions and other related issues

  relevant to the workshop.

   

  Workshop Programme and Audience Addressed

  This full-day workshop is intended for researchers and developers on

  different evaluation technologies, with experience on the various issues

  concerned in the call, and interested in defining a methodology to move

  forward.

  The workshop feature invited talks, submitted papers, and will conclude

  with a discussion on future developments and collaboration.

   

  Workshop Chairing Team

  Gregor Thurmair (Linguatec Sprachtechnologien GmbH, Germany) - chair

  Khalid Choukri (ELDA - Evaluations and Language resources Distribution

  Agency, France) - co-chair

  Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) - co-chair

   

  Organising Committee

  Victoria Arranz (ELDA - Evaluations and Language resources Distribution

  Agency, France)

  Khalid Choukri (ELDA - Evaluations and Language resources Distribution

  Agency, France)

  Christopher Cieri (LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, USA)

  Eduard Hovy (Information Sciences Institute of the University of

  Southern California, USA)

  Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

  Keith J. Miller (The MITRE Corporation, USA)

  Satoshi Nakamura (National Institute of Information and Communications

  Technology, Japan)

  Andrei Popescu-Belis (IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland)

  Gregor Thurmair (Linguatec Sprachtechnologien GmbH, Germany)

   

  Important dates

  Deadline for abstracts: Monday 28 January 2008

  Notification to Authors: Monday 3 March 2008

  Submission of Final Version: Tuesday 25 March 2008

  Workshop: Tuesday 27 May 2008

   

  Submission Format

  Abstracts should be no longer than 1500 words and should be submitted in

  PDF format to Gregor Thurmair at g.thurmair@linguatec.de.

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• HLT and NLP within the Arabic world

  HLT & NLP within the Arabic world:
  Arabic Language and local languages processing:
  Status Updates and Prospects
  
  Workshop held in conjunction with LREC 2008
  
  Saturday, May 31st 2008
  
  
  The submissions are now open. Please follow the procedure to submit your abstract.
  
  Only online submissions will be considered. All abstracts should be submitted in PDF format through the online submission form on START before 15 February 2008.
  
  Submissions must be in English.
  Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format.
  Abstracts for workshop contributions should not exceed 4 (Four) A4 pages (excluding references). An additional title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone and fax numbers.
  There is no template for the pdf abstract. The template will be made available online for the for the final papers.
  
  The submissions are not anonymous.
  
  Submitted papers will be judged based on relevance to the workshop aims, as well as the novelty of the idea, technical quality, clarity of presentation, and expected impact on future research within the area of focus.
   
  Any question should be sent to arabic@elda.org.
   
  Registration to LREC'08 will be required for participation, so potential participants are invited to refer to the main conference website for all details not covered in the present call.
  
  
  Important Dates
  
  Call for papers:                                      3 January 2008
  
  Deadline for abstract submissions:           15 February 2008
  
  Notification of acceptance:                  14 March 2008
  
  Final version of accepted paper:             11 April 2008
  
  Workshop full-day:                    Saturday 31st May 2008
  
  
  Full Call for Papers is available at: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/IMG/ws/HLTwithin%20the%20Arabic%20world-final.html
  Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/LREC2008/ALLLP2008/
  

  Back to Top

• CALL for JEP/TALN/RECITAL 2008 - Avignon France

  CALL FOR WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS

  For the third time, after Nancy in 2002 and Fes in 2004, the French speech association AFCP and the French NLP association ATALA are jointly organising their main conference in order to group together the two research community working in the fields of Speech and Natural Language Processing.

  The conference will include oral and poster communications, invited conferences, workshops and tutorials. Workshop and tutorials will be held on June 13, 2008.

  The official languages are French and English.

  IMPORTANT DATES

  Deadline for proposals: November 22nd 2007

  Approval by the TALN committee: November 30th 2007

  Final version for inclusion in the proceedings: April 4th 2008

  Workshop and tutorials: June 13th 2008

  OBJECTIVES

  Workshops can be organized on any specific aspect of NLP. The aim of these sessions is to facilitate an in-depth discussion of this theme.

  A workshop has its own president and its own program committee. The president is responsible for organizing a call for paper/participation and for the coordination of his program committee. The organizers ofthe main TALN conference will only take in charge the organization of the usual practical details (rooms, coffee breaks, proceedings).

  Workshops will be organized in parallel sessions on the last day of the conference (2 to 4 sessions of 1:30).

  Tutorials will be held on the same day.

  HOW TO SUBMIT

  Workshop and Tutorial proposals will be sent by email to taln08@atala.org before November 22nd, 2007.

  ** Workshop proposals will contain an abstract presenting the proposed theme, the program committee list and the expected length of the session.

  ** Tutorial proposals will contain an abstract presenting the proposed theme, a list of all the speakers and the expected length of the session (1 or 2 sessions of 1:30).

  The TALN program committee will make a selection of the proposals and announce it on November 30th, 2008.

   FORMAT

  Conferences will be given in French or English (for non French native speakers). Papers to be published in the proceedings will conform to the TALN style sheet which is available on the conference web site. Worshop papers should not be longer than 10 pages in Times 12 (references included).

  Contact:   taln08@atala.org

   

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• 6th Intl Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing CBMI '08

  Sixth International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI'08)  

                                 http://cbmi08.qmul.net/                        

                                18-20th June, 2008, London, UK    

  CBMI is the main international forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest 

  technological advances, industrial needs and product  developments in multimedia indexing, 

  search, retrieval, navigation and  browsing. Following the five successful previous events 

  (Toulouse 1999,  Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, and Bordeaux 2007), CBMI'08 

  will be  hosted by Queen Mary, University of London in the vibrant city of London.  

  The focus of CBMI'08 is the integration of what could be regarded as  unrelated disciplines 

  including image processing, information retrieval,  human computer interaction and 

  semantic web technology with industrial  trends and commercial product development. 

  The technical program of  CBMI'08 will include presentation of invited plenary talks, 

  special  sessions as well as regular sessions with contributed research papers.   

  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

  * Content-based browsing, indexing and retrieval of images, video and audio   

  * Matching and similarity search   

  * Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing   

  * Content-based search   

  * Multimedia data mining   

  * Summarisation and browsing of multimedia content    

  * Semantic web technology   

  * Semantic inference   

  * Semantic mapping and ontologies   

  * Identification and tracking of semantic regions in scenes    

  * Presentation and visualization tools   

  * Graphical user interfaces for navigation and browsing   

  * Personalization and content adaptation   

  * User modelling, interaction and relevance feed-back    

  * Metadata generation and coding   

  * Large scale multimedia database management    

  * Applications of multimedia information retrieval   

  * Analysis and social content applications   

  * Evaluation metrics 

  Submission  

  Prospective authors are invited to submit papers using the on-line system  at the 

  conference website http://cbmi08.qmul.net/. Accepted papers will  be published in the 

  Conference Proceedings. Extended and improved  versions of CBMI papers will be 

  reviewed and considered for publication  in Special Issues of IET Image Processing 

  (formerly IEE Proceedings  Vision, Image and Signal Processing) and EURASIP journal 

  on Image and  Video Processing.  

   Important Dates: 

  Submission of full papers (to be received by): 5th February, 2008 

  Notification of acceptance:                    20th March, 2008 

  Submission of camera-ready papers:             10th April, 2008 Conference:                                    18-20th June, 2008   

  Organisation Committee:

  General Chairs:     Ebroul Izquierdo,Queen Mary, University of London, UK  

  Technical Co- Chairs:   Jenny Benois-Pineau , University of Bordeaux, France     

  Arjen P. de Vries, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, NL 

  Alberto Del Bimbo,Universita` degli Studi di Firenze, Italy     

  Bernard Merialdo,Institut Eurecom, France  

  EU Commission:     

  Roberto Cencioni(Head of Unit INFSO E2) European Commission     

  Luis Rodriguez Rosello(Head of Unit INFSO D2) European Commission  

  Special Session Chairs:     

  Stefanos Kollias, National Technical University of Athens, Greece     

  Gael Richard,GET-Telecom Paris, France  

  Contacts: 

  Ebroul Izquierdo          ebroul.izquierdo@elec.qmul.ac.uk     

  Giuseppe Passino          giuseppe.passino@elec.qmul.ac.uk     

  Qianni Zhang              qianni.zhang@elec.qmul.ac.uk  

  Back to Top

• CfP IIS2008 Workshop on Spoken Language and Understanding and Dialog Systems

  2nd CALL FOR PAPERS                         

  IIS 2008 Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding  and Dialogue Systems 

  Zakopane, Poland    18 June 2008                  

   http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/IIS2008/luna.html                 

  The workshop is organized by the IST LUNA (http://www.ist-luna.eu/)  projects members and it is aimed to give an opportunity to share ideas on problems related to communication with computer systems in natural language and  dialogue systems.   

  SCOPE    

  The main area of interest of the workshop is human-computer interaction  in natural language and include among others:      

   - spontaneous speech recognition,     

  - preparation of speech corpora,     

  - transcription problems in spoken corpora     

  - parsing problems in spoken texts      

  - semantic interpretation of text,     

  - knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems,    

  - dialogue models,     

  - spoken language understanding.   

  SUBMISSIONS  

  The organizers invite long (10 pages) and short (5 pages) papers. The   papers will be refereed on the  basis of long abstracts (4 pages) by an  international committee. The final papers are to be prepared using LaTeX.   The conference proceedings in paper and electronic form will be  distributed at the conference. They will be available on-line after the conference.      I

  IMPORTANT DATES            

  Submission deadline (abstracts)         31 January 2008           

  Notification of acceptance:    		  29 February 2008          

  Full papers, camera-ready version due:  31 March  2008          

  Workshop:                               18 June 2008  

  ORGANISERS         

  Malgorzata Marciniak mm@ipipan.waw.pl         

  Agnieszka Mykowiecka  agn@ipian.waw.pl 

  Krzysztof Marasek kmarasek@pjwstk.edu.pl 

  Back to Top

• HLT Workshop on Mobile Language Technology (ACL-08)

  Call for Papers

  ACL-08: HLT Workshop on

  Mobile Language Processing

  http://www.mobileNLPworskshop.org

   

  Columbus, Ohio, United States

  June 19th or June 20th, 2008

  ** Paper submission deadline: March 7, 2007 **
  

  ************************************************************************

   

  Mobile Language Processing

   

  Mobile devices, such as ultra-mobile PCs, personal digital assistants, and smart phones have many unique characteristics that make them both highly desirable as well as difficult to use. On the positive side, they are small, convenient, personalizable, and provide an anytime-anywhere communication capability. Conversely, they have limited input and output capabilities, limited bandwidth, limited memory, and restricted processing power. 

   

  The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing the challenges in natural and spoken language processing and systems research that are unique to this domain. We argue that mobile devices not only provide an ideal opportunity for language processing applications but also offer new challenges for NLP and spoken language understanding research.

   

  For instance, mobile devices are beginning to integrate sensors (most commonly for location detection through GPS, Global Positioning Systems) that can be exploited by context/location aware NLP systems; another interesting research direction is the use of information from multiple devices for "distributed" language modeling and inference. To give some concrete examples, knowing the type of web queries made from nearby devices or from a specific location or a specific ‘context' can be combined for various applications and could potentially improve information retrieval results. Learned language models could be transferred from device to device, propagating and updating the language models continuously and in a decentralized manner.

   

  Processing and memory limitations incurred by executing NLP and speech recognition on small devices need to be addressed. Some applications and practical considerations may require a client/server or distributed architecture: what are the implications for language processing systems in using such architectures?

   

  The limitation of the input and output channels necessitates typing on increasingly smaller keyboards which is quite difficult, and similarly reading on small displays is challenging. Speech interfaces for dictation or for understanding navigation commands and/or language models for typing suggestions would enhance the input channel, while NLP systems for text classification, summarization and information extraction would be helpful for the output channel.  Speech interfaces, language generation and dialog systems would provide a natural way to interact with mobile devices.

  Furthermore, the growing market of cell phones in developing regions can be used for delivering applications in the areas of health, education and economic growth to rural communities.  Some of the challenges in this area are the limited literacy, the many languages and dialects spoken and the networking infrastructure.

  We solicit papers on topics including, but not limited to the following:

  ·       Special challenges of NLP for mobile devices

  ·       Applications of NLP for mobile devices

  ·       NLP enhanced by sensor data

  ·       Distributed NLP

  ·       Speech and multimodal interfaces

  ·       Machine translation

  ·       Language model sharing

  ·       Applications for the developing regions

   

  The goal of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to allow both industrial and academic researchers to share their experiences and visions, to present results, compare systems, exchange ideas and formulate common goals.

  "Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Stifelman, Principal User Experience Manager at Tellme/Microsoft. The title of her talk is soon to be announced."

   

  We accept position papers (2 pages), short research or demo papers (4 pages), and regular papers (8 content pages with 1 extra page for references). Papers must be submitted through the submission system at
  https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS07/submit.html

  Please use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available at http://ling.osu.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html.

   

  Important dates:

  - Paper submission deadline: March 7, 2008
  - Notification of acceptance: April 8, 2008
  - Camera-ready Copy: April 18, 2008

  
  

  Organizing committee:

  Rosario, Barbara        Intel Research    

  Paek, Tim               Microsoft Research    

   

  Contact

  For questions about the workshop, please contact Barbara Rosario (barbara.rosario@intel.com).

  Back to Top

• 4TH TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP PIT08

   

   ***************************************************************
  **          February 22, 2008: Deadline postponed            **
  ***************************************************************
  
  Following previous successful workshops between 1999 and 2006, the
  
  4TH TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP
  PERCEPTION AND INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR SPEECH-BASED SYSTEMS
  (PIT08)
  
  will be held at the Kloster Irsee in southern Germany from June 16 to
  June 18, 2008.
  
  Please follow this link to visit our workshop website
  http://it.e-technik.uni-ulm.de/World/Research.DS/irsee-workshops/pit08/introduction.html
  
  Submissions will be short/demo or full papers of 4-10 pages.
  
  Important dates:
  **February 22, 2008: Deadline for Long, Short and Demo Papers**
  March 15, 2008: Author notification
  April 1, 2008: Deadline for final submission of accepted paper
  April 18, 2008: Deadline for advance registration
  June 7, 2008: Final programme available on the web
  
  The workshop will be technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal
  Processing Society. It is envisioned to publish the proceedings in the
  LNCS/LNAI Series by Springer.
  
  We welcome you to the workshop.
  
  Elisabeth André, Laila Dybkjaer, Wolfgang Minker, Heiko Neumann,
  Michael Weber, Roberto Pieraccini
  
  PIT'08 Organising Committee

  - 
  Wolfgang Minker
  University of Ulm
  Department of Information Technology
  Albert-Einstein-Allee 43
  D-89081 Ulm
  Phone: +49 731 502 6254/-6251
  Fax:   +49 691 330 3925516
  http://it.e-technik.uni-ulm.de/World/Research.DS/

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• YRR-2008 Young Researchers' Roundtable

  YRR-2008: Call for participation
  
  Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems
  June 21st, 2008, Columbus, Ohio,
  
  First Call for Participation
  
  The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual
  workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers
  working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia
  and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants
  can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The
  workshop is meant to provide an interdisciplinary forum for creative
  thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research, and
  help create a stronger international network of young researchers
  working in the field.  The workshop is co-located with ACL 2008  and
  will occur the day after the 9th SIGdial workshop.
  
  Workshop Format
  
  Workshop events will include small informal discussion groups, a larger
  Question & Answers style discussion with senior researchers from
  academia and industry, and an opt-in demo presentation session. There
  will also be time for participants to have informal discussions over
  coffee with senior researchers on potential career opportunities. The
  small discussion groups are intended to allow participants to exchange
  ideas on key research topics, and identify issues that are likely to be
  important in the coming years. The results of each discussion group will
  then presented and discussed in plenary sessions. The topics for
  discussion are still open and will be determined by participant
  submissions and finalized online before the workshop. Potential
  participants should submit a short paper, as described below in the
  submission process to get accepted to the workshop.
  
  In addition to the traditional one day event, a half day extension on
  the topic of  "Frameworks and Grand Challenges for Dialog System
  Evaluation" is under consideration for the morning of June 22nd, 2008.
  The aim of this extra extension is to provide an opportunity for dialog
  systems researchers to discuss issues of evaluation, and hopefully
  determine an agenda for a future evaluation event or framework.
  Organization of this extended event will depend on interest; we
  therefore, as described below, invite potential participants to indicate
  their interest with their YRR08 submission.
  
  Submission Process
  
  We invite participation from students, post docs, and junior researchers
  in academia or industry who are currently working in spoken dialog
  systems research. We also invite participation from those who are
  working in related fields such as linguistics, psychology, or speech
  processing, as applied to spoken dialogue systems.  Please note that by
  'young researchers' the workshop's organizers mean to target students
  and researchers in the field who are at a relatively early stage of
  their careers, and in no way mean to imply that participants must meet
  certain age restrictions.
  
  Potential participants should submit a 2-page position paper and suggest
  topics for discussion and whether they would be interested in attending
  the extended session on Sunday morning. A template and specific
  submission instructions will be available on http://www.yrrsds.org/ on
  March 1.  Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis from that day
  until the maximum number of participants for the workshop (50) is
  reached, or until the submission deadline (May 10th, 2008) is reached.
  Proceedings from previous years' workshops are also available on our web
  site. Specific questions can be directed to the organizing committee at
  yrr08-organizers__AT_googlegroups_DOT_com
  
  Important Dates
  
  Submissions:            March 1st, 2008
  Submissions deadline:   May 10th, 2008
  Notification:           May 20th, 2008
  Registration begins:    to be announced
  Workshop:               June 21st, 2008
  
  Organizing Committee
  
  Hua Ai, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh, USA
  Carlos Gómez Gallo, Department of Computer Science, University of
  Rochester, USA
  Robert J. Ross, Department of Computer Science, University of Bremen,
  Germany
  Sabrina Wilske, Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland
  University, Germany
  Andi Winterboer, Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems,
  University of Edinburgh, UK
  Craig Wootton, University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland
  
  Local Organization
  
  Tim Weale, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio
  State University, USA
  

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• eNTERFACE 2008 Orsay Paris

  eNTERFACE'08 the next international summer workshop on multimodal

  interfaces will take place at LIMSI, in Orsay (near Paris), France,

  during four weeks, August 4th-29th, 2008.

  http://entreface08.limsi.fr

  Please consider proposing projects and participate to the workshop (see

  the Call for Projects proposal on the web site or attached to this mail).

  eNTERFACE08 is the next of a series of successful workshops initiated by

  SIMILAR, the European Network of Excellence (NoE) on Multimodal

  interfaces. eNTERFACE'08 will follow the fruitful path opened by

  eNTERFACE05 in Mons, Belgium, continued by eNTERFACE06 in Dubrovnik,

  Croatia and eNTERFACE07 in Istambul, Turkey. SIMILAR came to an end in

  2007, and the eNTERFACE http://www.enterface.org workshops are now

  under the aegis of the OpenInterface  http://www.openinterface.org

  Foundation.

   

  eNTERFACE'08 Important Dates

  . December 17th, 2007: Reception of the complete Project proposal in

  the format provided by the Author's kit

  . January 10rd, 2008: Notification of project acceptance

  . February 1st, 2008: Publication of the Call for Participation

  . August 4th -- August 29th, 2008: eNTERFACE 08 Workshop

   

  Christophe d'Alessandro

  CNRS-LIMSI, BP 133 - F91403 Orsay France

  tel +33 (0) 1 69 85 81 13 / Fax -- 80 88

   

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• 2nd IEEE Intl Conference on Semantic Computing

     

  IEEE ICSC2008

  Second IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing

  Call for Papers

  Deadline March 1st, 2008

  August 4th-7th,  2008
  Santa Clara, CA, USA   http://icsc.eecs.uci.edu/

   

  The field of Semantic Computing (SC) brings together those disciplines concerned with connecting the (often vaguely-formulated) intentions  of humans with computational content. This connection can go both ways: retrieving,  using  and  manipulating  existing content according to user's goals ("do what the user means"); and creating, rearranging, and managing content that matches the  author's intentions ("do what the author means").

   

  The content addressed in SC includes, but is not limited to, structured and semi-structured data, multimedia data, text, programs, services and, even, network behaviour. This connection between content and the user is made via (1) Semantic  Analysis, which analyzes content with the goal of converting it to meaning (semantics); (2)Semantic Integration, which  integrates  content and  semantics  from multiple sources; (3)Semantic Applications, which utilize content and semantics to solve  problems;  and  (4)Semantic Interfaces, which attempt to interpret users' intentions expressed in natural language or other communicative forms.

   

  Example areas of SC include (but, again, are not limited to) the following:

  ANALYSIS AND UNDERSTANDING OF CONTENT

  • Natural-language processing
  • Image and video analysis
  • Audio and speech analysis
  • Analysis of structured and semi-structured data
  • Analysis of behavior of software, services, and networks

  INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS

  • Database schema integration
  • Ontology integration
  • Interoperability and Service Integration

  SEMANTIC INTERFACES

  • Natural-Language Interface
  • Multimodal Interfaces

  APPLICATIONS

  • Semantic Web and other search technologies
  • Question answering
  • Semantic Web services
  • Multimedia databases
  • Engineering of software, services, and networks based on
  • natural-language specifications
  • Context-aware networks of sensors, devices, and/or applications

  The second IEEE International Conference  on  Semantic  Computing (ICSC2008)  builds on the success of ICSC2007 as an international interdisciplinary forum  for  researchers  and  practitioners  to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying  the  emerging  research topics and defining the future of Semantic Computing.  The conference particularly welcomes interdisciplinary research that facilitates the ultimate success of Semantic Computing.

   

  The event is located in Santa Clara, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. The technical program of ICSC2008 includes tutorials, workshops, invited talks, paper presentations, panel discussions, demo sessions, and an industry track. Submissions of high-quality papers  describing  mature results or on-going work are invited.

   

  In addition to Technical Papers, the conference will feature

   * Tutorials  * Workshops * Demo Sessions * Special Sessions * Panels   * Industry Track

   

  SUBMISSIONS

  Authors are invited to submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the guidelines available on the ICSC2008 web page under "submissions".

   

  The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.  Distinguished quality papers presented at the conference will be selected for publications in internationally renowned journals.

   

  Back to Top

• EUSIPCO 2008 Lausanne Switzerland

  2^nd CALL FOR PAPERS

  2^nd CALL FOR TUTORIALS

  EUSIPCO-2008 - 16th European Signal Processing Conference - August 25-29, 2008, Lausanne, Switzerland

  - http://www.eusipco2008.org/

   

  DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: February 8, 2008

   

  The 2008 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2008) is the sixteenth in a series of conferences promoted by EURASIP, the European Association for Signal Processing (www.eurasip.org). This edition will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland, organized by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).

   

  EUSIPCO-2008 will focus on the key aspects of signal processing theory and applications. Exploration of new avenues and methodologies of signal processing will also be encouraged. Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of EUSIPCO-2008. Acceptance will be based on quality, relevance and originality. Proposals for tutorials are also invited.

   

  *** This year will feature some exciting events and novelties: ***

   

  - We are preparing a very attractive tutorial program and for the first time, access to the tutorials will be free to all registered participants! Some famous speakers have already been confirmed, but we also hereby call for new proposals for tutorials.

  - We will also have top plenary speakers, including Stéphane Mallat (Polytechnique, France), Jeffrey A. Fessler (The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA), Phil Woodland (Cambridge, UK) and Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute, Tübingen, Germany).

  - The Conference will include 12 very interesting special sessions on some of the hottest topics in signal processing. See http://www.eusipco2008.org/11.html for the complete list of those special sessions.

  - The list of 22 area chairs has been confirmed: see details at http://www.eusipco2008.org/7.html

  - The social program will also be very exciting, with a welcome reception at the fantastic Olympic Museum in Lausanne, facing the Lake Geneva and the Alps (http://www.olympic.org/uk/passion/museum/index_uk.asp) and with the conference banquet starting with a cruise on the Lake Geneva on an historical boat, followed by a dinner at the Casino of Montreux (http://www.casinodemontreux.ch/).

  Therefore I invite you to submit your work to EUSIPCO-2008 by the deadline and to attend the Conference in August in Lausanne.

  ---

   

  IMPORTANT DATES:

  Submission deadline of full papers (5 pages A4): February 8, 2008

  Submission deadline of proposals for tutorials: February 8, 2008

  Notification of Acceptance: April 30, 2008

  Conference: August 25-29, 2008

   

   

  More details on how to submit papers and proposals for tutorials can be found on the conference web site http://www.eusipco2008.org/

  Back to Top

• TDS 2008 11th Int.Conf. on Text, Speech and Dialogue

  TSD 2008 - PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

  Eleventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2008)

  Brno, Czech Republic, 8-12 September 2008

  http://www.tsdconference.org/

  The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk

  University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of

  West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International

  Speech Communication Association.

  Venue: Brno, Czech Republic

   

  TSD SERIES

  TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between

  researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the

  former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Proceedings

  of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes

  in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.

   

  TOPICS

  Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

  text corpora and tagging

  transcription problems in spoken corpora

  sense disambiguation

  links between text and speech oriented systems

  parsing issues

  parsing problems in spoken texts

  multi-lingual issues

  multi-lingual dialogue systems

  information retrieval and information extraction

  text/topic summarization

  machine translation

  semantic networks and ontologies

  semantic web

  speech modeling

  speech segmentation

  speech recognition

  search in speech for IR and IE

  text-to-speech synthesis

  dialogue systems

  development of dialogue strategies

  prosody in dialogues

  emotions and personality modeling

  user modeling

  knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems

  assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue

  applied systems and software

  facial animation

  visual speech synthesis

  Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly

  encouraged.

   

  PROGRAM COMMITTEE

  Frederick Jelinek, USA (general chair)

  Hynek Hermansky, Switzerland (executive chair)

  FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

  The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,

  oral presentations, and a poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will

  be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

  Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow

  for additional informal interactions.

   

  CONFERENCE PROGRAM

  The conference program will include oral presentations and

  poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of

  the issues raised.

   

  IMPORTANT DATES

  March 15 2008 ............ Submission of abstract

  March 22 2008 ............ Submission of full papers

  May 15 2008 .............. Notification of acceptance

  May 31 2008 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration

  July 23 2008 ............. Submission of demonstration abstracts

  July 30 2008 ............. Notification of acceptance for

  demonstrations sent to the authors

  September 8-12 2008 ...... Conference date

  The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings

  that will be made available to participants at the time of the

  conference.

   

  OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

  of the conference will be English.

   

  ADDRESS

  All correspondence regarding the conference should be

  addressed to

   

  Dana Hlavackova, TSD 2008

  Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

  Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic

  phone: +420-5-49 49 33 29

  fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20

  email: tsd2008@tsdconference.org

   

  LOCATION

  Brno is the the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a

  population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and

  trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the

  south-east part of the Czech Republic. It had been a Royal City since

  1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural center of the

  region.

  Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow, Barcelona

  and Prague and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

  Back to Top

• 5th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction MLMI 2008

  MLMI 2008 first call for papers:
  
  
                  5th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning
                  and Multimodal Interaction (MLMI 2008)
  
                          8-10 September 2008
                        Utrecht, The Netherlands
  
                         http://www.mlmi.info/
  
  
  The fifth MLMI workshop will be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands,
  following successful workshops in Martigny (2004), Edinburgh (2005),
  Washington (2006) and Brno (2007).  MLMI brings together researchers
  from the different communities working on the common theme of advanced
  machine learning algorithms applied to multimodal human-human and
  human-computer interaction.  The motivation for creating this joint
  multi-disciplinary workshop arose from the actual needs of several large
  collaborative projects, in Europe and the United States.
  
  
  * Important dates
  
  Submission of papers/posters: Monday, 31 March 2008
  Acceptance notifications: Monday, 12 May 2008
  Camera-ready versions of papers: Monday, 16 June 2008
  Workshop: 8-10 September 2008
  
  
  * Workshop topics
  
  MLMI 2008 will feature talks (including a number of invited speakers),
  posters and demonstrations.  Prospective authors are invited to submit
  proposals in the following areas of interest, related to machine
  learning and multimodal interaction:
   - human-human communication modeling
   - audio-visual perception of humans
   - human-computer interaction modeling
   - speech processing
   - image and video processing
   - multimodal processing, fusion and fission
   - multimodal discourse and dialogue modeling
   - multimodal indexing, structuring and summarization
   - annotation and browsing of multimodal data
   - machine learning algorithms and their applications to the topics above
  
  
  * Satellite events
  
  MLMI'08 will feature special sessions and satellite events, as during
  the previous editions of MLMI (see http://www.mlmi.info/ for examples).  To
  propose special sessions or satellite events, please contact the special
  session chair.
  
  MLMI 2008 is broadly colocated with a number of events in related
  domains: Mobile HCI 2008, 2-5 September, in Amsterdam; FG 2008, 17-19
  September, in Amsterdam; and ECML 2008, 15-19 September, in Antwerp.
  
  
  * Guidelines for submission
  
  The workshop proceedings will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes
  in Computer Science series (pending approval).  The first four editions
  of MLMI were published as LNCS 3361, 3869, 4299, and 4892.  However,
  unlike previous MLMIs, the proceedings of MLMI 2008 will be printed
  before the workshop and will be already available onsite to MLMI 2008
  participants.
  
  Submissions are invited either as long papers (12 pages) or as short
  papers (6 pages), and may include a demonstration proposal.  Upon
  acceptance of a paper, the Program Committee will also assign to it a
  presentation format, oral or poster, taking into account: (a) the most
  suitable format given the content of the paper; (b) the length of the
  paper (long papers are more likely to be presented orally); (c) the
  preferences expressed by the authors.
  
  Please submit PDF files using the submission website at
  http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlmi08/, following the Springer LNCS format
  for proceedings and other multiauthor volumes
  (http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer/lncs?SGWID=5-164-7-72376-0).
   Camera-ready versions of accepted papers, both long and short, are
  required to follow these guidelines and to take into account the
  reviewers' comments.  Authors of accepted short papers are encouraged to
  turn them into long papers for the proceedings.
  
  
  * Venue
  
  Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, with historic
  roots back to the Roman Empire.  Utrecht hosts one of the bigger
  universities in the country, and with its historic centre and the many
  students it provides and excellent atmosphere for social activities in-
  or outside the workshop community.  Utrecht is centrally located in the
  Netherlands, and has direct train connections to the major cities and
  Schiphol International Airport.
  
  TNO, organizer of MLMI 2008, is a not-for-profit research organization.
   TNO speech technological research is carried out in Soesterberg, at
  TNO Human Factors, and has research areas in ASR, speaker and language
  recognition, and word and event spotting.
  
  The workshop will be held in "Ottone", a beautiful old building near the
  "Singel", the canal which encircles the city center.  The conference
  hall combines a spacious setting with a warm an friendly ambiance.
  
  
  * Organizing Committee
  
  David van Leeuwen, TNO (Organization Chair)
  Anton Nijholt, University of Twente (Special Sessions Chair)
  Andrei Popescu-Belis, IDIAP Research Institute (Programme Co-chair)
  Rainer Stiefelhagen, University of Karlsruhe (Programme Co-chair)

  Back to Top

• CfP 50th International Symposium ELMAR-2008

   

  50th International Symposium ELMAR-2008

  10-13 September 2008, Zadar, Croatia

  Submission deadline: March 03, 2008

  http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

  CALL FOR PAPERS AND SPECIAL SESSIONS

  TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS

  IEEE Region 8

  EURASIP - European Assoc. Signal, Speech and Image Processing

  IEEE Croatia Section

  IEEE Croatia Section Chapter of the Signal Processing Society

  IEEE Croatia Section Joint Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies

  TOPICS

   

  --> Image and Video Processing

  --> Multimedia Communications

  --> Speech and Audio Processing

  --> Wireless Commununications

  --> Telecommunications

  --> Antennas and Propagation

  --> e-Learning and m-Learning

  --> Navigation Systems

  --> Ship Electronic Systems

  --> Power Electronics and Automation

  --> Naval Architecture

  --> Sea Ecology

  --> Special Session Proposals - A special session consist

  of 5-6 papers which should present a unifying theme

  from a diversity of viewpoints; deadline for proposals

  is February 04, 2008.

  KEYNOTE TALKS

  * Professor Sanjit K. Mitra, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA:

  Image Processing using Quadratic Volterra Filters

  * Univ.Prof.Dr.techn. Markus Rupp, Vienna University

  of Technology, AUSTRIA:

  Testbeds and Rapid Prototyping in Wireless Systems

  * Professor Paul Cross, University College London, UK:

  GNSS Data Modeling: The Key to Increasing Safety and

  Legally Critical Applications of GNSS

  * Dr.-Ing. Malte Kob, RWTH Aachen University, GERMANY:

  The Role of Resonators in the Generation of Voice

  Signals

  SPECIAL SESSIONS

  SS1: "VISNET II - Networked Audiovisual Systems"

  Organizer: Dr. Marta Mrak, I-lab, Centre for Communication

  Systems Research, University of Surrey, UNITED KINGDOM

  Contact: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/CCSR/profiles?s_id=3D3937

  SS2: "Computer Vision in Art"

  Organizer: Asst.Prof. Peter Peer and Dr. Borut Batagelj,

  University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information

  Science, Computer Vision Laboratory, SLOVENIA

  Contact: http://www.lrv.fri.uni-lj.si/~peterp/ or

  http://www.fri.uni-lj.si/en/personnel/298/oseba.html

  SUBMISSION

  Papers accepted by two reviewers will be published in

  symposium proceedings available at the symposium and

  abstracted/indexed in the INSPEC and IEEExplore database.

  More info is available here: http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

  IMPORTANT: Web-based (online) paper submission of papers in

  PDF format is required for all authors. No e-mail, fax, or

  postal submissions will be accepted. Authors should prepare

  their papers according to ELMAR-2008 paper sample, convert

  them to PDF based on IEEE requirements, and submit them using

  web-based submission system by March 03, 2008.

  SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES

  Deadline for submission of full papers: March 03, 2008

  Notification of acceptance mailed out by: April 21, 2008

  Submission of (final) camera-ready papers : May 05, 2008

  Preliminary program available online by: May 12, 2008

  Registration forms and payment deadline: May 19, 2008

  Accommodation deadline: June 02, 2008

  GENERAL CO-CHAIRS

  Ive Mustac, Tankerska plovidba, Zadar, Croatia

  Branka Zovko-Cihlar, University of Zagreb, Croatia

  PROGRAM CHAIR

  Mislav Grgic, University of Zagreb, Croatia

  CONTACT INFORMATION

  Assoc.Prof. Mislav Grgic, Ph.D.

  FER, Unska 3/XII

  HR-10000 Zagreb

  CROATIA

  Telephone: + 385 1 6129 851=20

  Fax: + 385 1 6129 568=20

  E-mail: elmar2008 (_) fer.hr

  For further information please visit:

  http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

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• 2008 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing

  2008 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing 

  October 8-10, 2008 

  Shangri-la Hotel Cairns, Queensland, Australia 

  http://www.mmsp08.org/  

  MMSP-08 Call for Papers  MMSP-08 is the tenth international workshop on multimedia signal 

  processing. The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical 

  Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. A new theme of this workshop is 

  Bio-Inspired Multimedia Signal Processing in Life Science Research. 

  The main goal of MMSP-2008 is to further the scientific research within the broad field of 

  multimedia signal processing and its interaction with other new emerging areas such 

  as life science. The workshop will focus on major trends and challenges in this area, i

  ncluding brainstorming a roadmap for the success of future research and application. 

  MMSP-08 workshop consists of interesting features:   

  * A Student Paper Contest with awards sponsored by Canon. To enter the contest a 

  paper submission must have a student as the first author 

  * A Best Paper from oral presentation session with awards sponsored by Microsoft. 

  * A Best Poster presentation with awards sponsored by National ICT Australia (NICTA).   

  * New session for Bio-Inspired Multimedia Signal Processing  SCOPE  Papers are solicited 

  in, but not limited to, the following general areas: 

  *Bio-inspired multimedia signal processing 

  *Multimedia processing techniques inspired by the study of signals/images derived from 

  medical, biomedical and other life science disciplines with applications to multimedia signal processing. *Fusion mechanism 

  of multimodal signals in human information processing system and applications to 

  multimodal multimedia data fusion/integration. 

  *Comparison between bio-inspired methods and conventional methods. 

  *Hybrid multimedia processing technology and systems incorporating bio-inspired and 

  conventional methods. 

  *Joint audio/visual processing, pattern recognition, sensor fusion, medical imaging, 

  2-D and 3-D graphics/geometry coding and animation, pre/post-processing of digital video, 

  joint source/channel coding, data streaming, speech/audio, image/video coding and 

  processing 

  *Multimedia databases (content analysis, representation, indexing, recognition and 

  retrieval) 

  *Human-machine interfaces and interaction using multiple modalities 

  *Multimedia security (data hiding, authentication, and access control)   

  *Multimedia networking (priority-based QoS control and scheduling, traffic engineering, 

  soft IP multicast support, home networking technologies, position aware computing, 

  wireless communications). 

  *Multimedia Systems Design, Implementation and Application (design, distributed 

  multimedia systems, real time and non-real-time systems; implementation; multimedia 

  hardware and software) 

  *Standards    

  SCHEDULE  

  * Special Sessions (contact the respective chair):  March 8, 2008  

  * Papers (full paper, 4-6 pages, to be received by):  April 18, 2008  

  * Notification of acceptance by:  June 18,  2008 

  * Camera-ready paper submission by:  July 18, 2008  

  General Co-Chairs 

  Prof. David Feng,  University of Sydney, Australia, and Hong Kong 

  Polytechnic University feng@it.usyd.edu.au  

  Prof. Thomas Sikora,  Technical University Berlin Germany sikora@nue.tu-berlin.de  

  Prof. W.C. Siu,  Hong Kong Polytechnic University enwcsiu@polyu.edu.hk  

  Technical Program Co-Chairs 

  Dr. Jian Zhang National ICT Australia jian.zhang@nicta.com.au  

  Prof. Ling Guan Ryerson University, Canada  lguan@ee.ryerson.ca  

  Prof. Jean-Luc Dugelay Institute EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France  Jean-Luc.Dugelay@eurecom.fr  

  Special Session Co-Chairs: 

  Prof. Wenjun Zeng University of Missouri, USA  zengw@missouri.edu  

  Prof. Pascal Frossard EPFL, Switzerland pascal.frossard@epfl.ch  

  Back to Top

• ISSP 2008 8th Seminar on Speech production

   

  8^th International Seminar on Speech Production - ISSP 2008

  We are pleased to announce that the eighth International Seminar on Speech Production - ISSP 2008 will be held in Strasbourg, Alsace, France from the 8^th to the 12^th of December, 2008.

  We are looking forward to continuing the tradition established at previous ISSP meetings in Grenoble, Leeds, Old Saybrook, Autrans, Kloster Seeon, Sydney, and Ubatuba of providing a congenial forum for presentation and discussion of current research in all aspects of speech production.

  The following invited speakers have accepted to present their ongoing research works:

  Vincent Gracco
  McGill University, Montreal, Canada
  General topic Neural control of speech production and perception
  
  Sadao HIROYA
  Boston University, United States
  General topic Speech production and perception, brain imaging and stochastic speech production modeling
  
  Alexis Michaud
  Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory of Université Paris III, Paris, France
  General topic Prosody in tone languages
  
  Marianne Pouplier
  Institute for Phonetics and Speech Communication, Munich, Germany
  General topic Articulatory speech errors
  
  Gregor Schoener
  Institute for Neuroinformatics Bochum, Germany
  General topic Motor control of multi-degree of freedom movements

   

  Topics covered

  Topics of interest for ISSP'2008 include, but are not restricted to, the following:

  • Articulatory-acoustic relations
  • Perception-action control
  • Intra- and inter-speaker variability
  • Articulatory synthesis
  • Acoustic to articulatory inversion
  • Connected speech processes
  • Coarticulation
  • Prosody
  • Biomechanical modeling
  • Models of motor control
  • Audiovisual synthesis
  • Aerodynamic models and data
  • Cerebral organization and neural correlates of speech
  • Disorders of speech motor control
  • Instrumental techniques
  • Speech and language acquisition
  • Audio-visual speech perception
  • Plasticity of speech production and perception

  In addition, the following special sessions are currently being planned:

  1. Speech inversion (Yves Laprie)

  2. Experimental techniques investigating speech (Susanne Fuchs)

  For abstract submission, please include:

  •1)      the name(s) of the author(s);

  •2)       affiliations, a contact e-mail address;

  •3)      whether you prefer an oral or a poster presentation in the first lines of the body of the message.

  All abstracts should be no longer than 2 pages (font 12 points, Times) and written in English.

  Deadline for abstract submission is the 28^th of March 2008. All details can be viewed at

  http://issp2008.loria.fr/

  Notification of acceptance will be given on the 21^st of April, 2008.

  The organizers:

  Rudolph Sock

  Yves Laprie

  Susanne Fuchs

  Back to Top

• Seminaires GIPSA (ex ICP)

  Prochains séminaires du Département Parole et
  Cognition de GIPSA (ex ICP).
  Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous à
  http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr/index.php?id=597&param=fp
  
  Hélène Loevenbruck
  
  
  Jeudi 13 mars 2008, 13h30 - Séminaire externe
  ======================================
  Jean-Marc COLETTA
  LIDILEM, Grenoble
  
  La gestualité coverbale : questions concernant l'étude des gestes
  
  L'exposé est prévu en cinq points :
  1. Définition en compréhension et en extension de la gestualité coverbale.
  2. Les grandes catégories analytiques : approche sémiotique, approche
  fonctionnelle, approche relationnelle.
  3. Questions relatives à l'identification, à la description et à
  l'annotation des mouvements coverbaux.
  Il sera illustré à l'aide de clips vidéo et d'exemples d'annotations
  établies dans deux études très contrastées :
  - l'annotation (sous ELAN) de la gestualité coverbale de locuteurs en
  train d'accomplir une tâche narrative ;
  - l'annotation (sous ANVIL) de traces d'expressivité, d'émotions et
  d'états mentaux dans des interactions homme-machine.
  
  Amphi 9
  Rez-de-chaussée
  Université Stendhal, entrée sud
  
  Jeudi 20 mars 2008, 13h30 - Séminaire externe
  ======================================
  Pascal BARONE
  Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition
  Toulouse
  
  Interactions visuo-auditives et compréhension de la parole chez le
  patient sourd implanté cochléaire
  
  Chez certains patients atteints de surdité profonde, la pose de
  neuroprothèses auditives (implants cochléaires) permet de récupérer
  certaines fonctions auditives. S'il faut souligner la réussite de cette
  technologie d'implantation cochléaire puisque dans la plupart des cas,
  les patients récupèrent presque totalement l'intelligibilité de la
  parole, le patient implanté doit faire face à plusieurs faiblesses
  imposées par cette technologie. Ainsi les patients développent des
  stratégies particulières impliquant fortement la lecture labiale pour
  atteindre de tels niveaux de compréhension de la parole. Le but de la
  présente étude est d'évaluer les capacités de récupération de
  l'intelligibilité de la parole après implantation cochléaire ainsi que
  les réorganisations des activités cérébrales qui les accompagnent. Nous
  avons axé principalement nos recherches sur les phénomènes de plasticité
  cérébrale liés aux mécanismes de compensation inter-modalitaire.
  
  Amphi Gosse
  Rez-de-chaussée, bâtiment C
  INPG 46 avenue Félix Viallet - Grenoble
  
  Mercredi 23 avril 2008, 9h ? - Séminaire externe
  (attention modification date)
  ======================================
  Nicolas FRANCK
  Institut des Sciences Cognitives et Centre Hospitalier Le Vinatier
  Lyon - Bron
  
  Titre à venir
  
  Résumé à venir

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