ISCApad number 100

October 8th, 2006

MESSAGE from Isabel Trancoso: Vice President and Conference coordinator


It's an enormous pleasure for me to welcome you all to ISCApad #100!!!!!
Some of you are too young to have received the very first ISCApad, in 1998. Back then it was called ESCApad - a nice play on the word Escapade, the name of a French restaurant where the Board had dinner during one of its meetings. The "E->I" revolution in 1999 not only affected its name but also allowed us to share news within our interdisciplinary community spread all over the world.
ISCApad replaced the earlier paper version of NESCA - the newsletter first edited by Maxine Eskenazy. I edited the first 40 issues of ISCApad and tried including as much info as I felt was useful (jobs, courses, conferences, workshops, books, journals, grants, SIGs, etc.), but I could never find contributions as funny as the ones of the earlier paper newsletters. One of them even included an appropriate poem about letter-to-sound rules for English that ended like this:

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Despite the lack of humor, I think that ISCApad is very useful in giving us information about our community and Chris Wellekens has done a wonderful job of editing the following 60 issues! In ISCApad you also hear about the new ISCA initiatives (like our new Distinguished Lecturers Program), and many appeals to get you more involved in ISCA: as reviewers (please write to me at conferences@isca-speech.org if you can help us with this!), as voting members (don't forget we'll have Board elections next Summer), as members of the SIGs and of the Student Advisory Committee, as organizers of workshops and conferences, and so on.
By the way, if you feel you can do a job as great as the one that Rich Stern and the rest of the organizing team did for Interspeech 2006, we're accepting bids to organize Interspeech 2010. Thank you Rich and all for such a wonderful conference!
Throughout the years, ISCApad was also a way to share with you sad news about members who have passed away and have made tremendous contributions to research in our field. The many messages that are sent back to ISCA on these occasions are also a sign of how close our community is. But we would also like you to share with the rest of the community the good news, such as awards and honors received by our members.
Attending ISCA events is not just about work, but also about meeting many old friends again and making new ones! I'm really looking forward to meeting you all very soon, but if that's not possible let's all meet again in Antwerp next August for Interspeech 2007.

Isabel Trancoso
Conference Coordinator
Former ISCApad editor

Editorial

Dear Members,

This is the 100th ISCApad sent monthly to our members. The first issue was prepared by Isabel Trancoso in April 1998. We took the opportunity to invite her to describe in this issue her current activity for ISCA and to receive proper credit for her editorial work of the first ISCApads (up to number 39).
I met many of you at Interspeech in Pittsburgh where Rich Stern, Alan Black, Tanja Schultz and their teams demonstrated their skills in organizing a wonderful conference: thanks to all who contributed to this successful event.
We had a wonderful student reception with a lot of music and excellent jazz sponsored by Microsoft and IBM. Thanks to both for supporting our students.
Our student branch SAC also organized a successful panel with industry representatives on the topic "How to get your dream job? What are they looking for?".
A very large audience was present at our General Assembly.
Julia Hirschberg, Sadaoki Furui and I attended the Editorial board meeting of Speech Communication.
But it is time to look to the future and you will find below a call for bids for Interspeech 2010.
We also have the pleasure to announce the creation of the new SIG SLATE (Speech and Language Technology in Education) chaired by Maxine Eskenazi (CMU).
I remind you of two important and permanent requests:
First, SIG leaders are urged to submit brief activity reports to ISCApad.
Second, if you are aware of new books devoted to speech science and/or technology, please draw my attention to them, so that I can advertise these books in ISCApad.

Christian Wellekens



TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

ISCA NEWS


ISCA DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS PROGRAM
Announcement and Call for Nominations
PURPOSE and PLAN
ISCA has just started a new Distinguished Lecturers Program to send Distinguished Lecturers to travel to different parts of the world to give lectures to help promote research activities on speech science and technologies. No more than 3 Distinguished Lecturers will be selected by the end of 2006, with 2-year terms of 2007-2008. The first Distinguished Lecturer Tour is planned for the first half of 2007.

NOMINATIONS and SELECTION
A Distinguished Lecturers Committee has been organized. The members of the Committee for the year 2006 are: Sadaoki Furui (chair), Louis Pols, Renato DeMori, Nelson Morgan, and Lin-shan Lee (secretary). Nominations of candidates are called. Each nomination should include information (short biography, selected publications, website, etc. plus topics/titles of up to 3 possible lectures) of no more than 2 pages to be sent to the Committee Chair ). Only those who receive the highest votes by the Committee, exceeding a minimum threshold of 2/3, are selected. Nominations for this year should be received before the deadline of Nov 15 2006.

COMMITMENTS of the LECTURERS
The candidates selected by the Committee will be contacted and asked for the commitment of making time available for Lecture Tours, including the possibility of traveling to some regions specially identified as under-represented in ISCA programs (China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South and West Asia, Africa). Those who agree are announced as ISCA Distinguished Lecturers.

DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS TOURS
Distinguished Lecturers Tours are arranged by ISCA upon invitation only. The local hosts should be responsible for making and funding the local arrangements including accommodation and meals, and ISCA will pay travel costs. A Distinguished Lecturer Tour is realizable when at least three locations are included, and at least two lectures will be given at each location.

MORE DETAILS
More details of this Program can be found at ISCA website
.

Call for Bids for Interspeech 2010
Organization of INTERSPEECH 2010
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Individuals or organizations interested in organizing: INTERSPEECH 2010 should submit by 15 December 2006 a brief preliminary proposal, including:
* The name and position of the proposed general chair and other principal organizers.
* The proposed period in September/October 2010 when the conference would be held
* The institution assuming financial responsibility for the conference and any other cooperating institutions
* The city and conference center proposed (with information on that center's capacity)
* The commercial conference organizer (if any)
* Information on transportation and housing for conference participants
* Likely support from local bodies (e.g. governmental) The commercial conference organizer (if any)
* A preliminary budget
Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur in the same continent in two consecutive years. (IS2009 will be held in Brighton, UK.) Guidelines for the preparation of the proposal are available on our website. Additional information can be provided by Isabel Trancoso.
Those who plan to put in a bid are asked to inform ISCA of their intentions as soon as possible. They should also consider attending Interspeech 2006 in Pittsburgh to discuss their bids, if possible.
Proposals should be submitted by email to the above address. Candidates fulfilling basic requirements will be asked to submit a detailed proposal by 28 February 2007.

Message from our Student Activity Committee (SAC)
ONE-STOP solution for ALL researchers in Speech and Language Processing area
Have you SIGNED UP at isca-students.org? It is FREE to ALL researchers. It takes just 2 MINUTES to sign up.

ISCA Student Section has launched the new version of their website which is sponsored by ISCA. Check out the new features of the website! There are many reasons for both students and also other researchers to become a user at isca-students.org!

Some of the reasons ...

NETWORKING: meet new people, and keep in touch with your colleagues
RESOURCES: have a one-stop easy access to research resources
MAILING LISTS: monitor mailing lists easily at one location
JOBS/INTERNSHIPS: post/search internship/job/academic positions
FREEWARE/SHAREWARE: search shareware/freeware
THESES ARCHIVE: search all the theses and dissertations
DISCUSSION FORUMS: discuss research online with your colleagues
ONLINE COURSES: search online courses
ARTICLES: access to articles in speech and language processing area
BOOKS and REVIEWS: submit/read reviews for books in your area
GRANTS: increase your chance of getting a grant by providing your profile
and many more in the close future ...
GRANT APPLICATION: submit online applications to ISCA grants
RESEARCH FEEDBACK: get feedback for your conference presentation/publication
RESUME DATABASE: submit your resume or search the resume database
ISCA ARCHIVE: search ISCA publication archive by title, author, group, etc.
AUTOMATIC PUBLICATION HISTORY BUILDER: using our databases, we will provide your publication history
DEMOS: search demos by entering keywords
INTERVIEWS: access to interviews (text, audio, video) - Transcripts coming soon for: "How to get your dream job? What are they looking for?", Interspeech'06 Student Panel Discussion.

Murat Akbacak
ISCA-SAC President
PhD Student, University of Colorado at Boulder
Research Intern, University of Texas at Dallas
ISCA student branch

ISCA GRANTS
are available for students and young scientists attending meetings.
For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org/grants

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SIG's activities


A list of Speech Interest Groups can be found on our web.
SLATE - NEW SIG on Speech and Language Technology in Education The purpose of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) shall be to promote interest in the use of speech and natural language processing for education; to provide members of ISCA with a special interest in speech and language technology in education with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in Speech and Language Technology in Education; to sponsor meetings and workshops on that subject that appear to be timely and worthwhile, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and to provide and make available resources relevant to speech and language technology in education, including text and speech corpora, analysis tools, analysis and generation software, research papers and generated data. Please visit its website or send inquiries to Maxine Eskenazi .

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COURSES, INTERNSHIPS


AVIOS Speech Application Development Contest
Demonstrate your creativity and programming skills by entering the AVIOS Speech Application Development Contest organized by the Applied Voice Input Output Society. Develop a speech application using either VoiceXML or "X+V" by December 15 and win cash prizes of up to $2000 per student team plus world-wide recognition on the AVIOS web site and other public announcements.
More details

2nd INTERNATIONAL PhD SCHOOL IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES 2006-2008
Rovira i Virgili University,Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Tarragona Spain
Programme, registration conditions can be found on the Website

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

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BOOKS, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

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

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

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

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JOB OPENINGS

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

PhD position in Speech Recognition at ESAT/PSI, Leuven, Belgium

The ESAT/PSI speech group has a vacancy for a junior research working towards a PhD degree in the framework of the TELEX project.
The TELEX project aims at improving our hybrid and template based speech recognition system.
The major research topics are intrinsic improvements in the template based system by long span modeling and distance metrics. We will also aim at introducing pronunciation variation modeling into the template based framework.
This research will be performed in close collaboration with the Computer Science Department (CW/Nines) and the university of Gent. There will also be intense collaboration with the Marie Curie network Sound to Sense.
More information on the project may be found at our website
Candidates ideally have a university degree in engineering or computer science. Candidates with a general science degree and excellent programming skills may apply as well.
Knowledge of or experience in the following areas form an asset:
- speech recognition and speech modelling
- C/C++ programming
- statistical parameter estimation
The position is available as of 01 Jan 2007 though an earlier starting date is possible as well.
Interested applicants should send their CV to Prof. Dirk Van Compernolle
.

PhD position in Template Based Speech Recognition at ESAT/PSI, Leuven,Belgium.

The ESAT/PSI speech group has a vacancy for a junior research working towards a PhD degree in the framework of the TELEX project (TELEX: combining acoustic TEmplate with LEXical modeling). The TELEX project aims at improving our hybrid and template based speech recognition system. The major research topics are intrinsic improvements in the template based system by long span modeling and better distance metrics. We will also aim at introducing pronunciation variation modeling into the template based framework.
This research will be performed in close collaboration with the Computer Science Department (CW/Nines) of the K.U.Leuven and the university of Gent. There will also be intense collaboration with the Marie Curie network Sound to Sense. More information on the project may be found at our website
Candidates ideally have a university degree in engineering or computer science. Candidates with a general science degree and excellent programming skills may apply as well. Knowledge of or experience in the following areas form an asset:
- speech recognition and speech modelling
- C/C++ programming
- statistical parameter estimation
The position is available as of 01 Jan 2007 though an earlier starting date is possible as well.
Interested applicants should send their CV to Prof. Dirk Van Compernolle
.

Positions available at Acapela Group, Mons, Belgium

R&D engineer TTS
R&D engineer ASR
Computational linguist TTS
Details can be found on our website

Open positions at the Adaptive Multimodal Interface Research Lab at University of Trento (Italy)

Areas
Automatic Speech Recognition (PhD Research Fellowship)
Natural Language Processing (PhD Research Fellowship)
Machine Learning (PhD Research Fellowship/Senior Researcher)
HCI/User Interface (Junior Researcher)
Multimodal/Spoken Dialog (Senior Researcher)
The Adaptive Multimodal Interface research lab pursues excellence research in next-generation interfaces for human-machine and human-human communication. The research positions will be funded by the prestigious Marie Curie Excellence grant awarded by the European Commission for cutting edge and interdisciplinary research.
The candidates for PhD research fellowships should have background in speech, natural language processing or machine learning. The successful applicants should have EE or CS degree with strong academic records. The students will be part of an interdisciplinary research team working on speech recognition, language understanding, spoken dialog, machine learning and adaptive user interfaces.
Deadline for application submission is July 11, 2006.
The candidates for the junior/senior researcher positions should have a PhD degree either in computer science, cognitive science or related disciplines. They will have an established international research track record in their field of expertise and leadership skills. Deadline for application submission is November 1, 2006.
The applicants should be fluent in English. The Italian language competence is optional and applicants are encouraged to acquire this skill on the job. The applicants should have good programming skills in most of the following C++/Java/JavaScript/Perl/Python. University of Trento is an equal opportunity employer. Interested applicants should send their CV along with their statement of research interest and three reference letters to: Prof. Ing. Giuseppe Riccardi
The University of Trento is constantly ranked as premiere Italian graduate university institution (see ). DIT Department
-DIT has a strong focus on interdisciplinarity with professors from different faculties of the University (Physical Science, Electrical Engineering, Economics, Social Science, Cognitive Science, Computer Science) with international background.
-DIT aims at exploiting the complementary experiences present in the various research areas in order to develop innovative methods and technologies, applications and advanced services. -English is the official language.

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JOURNALS

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

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

Papers accepted for FUTURE PUBLICATION in Speech Communication

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

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FUTURE CONFERENCES

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

FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

INTERSPEECH 2007-EUROSPEECH
August 27-31,2007,Antwerp, Belgium
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves, K.U.Nijmegen
Website
Important dates
Proposals for special sessions: November 1, 2006
Proposals for tutorials: January 8, 2007
Four-page paper deadline: March 23, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance: May 25, 2007
Early registration deadline: June 22, 2007
Tutorial Day: August 27, 2007
Main conference: August 28-31, 2007

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

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

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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

NOLISP'07: Non linear Speech Processing

May 22-25, 2007 , Paris, France

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

Bonn (Germany), August 22-24, 2007
A satellite of INTERSPEECH 2007 (Antwerp)in collaboration with SynSIG
Details will be posted by early 2007
Contact
Prof. Wolfgang Hess

ITRW on Robustness

November 2007, Santiago, Chile

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

Amsterdam<, The Netherlands
Tentative date May 2008
Organizers:
Frans Hilgers
Louis C.W.Pols

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA

IV Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla

Zaragoza, Spain
November 8-10, 2006
Website

International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2006)

Evaluation campaign for language translation
Palulu Plaza Kyoto (right in front of Kyoto Station) (Japan)
November 30-December 1 2006
Website
Spoken language translation technologies attempt to cross the language barriers between people having different native languages who each want to engage in conversation by using their mother-tongue. Spoken language translation has to deal with problems of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT).
One of the prominent research activities in spoken language translation is the work being conducted by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR III), which is an international partnership of research laboratories engaged in automatic translation of spoken language. Current members include ATR (Japan), CAS (China), CLIPS (France), CMU (USA), ETRI (Korea), ITC-irst (Italy), and UKA (Germany).
A multilingual speech corpus comprised of tourism-related sentences (BTEC*) has been created by the C-STAR members and parts of this corpus were already used for previous IWSLT workshops focusing on the evaluation of MT results using text input () and the translation of ASR output (word lattice, NBEST list) using read speech as input (). The full BTEC* corpus consists of 160K of sentence-aligned text data and parts of the corpus will be provided to the participants for training purposes.
In this workshop, we focus on the translation of spontaneous speech which includes ill-formed utterances due to grammatical incorrectness, incomplete sentences, and redundant expressions. The impact of spontaneity aspects on the ASR and MT systems performance as well as the robustness of state-of- the-art MT engines towards speech recognition errors will be investigated in detail.
Two types of submissions are invited:
1) participants in the evaluation campaign of spoken language translation technologies,
2) technical papers on related issues.
Evaluation campaign (see details on our website)
Each participant in the evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper describing the utilized ASR and MT systems and to report results using the provided test data.
Technical Paper Session
The workshop also invites technical papers related to spoken language translation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
+ Spontaneous speech translation
+ Domain and language portability
+ MT using comparable and non-parallel corpora
+ Phrase alignment algorithms
+ MT decoding algorithms
+ MT evaluation measures
Important Dates
+ Evaluation Campaign
May 12, 2006 -- Training Corpus Release
August 1, 2006 -- Test Corpus Release [00:01 JST]
August 3, 2006 -- Result Submission Due [23:59 JST]
September 15, 2006 -- Result Feedback to Participants 2006
September 29, 2006 -- Paper Submission Due
October 14, 2006 -- Notification of Acceptance
October 27, 2006 -- Camera-ready Submission Due
- system registrations will be accepted until release of test corpus
- late result submissions will be treated as unofficial result submissions
+ Technical Papers
July 21, 2006 -- Paper Submission Due [23:59 JST]
September 29, 2006 -- Notification of Acceptance
October 27, 2006 -- Camera-ready Submission Due
Contact
Michael Paul
ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories
2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288 Japan

International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'2006)

Singapore Dec. 13-16, 2006
Conference website
Topics
ISCSLP'06 will feature world-renowned plenary speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and a number of lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:
* Speech Production and Perception
* Phonetics and Phonology
* Speech Analysis
* Speech Coding
* Speech Enhancement
* Speech Recognition
* Speech Synthesis
* Language Modeling and Spoken Language Understanding
* Spoken Dialog Systems
* Spoken Language Translation
* Speaker and Language Recognition
* Indexing, Retrieval and Authoring of Speech Signals
* Multi-Modal Interface including Spoken Language Processing
* Spoken Language Resources and Technology Evaluation
* Applications of Spoken Language Processing Technology
* Others
The official language of ISCSLP is English. The regular papers will be published as a volume in the Springer LNAI series, and the poster papers will be published in a companion volume. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work on all the aspects of Chinese spoken language processing.
The conference will also organize four special sessions:
* Special Session on Rich Information Annotation and Spoken Language Processing
* Special Session on Robust Techniques for Organizing and Retrieving Spoken Documents
* Special Session on Speaker Recognition
* Special Panel Session on Multilingual Corpus Development
Schedule
* Full paper submission by Jun. 15, 2006
* Notification of acceptance by Jul. 25, 2006
* Camera ready papers by Aug. 15, 2006
* Early registration by Nov. 1, 2006
Please visit the conference website for more details.

ISCSLP 2006-Special session on speaker recognition

Singapore, Dec 13-16, 2006
Website
Chair:
Dr Thomas Fang Zheng, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing.
Speaker recognition (or voiceprint recognition, VPR) is one of the most important branches in speech processing. Its applications become wider and wider in various fields, such as public security, anti-terrorism, justice, telephony banking, personal services, and so on. However, there are still many fundamental and theoretical problems to solve, such as issues of background noises, cross-channel, multiple-speakers, and short speech segment for training and testing.
The purpose of this special session is to invite researchers in this field to present their state-of-art technical achievements. Papers are invited to cover, but not limited to, the following topics:
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification
* Speaker detection
* Speaker segmentation
* Speaker tracking
* Speaker recognition systems and application
* Resource creation for speaker recognition
This special session also provides a platform for developers in this field to evaluate their speaker recognition systems using the same database provided by this special session. Evaluation of speaker recognition systems will cover the following tasks:
* Text-independent speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification
* Text-independent cross-channel speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent cross-channel speaker verification
Final details on these tasks (including evaluation criteria) will be made available in due course. The development and testing data will be provided by the Chinese Corpus Consortium (CCC). The data sets will be extracted from two CCC databases, which are CCC-VPR3C2005 and CCC-VPR2C2005-1000. Participants are required to submit a full paper to the conference describing their algorithms, systems and results.
Schedule for this special session
* Feb. 01, 2006: On-line registration open, CLOSED on May 1st, 2006
* May. 01, 2006: Development data made available to participants
* May. 21, 2006 (revised): Test data made available to participants
* Jun. 7, 2006 (revised):Test results due at CCC
* Jun. 10, 2006: Results released to participants
* Jun. 15, 2006: Papers due (using ISCSLP standard format)
* Jul. 25, 2006: The full set of the two databases made available to the participants of this special session upon request
* Dec. 16, 2006: Conference presentation
This special session is organized by the CCC .
Please address your enquiries to Dr. Thomas Fang Zheng.
Download the Speaker Recognition Evaluation Registration Form

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FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS


Call for papers- 9th DIMACS Implementation Challenge Workshop: Shortest Paths

WEBSITE
Goals
Shortest path problems are ones of the most fundamental combinatorial optimization problems with many applications, both direct and as subroutines in other combinatorial optimization algorithms. Algorithms for these problems have been studied since 1950's and still remain an active area of research. One goal of this Challenge is to create a reproducible picture of the state of the art in the area of shortest path algorithms. To this end we are identifying a standard set of benchmark instances and generators, as well as a benchmark implementations of well-known shortest path algorithms. Another goal is to enable current researchers to compare their codes with each other, in hopes of identifying the more effective of the recent algorithmic innovations that have been proposed. The final goal is to publish proceedings containing results presented at the Challenge Workshop, and a book containing the best of the proceedings papers.
Scope
The Challenge addresses a wide range of shortest path problems, including all sensible combinations of the following:
* Point-to-point, single-source, all-pairs.
* Non-negative arc lengths and arbitrary arc lengths (including negative cycle detection).
* Directed and undirected graphs.
* Static and dynamic problems. The latter include those dynamic in CS sense (arc additions, deletions, length changes) and those dynamic in OR sense (arc transit times depending on arrival times).
* Exact and approximate shortest paths.
* Compact routing tables and shortest path oracles.
Implementations on any platform of interest, for example desktop machines, supercomputers, and handheld devices, are encouraged.
How to participate
People interested in submitting papers to the Challenge Workshop can find benchmark instances, generators, and code for the problems they address at the Challenge website, along with detailed information on file formats. Your work can take two different directions.
1. Defining instances for algorithm evaluation. The instances should be natural and interesting. By the latter we mean instances that cause good algorithms to behave differently from the other instances. Interesting real-life application data are especially welcome.
2. Algorithm evaluation. Description of implementations of algorithms with experimental data that supports conclusions about practical performance. Common benchmark instances and codes should be used so that there is common ground for comparison. The most obvious way for such a paper to be interesting (and selected for the proceedings) is if the implementation improves state-of-the-art. However, there may be other ways to produce and interesting paper, for example by showing that an approach that looks well in theory does not work well in practice by explaining why this is the case.
Challenge Book
The best papers presented at the Challenge Workshop will be selected for publication in a book published in the DIMACS Book Series.
Important dates
- August 25, 2006: Paper submission deadline
- September 25, 2006: Author notification
- November 13-14, 2006: Challenge Workshop, DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Organizing Committee
Camil Demetrescu, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Andrew Goldberg, Microsoft Research
David Johnson, AT&T Labs - Research
Advisory Committee
Paolo Dell'Olmo, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Irina Dumitrescu, University of New South Wales
Mikkel Thorup, AT&T Labs-Research
Dorothea Wagner, Universitaet Karlsruhe

Call for papers 8th International Conference on Signal Processing

Nov. 16-20, 2006, Guilin, China
website
The 8th International Conference on Signal Processing will be held in Guilin, China on Nov. 16-20, 2006. It will include sessions on all aspects of theory, design and applications of signal processing. Prospective authors are invited to propose papers in any of the following areas, but not limited to:
A. Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
B. Spectrum Estimation & Modeling
C. TF Spectrum Analysis & Wavelet
D. Higher Order Spectral Analysis
E. Adaptive Filtering &SP
F. Array Signal Processing
G. Hardware Implementation for Signal Processing
H. Speech and Audio Coding
I. Speech Synthesis & Recognition
J. Image Processing & Understanding
K. PDE for Image Processing
L. Video compression &Streaming
M. Computer Vision & VR
N. Multimedia & Human-computer Interaction
O. Statistic Learning & Pattern Recognition
P. AI & Neural Networks
Q. Communication Signal processing
R. SP for Internet and Wireless Communications
S. Biometrics & Authentification
T. SP for Bio-medical & Cognitive Science
U. SP for Bio-informatics
V. Signal Processing for Security
W. Radar Signal Processing
X. Sonar Signal Processing and Localization
Y. SP for Sensor Networks
Z. Application & Others

CFP CI 2006 Special Session on Natural Language Processing for Real Life Applications

November 20-22, 2006 San Francisco, California, USA
Website
Topics
The Special Session on Natural Language Processing for Real Life Applications will cover the following topics (but is not limited to):
1. speech recognition, in particular
* multilingual speech recognition
* large vocabulary continuous speech recognition with focus on the application
2. real life dialog systems
* natural language dialog systems
* multimodal dialog systems
3. speech-based classification
* speaker classification, i.e. exploiting paralinguistic features of the speech to gather information about the speaker (for example age, gender, cognitive load, and emotions)
* language and accent identification
Paper Submission
Please submit papers for the special session directly to the session chair (christian.mueller@dfki.de). DO NOT submit the papers through the IASTED website. Otherwise, the papers will be handled as general papers for the conference. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. The final selection of papers for the session will be done by the session chair; acceptance/rejection letters and review comments along with registration information will be provided by IASTED by the general Notification deadline.
Formatting instructions
Please follow the formatting instructions provided by IASTED. Website.
Important Dates
Submissions due June 15, 2006
Notification of acceptance August 1, 2006
Camera-ready manuscripts due September 1, 2006
Registration Deadline September 15, 2006
Conference November 20 - 22, 2006
Registration
All papers accepted for the special session are required to register before the general conference registration deadline.

ELEVENTH AUSTRALASIAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND, 6-8 DECEMBER 2006
Conference Website Conference Website
The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA) is a scientific association that aims to advance the understanding of speech science and its application to speech technology. ASSTA and the University of Auckland are pleased to announce the Eleventh International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2006).
Conference Themes
Submissions are invited for oral and poster presentations. Submissions should describe original contributions to spoken language, speech science and/or technology that will be of interest to an audience including scientists, engineers, linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, audiologists and other professionals. Submissions are invited in all areas of speech science and technology, but particularly in the following areas:
Speech production
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustics of accent change
Music and speech processing
Emotional speech, voice, intonation and prosody
Applications of speech science and technology
Speech Processing for Forensic Applications
Speech recognition and understanding
Speaker recognition and classification
Speech enhancement and noise cancellation
Pedagogical technologies for speech and singing
Corpus management and speech tools
Contributions of speech science and technology to Phonetics and Phonology of Australian and New Zealand English audiology and speech language therapy (PANZE)
Combined session with Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Joseph Perkell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof. Pat Keating, University of California Los Angeles
Prof. Michael Corballis, University of Auckland.
Important Dates
. Abstract submission closing date - Monday, 28 August 2006
. Acceptance notice date - Monday, 25 September 2006
. Manuscript closing date - Monday, 6 November 2006
. Early registration date for conference and pre-conference workshop - Sunday, 29 October 2006
. Presenter/Author registration Deadline - Sunday, 29 October 2006
. Pre-conference tutorials and workshops - 5 December 2006
. SST 2006 Conference, 6-8 December
Important Contacts:
Abstract and Manuscript Submission: these should be submitted online. Click on the "Submission" link and follow the guidelines posted. Word and Latex templates, and a comprehensive author's guide for submissions, are available on the website.
Registration: An online registration form can be found on the conference website. Any queries regarding your registration should be directed either to the University Conference Management or to the Conference Chair Dr Catherine Watson.
Pre-Conference Workshops: Any enquiries regarding the Pre-Conference workshops should be sent to Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren.
Conference Organising Committee: Dr Catherine Watson (chair), Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren, Dr Waleed Abdulla, Dr Elaine Ballard, Helen Charters, Dr. Claire Fletcher Flynn, Dr Bernard Guillemin, Dr William Thorpe, Assoc. Prof. Suzanne Purdy, Dr Peter Keegan
Conference Advisory Committee Prof. Cathy Best, Prof. Bob Bogner, Prof. Herve Bourlard, Prof. Anne Cutler, Prof. Hiroya Fujisaki, . Jonathan Harrington, Prof. Hynek Hermansky, Prof. Louis Pols, Prof. Peter Thorne, Prof. Roger Wales, Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren, Assoc. Prof. Thomas Fang Zheng Pre-Conference Workshops: Morning 1. Speech Processing Waleed Abdulla, University of Auckland 2. Intonation and Prosody in AuE and NZ Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne and Paul Warren, Victoria University of Wellington Afternoon 3. Speech database management and access Jen Hay, University of Canterbury 4. The phonetics of Maori Peter Keegan, University of Auckland Accommodation: A variety of accommodation options have been arranged at special conference rates. An accommodation reservation form can be downloaded from the website http://www.assta.org/sst/2006/. Other hotels within walking distance of the University include The Copthorne, Duxton, Rydges and Quest on Mount. Information regarding these hotels can be found on the www.nz.com website

CFP - IEEE/ACL 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology

Marriott
Palm Beach, Aruba
December 10 -- December 13, 2006
Workshop website
Paper status is now available by calling the DISCOH spoken dialog system at 888-681-5290
You are invited to register for the first international workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT),which will be held at the Aruba Marriott,December 10-13, 2006 (Sunday through Wednesday).
Workshop Topics
Spoken language understanding; Spoken document summarization, Machine translation for speech; Spoken dialog systems; Spoken language generation; Spoken document retrieval; Human/Computer Interactions (HCI); Speech data mining; Information extraction from speech; Question/Answering from speech; Multimodal processing; Spoken language systems, applications and standards.
Submissions for the Technical Program
The workshop program will consist of tutorials, oral and poster presentations, and panel discussions. Attendance will be limited with priority for those who will present technical papers; registration is required of at least one author for each paper. Submissions are encouraged on any of the topics listed above. The style guide, templates, and submission form will follow the IEEE ICASSP style. Three members of the Scientific Committee will review each paper. The workshop proceedings will be published on a CD-ROM.
Schedule
Camera-ready paper submission deadline July 15, 2006
Hotel Reservation and Workshop registration opens July 30, 2006
Paper Acceptance / Rejection September 1, 2006
Hotel Reservation and Workshop Registration closes October 15, 2006
Workshop December 10-13, 2006
Registration and Information
Registration and paper submission, as well as other workshop information, can be found on the SLT website.

Organizing Committee
General Chair: Mazin Gilbert, AT&T, USA
Co-Chair: Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Finance Chair: Gokhan Tur, SRI, USA
Publication Chair: Brian Roark, OGI/OHSU, USA
Publicity Chair: Eric Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State U., USA
Industrial Chair: Roberto Pieraccini, Tell-Eureka, USA

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia - ISM 2006

Conference website
Special track: Remote Sensors for Audio Processing
In recent decades, the cost of acoustic technologies has declined dramatically. Advances in networks, storage devices, and power management have made it practical to consider the remote location of sensors that either transmit data to a central processing facility or store the data for later retrieval. Nonetheless, many challenges remain for the fabrication, deployment and use of remote sensors. In locations with limited infrastructure, power management and the ability for the user to access or retrieve the data are paramount. In some situations, the need for localization or improved signal to noise ratio may dictate the use of microphone arrays or other signal enhancement techniques. Deployment in hostile environments such as arctic or deep sea conditions requires additional considerations. Remote sensors are capable of generating large acoustic or mixed media datasets. With these large corpora, the need for automated processing becomes critical as the staffing requirements for human analysis are both cost and labor prohibitive. The development of automated analysis can yield valuable data such as seasonal or diel patterns of animals, perimeter intrusion detection, access control, and a myriad of other applications. This special session invites researchers to submit high quality papers describing either preliminary or mature results on topics related to audio for remote sensors.
Topics of interest
· Audio classification and detection tasks for remote sensors (speech, bioacoustics, auditory scene analysis, etc.)
· Deployment issues
· Power management
· Networking/Storage/Data Management
· Array processing
· Remote audio sensors in challenging environments
· Applications of remote sensors with a significant audio component
Submissions and deadlines
The written and spoken language of ISM2006 is English. Authors should submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format including authors' names and affiliations, and a short abstract electronically. Submissions should be directed to Prof. Marie Roch , following the formatting instructions available in the submission guidelines for regular papers. Note that papers should not be submitted directly to ISM web site. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF). The paper should have a cover page, which includes a 200-word abstract, a list of keywords, and author's phone number and e-mail address. The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.
Important dates:
· August 8 - submission of papers
· September 10 - Notification of acceptance of papers
· September 25 - Camera-ready papers due
· December 11-13 - Conference at Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego , California

Multimedia Content Access: Algorithms and Systems (EI121)

Part of the IS&T/SPIE International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 28 January - 1 February 2007, San Jose, California, USA
Conference Chairs:
Alan Hanjalic, Technische Univ. Delft (Netherlands);
Raimondo Schettini, DISCo/Univ. degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy);
Nicu Sebe, Univ. van Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Topics
Content Analysis:
* image, audio and video characterization (feature extraction)
* fusion of text, image, video and audio data
* content parsing, clustering and classification
* semantic modeling
* image, video and audio similarity measures
* object and event detection and recognition
* benchmarking of content analysis methods and algorithms
* generic methods and algorithms for content analysis
* affective content analysis.
Content Management and Delivery:
* (Internet) multimedia databases
* multimedia standards (e.g. SVG, SMIL, MPEG-7)
* efficient peer-to-peer storage and search techniques
* indexing and data organization
* system optimization for search and retrieval
* storage hierarchies, scalable storage
* personalized content delivery.
Content Search/Browsing/Retrieval:
* multimedia data mining
* active learning and relevance feedback
* query models
* browsing and visualization
* search issues in distributed and heterogeneous systems
* benchmarking search, browsing, and retrieval algorithms and systems
* generation of video summaries and abstracts
* cognitive aspects of human/machine systems.
Internet Imaging and Multimedia:
* peer-to-peer imaging systems for the Internet
* content creation and presentation for the Internet
* web cameras: impact on content analysis techniques
* interactive multimedia creation for the Internet
* content rating, authentication, non-repudiation, and cultural differences in content perception
* XML applications
* web crawling, caching, and security
* semantic web
* (adaptable) user interfaces.
Applications:
* commerce
* medicine
* news
* entertainment
* wearable and ubiquitous computing
* management of meetings
* biometrics
* cultural heritage and education
* collaborative systems and multi-device applications
* life log applications
* military and civilian security applications.
The conference program will include invited keynote presentations, invited special sessions, and a panel of experts who will be discussing the remaining research challenges related to multimedia content analysis, management and retrieval.
Important Dates
Paper Proposals (5,000 words): 04 August 2006 (last extension)
Final Manuscript Due Date: 13 November 2006
200-word Final Summary: 20 November 2006

CFP International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications (ISSPA 2007)

ISSPA 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of launching the first ISSPA in 1987 in Brisbane, Australia. Since its inception, ISSPA has provided, through a series of 8 symposia, a high quality forum for engineers and scientists engaged in research and development of Signal and Image Processing theory and applications. Effective 2007, ISSPA will extend its scope to add the new track of information sciences. Hence, the intention that the previous full name of ISSPA is replaced after 2007 by the following new full name: International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications. ISSPA is an IEEE indexed conference.
ISSPA 2007 will be organized between February 12 to 15, 2007 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE) by three prominent institutions located in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates: University of Sharjah, American University of Sharjah, and Etisalat University College.
The regular technical program will run for three days along with an exhibition of signal processing and information sciences products. In addition, tutorial sessions will be held on the first day of the symposium.
Topics
Papers are invited in, but not limited to, the following topics:
1.Filter Design Theory and Methods
2. Multirate Filtering & Wavelets
3.Adaptive Signal Processing
4.Time-Frequency/Time-Scale Analysis
5.Statistical Signal & Array Processing
6.Radar & Sonar Processing
7.Speech Processing & Recognition
8.Fractals and Chaos Signal Processing
9.Signal Processing in Communications
10.Signal processing in Networking
11. Multimedia Signal Processing
12. Nonlinear signal processing
13.Biomedical Signal and Image Processing
14.Image and Video Processing
15.Image Segmentation and Scene Analysis
16. VLSI for Signal and Image Processing
17.Cryptology, Steganography, and Digital Watermarking
18. Image indexing & retrieval
19.Soft Computing & Pattern Recognition
20. Natural Language Processing
21.Signal Processing for Bioinformatics
22. Signal Processing for Geoinformatics
23.Biometric Systems and Security
24.Machine Vision
25.Data visualization
26. Data mining
27. Sensor Networks and Sensor Fusion
28.Signal Processing and Information Sciences Education
29.Others
How to submit?
Prospective authors are invited to submit full length (four pages) papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above (indicate area in your submission). We also encourage the submission of proposal for student session, tutorial and sessions on special topics. All articles submitted to ISSPA 2007 will be peer-reviewed using a blind review process.
For more details and submission of papers please see : conference website
Important Dates
Full Paper Submission: September 15, 2006
Tutorials/Special Sessions Proposals: September 15, 2006
Notification of Paper Acceptance: November 15, 2006
Final Accepted Paper Submission: December 1, 2006
Conference: February 12 to 15, 2007 Contact person:
Dr Mohammed Al-Mualla ISSPA07 Publicity Chair

CFP ICASSP 2007

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

NAACL HLT 2007 Preliminary Call for Papers

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

Rochester: NAACL-HLT 2007 - Call for Doctoral Consortium

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

RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (RANLP-07)

SAMOKOV hotel, Borovets, Bulgaria
conference website
RANLP-07 tutorials: September 23-25, 2007 (Sunday-Tuesday)
RANLP-07 workshops: September 26, 2007 (Wednesday)
6th Int. Conference RANLP-07: September 27-29, 2007 (Thursday-Saturday)
We are pleased to announce that the dates for RANLP’07 have been finalised (see above). Building on both the successful international summer schools organised for more than 17 years, and previous conferences held in 1995, 1997, 2001, 2003 and 2005, RANLP has become one of the most influential, competitive and far-reaching conferences, with wide international participation from all over the world. Featuring leading lights in the area as keynote speakers or tutorial speakers, RANLP has now grown into a larger-scale meeting with accompanying workshops and other events. In addition to the 6 keynote speeches and tutorials on hot NLP topics, RANLP07 will be accompanied by workshops and shared task competitions.
Volumes of selected papers are traditionally published by John Benjamins Publishers and previous conferences have enjoyed support from the European Commission.
Important dates
: Conference 1st Call for Papers: October 2006;
Call for Workshop proposals: November 2006,
deadline of proposals end of January 2007;
Workshop selection: early March 2007;
Conference Submission deadline: March 2007 with notification 30 May 2007;
Workshop Submission deadline: 15 June 2007 with notification in July 2007;
RANLP-07 tutorials, workshops and conference: 23-30 September 2007
The conference will be held in the picturesque resort of Borovets. It is located in the Rila mountains and is one of the best known ski and tourist resorts in South-East Europe. The conference venue Samokov hotel offers excellent working and leisure facilities. Borovets is only 1 hour away from Sofia international airport.
THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-07
Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair of the Organising Committee)
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK (Chair of the Programme Committee)
Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Communications, Boulder, USA
Nikolai Nikolov, INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshop Coordinator)
E-mail <

16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences

Saarland University, Saarbrücken,
6-10 August 2007.
The first call for papers will be made in April 2006. The deadline for *full-paper submission* to ICPhS 2007 Germany will be February 2007. Further information is available under conference website

CFP (First announcement) 3rd Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics

October 5-7, 2007,
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University,
Poznan, Poland,
Website
CONFERENCE TOPICS
The conference program will include the following topics:
* electronic language resources and tools
* formalisation of natural languages
* parsing and other forms of NL processing
* computer modelling of language competence
* NL user modelling
* NL understanding by computers
* knowledge representation
* man-machine NL interfaces
* Logic Programming in Natural Language Processing
* speech processing
* NL applications in robotics
* text-based information retrieval and extraction, question answering
* tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems
* translation enhancement tools
* methodological issues in HLT
* prototype presentations
* intractable language-specific problems in HLT (for languages other than English)
* HLT standards
* HLT as foreign language teaching support
* new challenge: communicative intelligence
* vision papers in the field of HLT
* HLT related policies
This list is not closed and we are open to further proposals. The Program Committee is also open to suggestions concerning accompanying events (workshops, exhibits, panels, etc). Suggestions, ideas and observations may be addressed directly to the LTC Chair
. FURTHER INFORMATION
Further details will be available soon. The call for papers will be distributed by mail and published on the conference site . The site currently contains information about LTC’05 including freely-downloadable abstracts of the papers presented.
Zygmunt Vetulani
LTC’07 Chair

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