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MESSAGE from Hiroya Fujisaki, Board Member in charge of Interdisciplinarity of ISCA Activities.
Dear ISCA Members,
It is a great pleasure for me to have this opportunity, not only for reporting to you on my area of responsibility but also for sharing with you my idea
on how ISCA should expand the scope of its scientific activities in the future. My job is to promote ISCA’s activities by strengthening and broadening
its involvement:
(a) in all areas of scientific and technological disciplines that are related to speech communication, both between humans, and between human and machine
(b) especially in areas that clearly belong to speech communication, but are not well represented in ISCA
(c) especially in cross- and inter-disciplinary areas where there are not yet enough organizational efforts
As for
(a), I have been responsible for creating and maintaining a list of topics to be covered by the INTERSPEECH conferences and other
ISCA-sponsored meetings. This list is serving as ISCA Board’s recommendations for their organizers. It is a guideline, and the organizers of each
conference have certain freedom to modify it to meet the specific features or needs of their conference. The list should be revised to meet
the developments and changes of the field of speech communication. Also, I have been keeping a record on the balance between basic science,
component technologies, and integrated systems in the papers presented at INTERSPEECH conferences, to help us to realize our strength and
weakness.
As for (b), I have been soliciting the participation of those people working in basic areas such as psychology, physiology (especially neurophysiology and
brain science), pathology, and linguistics, as well as in applicational areas including technologies and systems for information retrieval, extraction,
and discovery; for evaluation and standardization; for aiding acquisition, learning, and teaching of spoken language; as well as for aiding the retarded,
impaired, and aged.
As for(c), I have been trying to attract the interest of our members to those areas, but also to attract the attention of those who are not
members of ISCA to come and join ISCA, in order to explore those areas within the framework of ISCA. This has been done mainly in cooperation
with the organizers of some INTERSPEECH conferences through plenary talks, special sessions, and satellite events.
As you will easily realize, some of these efforts were successful, but others are still far from being successful. It is certainly easy for anyone to walk
through a known path, but the frontiers are always found where no one has visited before. I believe that ISCA’s future will depend very much on our
ability and willingness to explore those unexplored areas. For that, I need the help from many of you within ISCA, but also from people outside ISCA.
Let us all strive toward a bright future of ISCA as a forerunner of these new areas of science and technology of human communication.
Hiroya Fujisaki
University of Tokyo
Editorial
Dear Members,
ISCA Board is delighted to announce the selection of Victor Zue as ISCA Medalist for 2007. ProfessorZue will be granted
the medal at Interspeech 2007 in Antwerp.
Our monthly message is delivered by Professor Hiroya Fujisaki who is known worldwide for his outstanding experience in
phonetics,
linguistics and speech science but also, for being at the origin of ICSLP conferences which became
later part of the ISCA program under the name Interspeech-ICSLP.
I take this opportunity to remind you that organization of an Interspeech conference should start several years before
its venue:
it is already time to think about Interspeech 2010 and you will find below a call for bids
for this future event.
Also in this issue, you will find the Call for Papers for next Interspeech in Antwerp:pay attention to the submission deadline March 23rd, 2007.
I remind you that
I would appreciate it if you draw my attention on new books devoted to speech science and/or technology:
so that I can advertise them in ISCApad.
Every month, I receive advertisings for recent books that are listed in the appropriate section.
!! SEASON'S GREETINGS FROM THE BOARD!!
Christian Wellekens
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- ISCA News
- SIG's activities
- Courses, internships
- Books, databases,
softwares
- Job openings
- Journals
- Future Interspeech Conferences
- Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW)
- Forthcoming Events supported (but not organized) by ISCA
- 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.
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.
ISCA GRANTS
are available for students and young scientists
attending meetings.
For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org/grants
top
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 .
top
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
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 Quality of VoIP: Assessment and Prediction
Author: Alexander Raake
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, UK-Chichester, September 2006
Website
Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech, Studies in the Evolution
of Language
Author: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Website
Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels
Authors: Antonio M.
Peinado and Jose C. Segura
Publisher: Wiley, July 2006
Website
Multilingual Speech Processing
Editors: Tanja Schultz and
Katrin Kirchhoff ,
Elsevier Academic Press, April 2006
Website
Reconnaissance automatique de la parole: Du signal a
l'interpretation
Authors: Jean-Paul Haton
Christophe
Cerisara
Dominique Fohr
Yves Laprie
Kamel Smaili
392 Pages
Publisher: Dunod
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JOB OPENINGS
We invite all laboratories and industrial companies which have job
offers to send them to the ISCApad
editor: they will appear in the newsletter and on our website for
free. (also have a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs.html
as well as http://www.elsnet.org/
Jobs)
Position at Saybot in China
Job title: Speech Scientist
Location: China (Beijing or Shanghai)
Saybot develops software technology and curricula for learning spoken english. Since 2005, we have been
building software which features state-of-the-art speech technologies and innovative interactive lessons to
help users practice speaking English. We are currently looking for talented speech scientists to help strengthen
our R&D team and to develop our next-generation products. Successful candidates would have proven excellence
and good work ethics in academic or industry context and demonstrated creativity in building speech systems
with revolutionary designs.
* MS/PhD degree in speech technology (or related).
* Expertise in at least one of the following areas and basic knowledge of the others:
o acoustic model training,
o speaker adaptation,
o natural language understanding,
o prosody analysis,
o embedded recognizers.
* Excellent programming skills in both object-oriented languages (C++, C# or Java) and scripting (Perl or Python).
* Good knowledge and experience in at least one commonly used recognizer (HTK, Sphinx, Nuance...).
* Excellent communication skills in written and oral English.
* Experience in machine translation is a plus.
* Experience in VoIP integration is a plus.
* Experience in language teaching is a plus.
Contact: Sylvain Chevalier
Speech Recognition Research/Software Engineer-
Cambridge, England
Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Cambridge Research Lab (CRL) are
looking for a research engineer for our ASR R&D. The successful
candidate will work on the design and implementation of speech
recognition systems. This post would suit someone with a PhD in
the area and industrial software engineering experience.
Required:
Degree in a relevant subject:
Very strong software skills in C, Perl/Python and Linux
Good knowledge of pattern processing
Good software architecture design skills
Experience of working in a team
Good English and communication skills
Preferred:
Background in speech recognition or HMM based pattern processing,
particulary noise robustness
PhD or 1st class degree
Industrial coding experience
Knowledge of more than one major European language
The CRL Speech Technology Group is a multinational team of dynamic
individuals. Established in 2002, we play a significant role in developing
Toshiba’s speech recognition and synthesis capabilities. Work done within
the group contributes to Toshiba’s core speech technology and support of
European and American languages. We collaborate with Toshiba RDC in
Japan, Toshiba China and the University of Cambridge.
An attractive salary and benefit package will be offered.
Applicants should send a CV, the names and addresses
of three referees
and a covering letter to: Questions or requests
for further details can be sent to Kate Knill
Closing date for applications: 14 January 2007 (or until job filled)
Dr Kate Knill, Group Leader, Speech Technology Group,
Cambridge Research Laboratory, Toshiba Research Europe Limited
St George House, 1 Guildhall St
Cambridge, CB2 3NH, UK.
Website
Ph.D. Program CMU-PORTUGAL
in the area of Language and Information Technologies
The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) offers a dual degree Ph.D. Program in
Language and Information Technologies in cooperation with Portuguese
Universities. This Ph.D. program is part of the activities of the recently
created Information and Communication Technologies Institute (ICTI), resulting
from the Portugal-CMU Partnership.
The Language Technologies Institute, a world leader in the areas of speech
processing, language processing, information retrieval, machine translation,
machine learning, and bio-informatics, has been formed 20 years ago. The
breadth of language technologies expertise at LTI enables new research in
combinations of the core subjects, for example, in speech-to-speech
translation, spoken dialog systems, language-based tutoring systems, and
question/answering systems.
The Portuguese consortium of Universities includes the Spoken Language Systems
Lab (L2F) of INESC-ID Lisbon/IST, the Center of Linguistics of the University
of Lisbon (CLUL/FLUL), the Centre for Human Language Technology and
Bioinformatics at the University of Beira Interior (HULTIG/UBI) and the
linguistics group at the University of Algarve (UALG). These four research
centers (and the corresponding Universities), share expertise in the same
language technologies as LTI, although with a strong focus on processing the
Portuguese language.
Each Ph.D. student will receive a dual degree from LTI and the selected
Portuguese University, being co-supervised by one advisor from each institute,
and spending approximately half of the 5-year doctoral program at each
institute. Most of the academic part willtake place at LTI, during the first
2 years, where most of the required 8 courses will be taken, with a proper
balance of focus areas (Linguistic, Computer Science, Statistical/Learning,
Task Orientation). The remaining 3 years of the doctoral program will be
dedicated to research, mostly spent at the Portuguese institute, with one or
two visits to CMU per year.
The thesis topic will be in one of the research areas of the cooperation
program, defined by the two advisors. Two multilingual topics have been
identified as primary research areas (although other areas of human language
technologies may be also contemplated): computer aided language learning
(CALL) and speech-to-speech machine translation (S2SMT). The doctoral students
will be involved in one of these two projects aimed at building real HLT
systems. These projects will involve at least two languages, one of them being
Portuguese, the target language for the CALL system to be developed and either
the source or target language (or both) for the S2SMT system. These two
projects provide a focus for the proposed research; through them the
collaboration will explore the main core areas in language technology.
The scholarship will be funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology
(FCT), Portugal.
How to Apply
Applications should be received before December 22, 2006. In order to apply,
candidates should fill in the corresponding form at the LTI webpage and
simultaneously send an email to the
coordinator of the Portuguese consortium: Isabel Trancoso.
All questions about the joint degree doctoral program should be directed to
this address.
The applications will be screened by a joint committee formed by
representatives of LTI and representatives of the Portuguese Universities
involved in the joint degree program.
Despite this particular focus on the Portuguese language, applications are not
in any way restricted to native or non-native speakers of Portuguese.
For more information about LTI Ph.D. courses and areas of research, visit the
LTI webpage.
For more information about the consortium of Portuguese universities involved
in this program, visit the corresponding webpages:
www.l2f.inesc-id.pt
www.clul.ul.pt
www.ualg.pt
hultig.di.ubi.pt
Updated information on the CMU-Portugal Program in the area of Language and
Information Technologies may be found in the INESC ID website.
PhD position open in Computational modeling in the south of France
A post-doctoral position is open at the
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, a CNRS lab
at the University of Provence, Marseille, France. The person
hired on this position will participate in a
large-scale project on modeling reading
acquisition, and will be specifically involved in
developing and testing both supervised and
unsupervised learning algorithms applied to the
development of orthographic representations and
spelling-sound correspondences during the process
of learning to read. The ideal candidate will
have appropriate programming skills (C, Matlab)
and experience in developing neural network
simulations of cognitive processes, with a Ph.D
in cognitive science or cognitive psychology.
Provisional start date - January 1st 2007.
Send application with CV plus names and contact
information for two referees to:
Jonathan Grainger
Director
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive
Université de Provence
3 pl. Victor Hugo
13331 Marseille
France
Post-Doctoral and PhD positions in Dialogue Processing: Potsdam, Germany
Post-Doctoral and PhD positions in Incremental Dialogue Processing and
Prosody, University of Potsdam, Germany
We have one position for a Post-Doctoral Researcher and one position
for a PhD student available from January 1st, 2007 within the newly
formed, DFG-funded `Emmy Noether Independent Research Group on Content
and Coordination' led by David Schlangen at the Institute for
Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany.
The successful applicants will work in the context of ``InPro:
Incrementality and Projection in Dialogue Processing'', a new project
on incremental processing for dialogue systems, with computational
modelling of smooth turn-taking as the central test case. The project
will run for three years, with the possibility of a subsequent
one-year extension.
* Post Doctoral Position: Ideal candidates for the Post-Doc position
have a strong background in Computational Linguistics, Natural
Language Processing and/or Computer Science, with experience in
incremental parsing or incremental processing in general. Experience
with spoken dialogue systems, dialogue management, and research on
prosody would be a definite plus; good programming skills and a
keen interest in problem solving and research are essential.
Candidates must hold a doctoral degree by the start of the
appointment. There is no obligatory teaching load, but if desired
successful applicants can get involved in teaching activities as
well, to develop their CV.
* PhD Position : Ideal candidates for the PhD position have a good
degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, or Computer
Science, and have shown ability for conducting original
research. Prior work on prosody, especially within dialogue
settings, would be a definite plus. Good programming experience is
important, a keen interest in problem solving and research is
essential. The successful candidate will work towards a PhD degree
in Computational Linguistics from the University of Potsdam.
The `working language' of the project will be English, so fluency in
English is a condition. Prior knowledge of German is not required.
We offer
- a competitive salary with all benefits (for the Post-Doc position:
German BAT IIa payscale, the actual salaries vary depending on age
and family situation, currently between 2900 and 3800 E per month;
for the PhD position 1/2 BAT IIa)
- a dynamic and international working environment (Computational
Linguistics is a growing part of Linguistics in Potsdam, which
already is one of the larger linguistics departments in Germany;
there are also established inter-disciplinary connections to
e.g. computer science and psychology);
- a nice (and affordable) living environment (Potsdam is a beautiful
mid-sized city just on the outskirts of Berlin, from where, if
desired, Potsdam is in easy commuting distance).
These positions are open from January 1st, 2007 (or earlier), so
candidates are encouraged to apply ASAP and reviewing of applications
begins immediately; however, we are looking for the best candidate, so
later starting dates may be negotiable as well.
To apply, please send
- a statement of research interests;
- a cv, including details of research experience;
- if applicable, (links to) sample publications;
- addresses of at least two referees
to Dr. David Schlangen.
If you need further information, please don't hesitate to contact us
at the address above.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in QALL-ME project
As postdoctoral research fellow/senior research fellow you will work on
a EU funded project to develop a system for question answering learning
technologies in a multilingual and multimodal environment, focusing on
implementation of various components, as well as evaluation of the
system. This is a fixed contract for 30 months. You should have a degree
in computer science and a PhD in computational linguistics or equivalent
experience. Experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques
and programming are required, as well as familiarity with Question
Answering, Information Extraction and Machine Learning techniques for
language processing. Publications in good journals, experience with
grant applications and working with the industry, native or near native
proficiency in English are a plus. For appointment at Senior Research
Fellow level you will need to demonstrate a very good publications
record, grant applications experience, and potential leadership
qualities.
Required skills:
* PhD or equivalent research experience/output in Computational
Linguistics/Natural Language Processing
* Experience with Question Answering and/or Information Extraction
* Experience with at least one of the following programming
languages C, C#, Perl or Java
* Experience with machine learning for computational linguistics
Desirable skills:
* Experience working with ontologies
* Experience with database programming
* Good journal publications
Applications should include a completed application form, CV, and
covering letter in which the candidates explain why they have applied
for the position and give details of their research interests/experience
and background. Candidates should also give the names of three referees
with their email addresses and telephone numbers. The interviews are
scheduled to take place in January 2007, and the starting date as soon
as possible after the interviews, but no later than 1st March 2007.
Applications closing date: 15th December 2006/Reference: A4642
Salary: £19,430 - £25,184* pa or £29,211 - £37,521* pa (level of
appointment dependent on qualifications and experience)
For informal inquiries, please contact
Mr. Constantin Orasan or
Prof. Ruslan Mitkov .
Applications to be sent to Personnel. If emailed, please cc to C.Orasan.
For an application form, contact
Personnel Services Department,
University of Wolverhampton,
Molineux Street,
Wolverhampton WV1 1SB
Phone +44 (0) 1902 321049 (ansaphone), and quoting the reference number.
For hearing impaired candidates our Minicom number is +44 (0) 1902 321249.
The application form can also be
downloaded.
Introducing the RESEARCH GROUP IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
TheRESEARCH GROUP IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS at the University of
Wolverhampton,
established by Prof. Mitkov in 1997, is a highly successful one, delivering cutting-edge research
in a number of NLP areas such as anaphora resolution, automatic
abstracting, question answering, lexical knowledge acquisition, text
categorisation, named entity recognition, information extraction, corpus
construction and annotation, automatic terminology processing,
multilingual processing, and multiple-choice question generation. To a
large extent, this research has been undertaken in projects funded by
major UK funding bodies and commercial partners.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT POSITION IN "AUDIO CONTENT ACCESS" at IRCAM (Paris)
PRESENTATION OF THE MUSICDISCOVER PROJECT :
The goal of the MusicDiscover project is to give access to the contents of
musical audios recordings (as it is the case, for example, for texts),
i.e. to a structured description, as complete as possible, of the recordings:
melody, genre/style, rate/rhythm, instrumentation, musical structure,
harmony, etc. The principal objective is thus to develop and evaluate means
directed towards the contents, which include techniques and tools for
analysis, indexing, representation and search for information. These means
will make it possible to build and use such a structured description.
This project of the ACI "Masses of Data" is carried out in collaboration
between Ircam (Paris), Get-Telecom (Paris) and the LIRIS (Lyon) since
October 2004. The principal lines of research are :
- Rhythmic analysis and detection of ruptures
- Recognition of musical instruments and indexing
- Source Separation
- Structured Description
- Research of music by similarity
- Recognition of musical titles
- Classification of musical titles in genre and emotion.
The available position relates to the construction and the use of the
Structured Description in collaboration with the other lines of research.
DEVELOPMENTS TASKS:
A position is available from December 1st 2006 within the "Equipe
Analyse/Synthese" of Ircam for a 9 months total duration.
The contents of work are as follows:
- Participation in the design of a Structured Description
- Software development for construction and use of Structured Descriptions
- Participation in the definition and development of the graphic interface
- Participation in the evaluations
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE:
- Experience of research in Audio Indexing and signal processing
- Experience in Flash, C and C++ and Matlab programming.
- High productivity, methodical work, excellent programming style.
- Good knowledge of UNIX and Windows environments.
AVAILABILITY :
- The position is available in the "Analysis/Synthesis" team in the R&D
department from November 1st 2006 for a duration of 9 months.
EEC WORKING PAPERS :
- In order to start immediately, the candidate should preferably have EEC
citizenship or already own valid EEC working papers.
SALARY:
- According to background and experience.
TO APPLY:
- Please send your resume with qualifications and informations adressing the
above issues, preferably by email to
Xavier Rodet, Analyse/Synthese team manager.
or by fax at:
(33 1) 44 78 15 40, care of Xavier.Rodet
or by surface mail to:
Xavier Rodet, IRCAM, 1 Place Stravinsky, 75004 Paris.
Introducing IRCAM
IRCAM is a leading non-profit organization dedicated to musical
production, R&D and education in acoustics and music, located in the center
of Paris (France), next to the Pompidou Center. It hosts composers,
researchers and students from many countries cooperating in contemporary
music production, scientific and applied research. The main topics
addressed in its R&D departement are acoustics, psychoacoustics, audio
synthesis and processing, computer aided composition, user interfaces, real
time systems.
Detailed activities of IRCAM and its groups are presented on our
WWW
server
Up to 2 PhD Scholarships Available in:
Partnership International for Research and Education (PIRE)
Meaning Representations in Language Understanding
The partnership for research and education (PIRE), established in 2005,
is a collaborative PhD programme between
* Saarland University, Germany
* the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing headed by
Eugene Charniak
* The Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing
(CLSP) headed by Frederick Jelinek
* Charles University (Jan Hajic), Czech Republic.
PIRE is also affiliated with our existing International Research
Training Group (IRTG) co-operation with Edinburgh University.
Each scholarship is funded for two years, normally extendable for a
third year. Doctoral degrees may be obtained in computational
linguistics, phonetics, or informatics, from Saarland University. The
official language of the programme is English. Distinguishing features
of the cooperation include:
- Joint supervision of dissertations by lecturers from Saarbruecken and
our US partner universities
- A six month research stay either at Brown University or at Johns
Hopkins University
- An intensive research exchange programme between all four universities
involved in PIRE.
PhD projects will be in the area of meaning representation for natural
language processing and suitable applications like machine translation
or speech reconstruction.
The scholarship currently provides EURO 1468 per month. Additional
compensation includes family allowance (where applicable), travel
funding, support for carrying out experiments, and an additional monthly
allowance for the duration of the stay in the US. Applicants should hold
a strong university degree equivalent to the German Diplom or Magister
(e.g. Master's level) in a relevant discipline, and should not be more
than 28 years of age. Women and international students are particularly
encouraged to apply.
Deadline for applications: 16 December, 2006
Applications should be sent IRTG positions
or are
planing to do so, you do not need to send your complete application
again, but just a short note, that you would also like to be considered
for PIRE.
In case an application can only be submitted by regular post, it should
be sent to:
PIRE office
Claudia Verburg
Department of Computational Linguistics
Saarland University
P.O. Box 15 11 50
D-66041 Saarbruecken
Germany
If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow.
For more informationUniv.Saarland projects
Johns Hopkins University
Univ. Saarland.
Open position for a Research Engineer-Speech Production Research at MIT,Cambridge, MA, USA
Title: Research Engineer-Speech Production Research
Req Number: mit-00003505
Department: Research Laboratory Of Electronics
Location(s): Cambridge MA
FT/PT: Full Time
Employment / Payroll Category: SRS (Research)
Work Shift: M-F 9:00-5:00
RESEARCH ENGINEER-SPEECH PRODUCTION GROUP, Research Laboratory of
Electronics, to help conduct research on speech motor control, including
the role of hearing. The research involves speech production and perception
experiments on adults with normal hearing and on cochlear implant users, in
conjunction with the development of neurocomputational models simulating
brain functions underlying speech. Will assist with many aspects of the
research including computational modeling; running experiments (making
multichannel recordings of acoustic and movement signals); working with
interactive Windows-based software for experiment control, signal
processing, and data analysis; and performing graphical and statistical
analysis of extracted data. Duties also include transducer system
calibration and maintenance, hard/software integration and development, and
participation in designing and reporting on experiments.
REQUIREMENTS: a master's or Ph.D in bioengineering, electrical engineering,
computational neuroscience, computer science, or related field. Experience
in the following areas highly desirable: research in speech communication
and/or motor control, Windows- and Linux-based programming in C++ and
MATLAB (including applications for real-time data acquisition), and the use
and calibration/maintenance of laboratory instrumentation. MIT-00003505
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION by the
Website
Open position for a Research Specialist-Speech Production Group at MIT,Cambridge, MA, USA
Title: Research Specialist-Speech Production Group
Req Number: mit-00003504
Department: Research Laboratory Of Electronics
Location(s): Cambridge MA
FT/PT: Full Time
Employment / Payroll Category: SRS (Research)
Work Shift: M-F 9:00-5:00
RESEARCH SPECIALIST-SPEECH PRODUCTION GROUP, Research Laboratory of
Electronics, to manage and help run a research project exploring the role
of hearing in speech, specifically in postlingually-deafened adults who use
cochlear implants. Will be responsible--in collaboration with a large
research team--for many aspects of the research, including recruiting and
scheduling subjects, making acoustic recordings, running perceptual tests,
and extracting and managing large amounts of data. Will also assist with
experimental design, data analysis, and preparation of manuscripts and
presentations; and supervise a technical assistant.
REQUIREMENTS: a minimum of a master's degree in speech and hearing science,
speech-language pathology, audiology, experimental psychology, experimental
phonetics, biomedical engineering, or other related field. Experience with
acoustic phonetics and research methods very important. Ability to work
with adults who are hard-of-hearing or deaf essential, as are strong
organizational and planning skills. MIT-00003504
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION by the
web
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
.
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JOURNALS
Call for Papers- Special Issue of the
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing
Dramatic advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology in
recent years has enabled serious growth in spoken language processing
research, both for human-computer interaction and spoken document
processing. The challenges of working with spoken language, including
ASR errors and disfluencies, were major factors in the adoption of
statistical techniques in the language processing community. Statistical
methods now dominate many areas of text processing as well, enabled by
growing collections of linguistic data resources and developments in
machine learning. While transfer of methods from spoken- to written-
language processing continues, advances in written-language processing
also now have a significant impact on spoken-language processing.
This issue seeks to highlight the cross-fertilization in speech and text
processing by publishing novel statistical modeling and learning methods
that span a variety of language processing applications.
We invite papers describing new approaches to statistical language
processing of both spoken and written language. Submissions must not
have been previously published, with the exception that substantial
extensions of conference papers will be considered. Of particular
interest are methods that transfer recent developments from text
processing to speech processing and vice versa, but new methods in one
domain are also welcome. Papers describing new strategies for
integrating acoustic and linguistic cues in spoken language processing
are also encouraged.
Topics of interest include:
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning
- Discriminative learning
- Transfer or adaptation to new domains
- Active learning
- Reinforcement learning
- Memory-based learning and neighborhood methods
- Novel statistical models
- Statistical methods for feature selection or transformation
Specific applications of interest include information extraction,
question answering, text segmentation and classification, summarization,
translation, language generation and spoken language dialogs. Papers
that address component problems of these larger applications are also
encouraged, including parsing, discourse analysis, and talker
interaction analysis. The issue aims to cover a variety of applications
as well as different statistical methods.
Submission procedure:
Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the
Information for Authors as published in any recent issue of the
Transactions.
Note that all rules will apply with regard to submission lengths,
mandatory overlength page charges, and color charges. Manuscripts should
be submitted electronically through the online
IEEE manuscript
submission system.
When selecting a manuscript type, authors must click on "Special Issue
of TASLP on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing".
Authors should follow the instructions for the IEEE Transactions Audio,
Speech and Language Processing and indicate in the Comments to the
Editor-in-Chief that the manuscript is submitted for publication in the
Special Issue on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text
Processing. We require a completed copyright form to be signed and faxed
to +1-732-562-8905 at the time of submission. Please indicate the
manuscript number on the top of the page.
Schedule:
Submission deadline: 15 June 2007
Notification of final acceptance: 15 December 2008
Final manuscript due: 1 February 2008
Publication date: May 2008
Guest Editors:
Dr. Bill Byrne Cambridge University, UK
Dr. Mark Johnson Brown University, USA
Dr. Lillian Lee Cornell University, USA
Dr. Steve Renals University of Edinburgh, UK
Call for papers for a special issue of Speech Communication on
Iberian Languages
Iberian languages (henceforth IL) are amongst the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Nowadays, 628 million people on virtually all continents have Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque,
Galician, etc. as their official language. Consequently, important speech research centers and companies,
both public and private, are focusing their interest on those languages. This effort has resulted in novel
and generic approaches applicable to any language, as well as in the optimization of existing techniques
or systems. It is worth highlighting that the community working on speech science and technology in IL
speaking countries has already reached world-class level in many areas and has continuously increased in
size in the last 15 years.
Speech technology proposed in the context of a non-Iberian language (e.g., English) may not be directly
applicable to IL. All linguistic and paralinguistic dimensions, from phonetics to pragmatics, are amongst
the features that certainly distinguish IL from others considered in speech science and technology
research. As a result, original work and optimization of existing techniques and systems may be necessary
in many areas of Iberian spoken language research.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to present recent progress and significant advances in all areas of
speech science and technology research in the context of IL. Submitted papers must address topics
specific to IL and/or issues raised by analyses of spoken data that shed light on speech science and
linguistic theories regarding these languages. Research which deals with IL data, but makes use of
standard techniques should not be submitted for this Special Issue. However, both research presenting
relevant optimization of current technology and systems, and work exploring specific features of IL
spoken corpora will be considered for submission.
This Special Issue is one of the first initiatives proposed by the recently created SIG-IL (ISCA Special
Interest Group on Iberian Languages, URL http://www.il-sig.org). The purposes of the SIG-IL are to
promote research activities on IL, to sponsor and/or organise meetings, workshops and other events on
related topics, and to make speech corpora publicly available by promoting joint evaluation efforts.
Furthermore, the SIG-IL is also strongly committed to encouraging world-class research within its
community in order to contribute with new ideas to the field of speech science and technology.
Original, previously unpublished submissions for the following areas, involving IL and detailing
the language-specific aspects, are encouraged:
Topics
o Linguistics, Phonology and Phonetics
o Prosody
o Paralinguistic & Nonlinguistic Information in
Speech
o Discourse & Dialogue
o Speech Production
o Speech Perception
o Physiology & Pathology
o Spoken Language Acquisition, Development
and Learning
o Spoken Language Generation & Synthesis
o Language/Dialect Identification
o Speech and Speaker Recognition: acoustic,
language and pronunciation modeling.
o Spoken Language Understanding
o Multi-modal / Multi-lingual Processing
o Spoken Language Extraction/Retrieval
o Spoken Language Translation
o Spoken/Multi-modal Dialogue Systems
o Spoken Language Resources and Annotation
o Evaluation and Standardization
o Spoken Language Technology for the Aged
and Disabled (e-inclusion)
o Spoken Language Technology for Education
(e-learning)
o Interdisciplinary Topics in Speech and
Language
o New Applications
Guest Editors
Isabel Trancoso INESC-ID, Portugal
Nestor Becerra-Yoma Univ. de Chile, Chile
Plinio A. Barbosa Univ. of Campinas, Brazil
Rubén San-Segundo UPM, Spain
Kuldip Plaiwal Griffith University, Australia
Important Dates
Submission deadline: May 31st, 2007
Notification of acceptance: October 31st, 2007
Final manuscript due: December 30th, 2007
Tentative publication date: March, 2008
Submission Procedure
Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Speech Communication Journal for
electronic submission (http://ees.elsevier.com/specom). During submission authors must select the
Section “Special Issue Paper”, not “Regular Paper”, and the title of the special issue should be referenced
in the “Comments” (Special Issue on Iberian Languages) page along with any other information.
Papers accepted for FUTURE PUBLICATION in Speech
Communication
Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com/ for
Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing 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-EUROSPEECHAugust 27-31,2007,Antwerp,
Belgium
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves,
K.U.Nijmegen
Website
INTERSPEECH 2007 is the eighth conference in the annual series of
INTERSPEECH events and also the tenth biennial EUROSPEECH conference. The
conference is jointly organized by scientists from the Netherlands and
Belgium, and will be held in Antwerp, Belgium, August 27-31, 2007, under the
sponsorship of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
The INTERSPEECH meetings are considered to be the top international
conferences in spoken language processing, with more than 1000 attendees
from universities, industry, and government agencies. The conference offers
the prospect of meeting the future leaders of our field, exchanging ideas,
and exploring opportunities for collaboration, employment, and sales through
keynote talks, tutorials, technical sessions, exhibits, and poster sessions.
In recent years the INTERSPEECH meetings have taken place in a number of
exciting venues including most recently Pittsburgh, Lisbon, Jeju Island
(Korea), Geneva, Denver, Aalborg (Denmark), and Beijing.
CALL FOR PAPERS
ISCA and the Interspeech 2007 organizing committee would like to
encourage submission of papers for the upcoming conference.
AREAS AND TOPICS OF INTEREST:
A.Human speech production, perception and communication
Phonology and phonetics
Discourse and dialogue
Prosody (production, perception, prosodic structure)
Paralinguistic and nonlinguistic cues (e.g. emotion and expression)
Speech production
Speech perception
Physiology and pathology
Spoken language acquisition, development and learning
B.Speech and Language technology
Speech and audio processing
Speech enhancement
Speech coding and transmission
Spoken language generation and synthesis
Speech recognition
Spoken language understanding
Accent and language identification
Cross-lingual and multi-lingual processing
Multimodal/multimedia signal processing
Speaker characterization and recognition
C.Spoken language systems and applications
Dialogue systems
Systems for information retrieval
Systems for translation
Applications for aged and handicapped persons
Applications for learning and education
Other applications
D.Resources, standardization and evaluation
Spoken language resources and annotation
Evaluation and standardization
E.Others (please specify)
PAPER SUBMISSION
The deadline for full paper submission (4 pages) is March 23, 2007.
Paper submission is done exclusively via the conference website,
using the submission guidelines. These guidelines will mention that
authors also have the opportunity to include a restricted number of
multimedia files in their submission.
Previously-published papers should not be submitted, nor papers
already submitted and/or accepted for publication in journals or
upcoming conferences.
At the time of submission, authors will have the opportunity to
specify that they would like to present their paper in one of the
Special Sessions. All the information on Special Sessions and how
to contribute to them will be available on the Interspeech 2007
website by the time the paper submission opens.
Each corresponding author will be notified by e-mail of the acceptance
or rejection of her/his paper by May 25, 2007. Minor updates of accepted
papers will be allowed during May 25 - June 3, 2007.
CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS
ISCA, together with the INTERSPEECH 2007 organizing committee, would like to
encourage submission of Special Session proposals for the upcoming
conference, covering interdisciplinary topics and/or important new emerging
areas of interest related to the main conference topics:
Human speech production and perception
Human speech communication
Speech coding and speech enhancement
Speech and audio signal processing
Automatic speech and speaker characterization
Speech synthesis
Automatic speech recognition
Speech technology applications
Speech and multimodal resources
Other relevant topics
Persons who would like to organize a special session are invited to
email a one-page proposal on or
before November 15, 2006.
Special sessions will be allocated one time slot of two hours. In
exceptional cases two consecutive time slots may be allocated. Proposals
should clearly describe the topic and the format of the session and explain
why the topic cannot be covered appropriately in one or more regular
sessions. Proposals also should include a list of at least ten names of
independent persons or research groups who can be expected to make
contributions to the special session.
All papers submitted for Special Sessions will undergo the normal peer
reviewing process organized by the Scientific Committee of the conference.
CALL FOR TUTORIALS
We also encourage proposals for three-hour tutorials to be held on August
27, 2007. Those interested in organizing a tutorial should email a one-page
description of the proposed tutorial
on or before January 8, 2007.
Proposals for tutorials should contain the following information:
* Title of the tutorial
* Summary and relevance
* The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of
the tutorial speakers, with a one-paragraph statement describing the
research interests and areas of expertise of the speaker(s)
* Any special requirements for technical needs (display projector,
computer infrastructure, etc.)
IMPORTANT DATES
Proposals for special sessions: November 15, 2006
Proposals for tutorials: January 8, 2007
Full paper submission deadline: March 23, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance/rejection May 25, 2007
Early registration deadline: June 22, 2007
Tutorial Day: August 27, 2007
Main conference: August 28-31, 2007
Further information via website or
email.
ORGANIZERS
Professor Dirk Van Compernolle (General Chair)
Professor Lou Boves (General Co-Chair)
c/o
Annitta De Messemaeker
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Department of Electrical Engineering
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10
B3001 Heverlee
Belgium
Fax: +32 16 321723
Email
Website
INTERSPEECH 2008-ICSLP September 22-26, 2008, Brisbane,
Queensland, Australia
Chairman: Denis Burnham, MARCS, University of West Sydney.
INTERSPEECH 2009-EUROSPEECH Brighton, UK,
Chairman:
Prof. Roger Moore,
University of Sheffield.
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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)
Third ITRW on NON-LINEAR SPEECH PROCESSING (NPLISP'07)
May 22-25,
2007 , Paris, France
Website
Many specifics of the speech signal are not well addressed by the conventional models currently used in the field
of speech processing. The purpose of the workshop is to present and discuss novel ideas, work and results related
to alternative techniques for speech processing, which depart from mainstream approaches.
SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are invited to submit a 3 to 4-page paper proposal in English, which will
be evaluated by the Scientific Committee. Final papers will be due 1 month after the workshop,
for inclusion in the CD-ROM proceedings. A special issue in Speech Communication (Elsevier) will follows.
KEY DATES
Submission (full paper): 15 January 2007
Notification of acceptance: 23 February 2007
Workshop: 22-25 May 2007
Final (revised) paper: 25 June
6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop
(SSW-6)
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
CfP-
SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education
ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop
The Summit Inn, Farmington, Pennsylvania USA October 1-3, 2007.
Website
Speech and natural language processing technologies have evolved from being emerging new technologies to being reliable techniques
that can be used in real applications. One worthwhile application is Computer-Assisted Language Learning. This is not only helpful to
the end user, the language learner, but also to the researcher who can learn more about the technology from observing its use in a real setting.
This workshop will include presentations of both research projects and real applications in the domain of speech and language technology
in education.
IMPORTANT DATES
Full paper deadline: May 1, 2007.
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2007.
Early registration deadline: August 1, 2007.
Preliminary programme available: September 1, 2007.
Workshop will take place: October 1-3, 2007.
LOCATION
The workshop will be held in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. In early October the vegetation in the Highlands puts on a beautiful show of colors
and the weather is still not too chilly. The event will take place at the Summit Inn, situated on one of the Laurel Ridges. It is close to the Laurel Caverns
where amateur spelunkers can visit the underground caverns. The first night event will be a hayride and dinner at a local winery and the banquet will take
place at Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderful Fallingwater.
TOPICS
The workshop will cover all topics which come under the purlieu of speech and language technology for education.
In accordance with the spirit of the ITRWs, the upcoming workshop will focus on research and results,
give information on tools and welcome prototype demons
trations of potential future applications.
The workshop will focus on research issues, applications, development tools and collaboration. It will be
concerned with all topics which fit under the purview of speech and language technology for education.
Papers will discuss theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, persistent difficulties, general research
tools and techniques. Papers that critically evaluate approaches or processing strategies will be especially
welcome, as will prototype demonstrations of real-world applications.
The scope of acceptable topic interests includes but is not limited to:
- Use of speech recognition for CALL
- Use of natural language processing for CALL
- Use of spoken language dialogue for CALL
- Applications using speech and/or natural language processing for CALL
- CALL tutoring systems
- Assessment of CALL tutors
ORGANIZATION-CONTACT
The workshop is being organized by the new ISCA Special Interest Group, SLaTE.
The general chair is Dr. Maxine Eskenazi from Carnegie Mellon University .
PROGRAMME
As per the spirit of ITRWs, the format of the workshop will consist of a non-overlapping mixture of oral, poster
and demo sessions. Internationally recognized experts from pertinent areas will deliver several keynote lectures
on topics of particular interest.
All poster sessions will be opened by an oral summary by the session chair.
A number of poster sessions will be succeeded by a discussion session focussing on the subject of the session.
The aim of this structure is to ensure a lively and valuable workshop for all involved.
Furthermore, the organizers would like to encourage researchers and industrialists to bring along
their applications, as well as prototype demonstrations and design tools where appropriate.
The official language of the workshop is English. This is to help guarantee the highest degree of
international accessibility to the workshop. At the opening of the workshop hardcopies and CD-ROM of the
abstracts and proceedings will be available.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We seek outstanding technical articles in the vein discussed above. For those who intend to submit papers,
the deadline is May 1, 2007. Following preliminary review by the committee,
notification will be sent regarding acceptance/rejection. Interested authors should send full 4 page camera-ready
papers.
REGISTRATION FEE
The fee for the workshop, including a booklet of Abstracts, the Proceedings on CD-ROM is:
- $325 for ISCA members and
- $225 for ISCA student members with valid identification
Registrations after August 1, 2007 cannot be guaranteed.
ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION INFORMATION
All meals except breakfast for the two and a half days as well as the two special events are included in this price.
Hotel accommodations are $119 per night , and breakfast is about $10. Upon request we will furnish bus transport
from the Greater Pittsburgh Airport and from Pittsburgh to Farmington at a cost of about $30. ISCA membership
is 55 Euros. You must be a member of ISCA to attend this workshop.
ITRW on Robustness
November 2007, Santiago, Chile
ITRW on Evidence-based Voice and Speech Rehabilitation in Head & Neck Oncology
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2008
Cancer in the head and neck area and its treatment can have debilitating effects on communication. Currently available treatment options such as radiotherapy,
surgery, chemo-radiation, or a combination of these can often be curative. However, each of these options affects parts of the vocal tract and/or voice to a more
or lesser degree. When the vocal tract or voice no longer functions optimally, this affects communication. For example, radiotherapy can result in poor voice quality,
limiting the speaker’s vocal performance (fatigue from speaking, avoidance of certain communicative situations, etc.). Surgical removal of the larynx necessitates
an alternative voicing source, which generally results in a poor voice quality, but further affects intelligibility and the prosodic structure of speech. Similarly, a
commando procedure (resection involving portions of the mandible / floor of the mouth / mobile tongue) can have a negative effect on speech intelligibility.
This 2 day tutorial and research workshop will focus on evidence-based rehabilitation of voice and speech in head and neck oncology. There will be 4 half day
sessions, 3 of which will deal with issues concerning total laryngectomy. One session will be devoted to research on rehabilitation of other head and neck cancer
sites. The chairpersons of each session will prepare a work document on the specific topic at hand (together with the two keynote lecturers assigned), which will
be discussed in a subsequent round table session. After this there will be a 30’ poster session, allowing 9-10 short presentations. Each presentation consists of
maximally 4 slides, and is meant to highlight the poster’s key points. Posters will be visited in the subsequent poster visit session. The final work document will
refer to all research presently available, discuss its (clinical) relevance, and will attempt to provide directions for future research. The combined work document,
keynote lectures and poster abstracts/papers will be published under the auspices of ISCA.
Organizers
Prof. dr. Frans JM Hilgers
Prof. dr. Louis CW Pols, PhD
dr. Maya van Rossum.
Sponsoring institutions:
Institute of Phonetic Sciences - Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication,
The Netherlands Cancer Institute – Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital
Dates and submission details as well as a website address will be announced in a later issue.
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA
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
2007 Winter School in Speech and Audio Processing
10-13 January 2007, Golden Jubilee Seminar Hall, Dept. of Electrical Communication Engg., Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore-560012,
India
Website
Speech and Audio processing is both a scientific discipline
as well as a technology frontier with immense
applications; as a scientific discipline it has a long history
and as a technology area it is intensely explored both by
industry and academia. On one side of the spectrum are
the speech and language sciences, such as linguistics,
phonetics, psycho-acoustics, and on the other side are
signal processing theory, pattern recognition, artificial
intelligence, etc., leading to enhanced human-human and
human-machine communication systems, such as speech
and audio coding, automatic speech recognition and
understanding, speaker and language recognition, speech
enhancement, multi-media systems etc. Such a wide
ranging research and development pursuit demands a
broad base of fundamental knowledge as well as clever
algorithms and techniques to be mastered.
This series of Winter Schools in Speech Audio Processing
(WiSSAP) is aimed towards providing a regular forum
for research students, faculty and R&D engineers working
in these areas to enhance their background and appreciate
the nuances of frontier knowledge. WiSSAP-07 is the
second one in the series, following a very successful
WiSSAP-06. The focus of WiSSAP-07 is on Speech and
Audio Coding whose developments are revolutionizing
the communication and multimedia industry.
The draft technical program for WiSSAP-07 is given
overleaf.
Program Committee
T. V. Sreenivas, IISc, Bangalore, Convener
V. Ramasubramanian, Siemens CT-India
Hema Murthy, IIT-Madras
C. Chandra Sekhar, IIT-Madras
K. Samudravijaya, TIFR, Mumbai
Preeti Rao, IIT-Bombay
S. Umesh, IIT-Kanpur
C. S. Ramalingam, IIT-Chennai
Arun Kumar, IIT-Delhi
Invited Faculty
Prof. Kuldip K. Paliwal, Griffith Univ, Australia
Prof. Bastiaan Kleijn, KTH, Sweden
Prof. K. Brandenberg, FhG-IDMT, Germany
(to be confirmed)
Tutorial Faculty
Prof. T.V. Sreenivas, IISc
Prof. C.S. Ramalingam, IIT-Chennai
Prof. Preeti Rao, IIT-Bombay
Dr. V. Ramasubramanian, Siemens CT-India
Advanced topics
Prof. Kuldip K. Paliwal :
• Speech Coding
• Quantization
Prof. Bastiaan Kleijn
• Speech Coding
• Audio Coding
• Information Theory
top
FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS
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
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
Third
Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language
(SSML)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will hold the third
Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language
(SSML) on 13-14 January, 2007. The Workshop will be held at
International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad,
India, jointly hosted by Bhrigus Software and IIIT.
The goal of this third workshop is to identify and prioritize
requirements for extensions and additions to SSML that will improve
the use of SSML for rendering non-English languages.
The workshop is open to the public. However, position papers are
required to participate. Each organization or individual wishing to
participate must submit a position paper by 1 December. Participation
is pending acceptance of the position paper by the program committee.
Full call for participation
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
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
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)
2nd CFP 1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2007)
Tarragona Spain
March 29 - April 4 2007
Website
Extended submission deadline: December 7th, 2006
AIMS
2007 intends to become a major conference in theoretical computer s
cience and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School
in Formal Languages and Applications that is being developed at the hos
t institute since 2001, it will reserve significant room for young com
puter scientists at the beginning of their career. LATA 2007 will aim
at attracting scholars from both classical theory fields and application
areas (bioinformatics,systems biology,language technology,arti
ficial intelligence, etc)
SCOPE
Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include but are not
limited to
- words, languages and automata
- grammars (Chomsky hierarchy contextual, multidimensional, unifi
cation, categorial, etc)
- grammars and automata architectures
- combinatorics on words
- language varieties and semigroups
- algebraic language theory
- computability
- computational,descriptional, communication and parameterized comp
lexity
- patterns and codes
- regulated rewriting
- trees, tree languages and tree machines
- term rewriting
- graphs and graph transformation
- power series
- fuzzy and rough languages
- cellular automata
- DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing
- quantum=2C chemical and optical computing
- biomolecular nanotechnology
- automata and logic
- automata for verification
- automata, concurrency and Petri nets
- parsing
- weighted machines
- foundations of finite state technology
- grammatical inference and learning
- symbolic neural networks
- text retrieval and pattern recognition
- string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinform
atics
- mathematical evolutionary genomics
- language-based cryptography
- compression
- circuit theory and applications
- language theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artifici
al life
STRUCTURE
LATA 2007 will consist of
- 2 invited tutorials
- refereed contributions
- open sessions for discussion in specific subfields
- young sessions on professional issues
INVITED SPEAKERS
Volker Diekert (UStuttgart), Equations: From Words to Graph Products
(tutorial)
Nissim Francez and Michael Kaminski (Technion) ,Extensions of Pregroup
Grammars and Their Correlated Automata
Eric Graedel (RWTH Aachen), Infinite Games (tutorial)
Neil Immerman (UMass.Amherst),Nested Words
Helmut Jorgensen (UWestern Ontario), Synchronization and Codes (tent
ative title)
SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished
research. Papers should not exceed 12 pages and should be formatted a
ccording to the usual LNCS article style=2E Submissions have to be sent
through the webpage
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: extended to December 7th, 2006
Application for funding (PhD students):December 15 2006
Notification of funding acceptance or rejection: December 31,2006
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: January 31 2007
Early registration: February 15 2007
Final version of the paper for the pre-proceedings: February 28 2007
Starting of the conference: March 29 2007
Submission to the proceedings volume: May 15 2007
Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology
April 26, 2007
Rochester, NY
Call for Papers
In the recent years, we have seen rapid adoption of dialog systems in commercial applications. They range from
telephone-based services, in-car interactive systems, to online conversational service agents and talking
characters in computer games. Open-standard platforms such as VoiceXML have been adopted by the industry, and
become the driving force for the faster adoption of dialog applications.
The widespread dialog applications in industry setting pose challenges for researchers in both industrial and
academic worlds. Progress from academic world has not benefited the real world applications to a satisfactory extent.
This is partly due to different research interests and priorities from the two camps: one is heavily driven by
imminent daily needs from the end customers; the other is largely driven by academic curiosity towards understanding
the nature of human-human and human-machine dialogs. The two research agenda lead to somewhat different performance
and evaluation metrics.
The purpose of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to bring industrial and academic researchers
together to share their experiences and visions in the dialog technology development, and to identify topics that are of interest to both camps.
Topics
We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of dialog systems. Topics of interest include (but are
not limited to):
Robustness and error handling in dialog systems
Adaptive dialog systems
Scalability of dialog systems
Domain portability issues
Methodology and tools for use case and dialog flow design
Performance evaluation methods and metrics
Comparison of statistical and non-statistical approaches in terms of effort and performance
Challenging issues for the future research
The application and limitations of open standards such as VoiceXML and SALT
In depth discussion of dialog systems successfully deployed in industrial applications,
which include but are not limited to:
Call centers
Internet service
Automotive
Mobile devices
Computer games
Desktop applications
Other topics
Submissions
We invite academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to submit original research papers,
well-written surveys, or papers describing deployed systems to the workshop. The papers must not exceed
8 pages in length including references and should be prepared using the HLT-NAACL format. The reviewing process
will be blind, so authors' names, affiliations, and all self-references should not be included in the paper.
Submissions should be sent through the HLT submission page (http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsdialog/).
Important Dates:
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2007
Acceptance Notification: February 17, 2007
Camera-ready Copy: February 24, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007
Organizing Committee
Fuliang Weng, Bosch Research
Ye-Yi Wang, Microsoft Corporation
Gokhan Tur, SRI International
Junling Hu, Bosch Research
Program Committee
James Allen, University of Rochester
Mark Fanty, Nuance Communications
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, ICSI, UC Berkeley
Juan Huerta, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM
Michael Johnston, AT&T Labs
Yun-Cheng Ju, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Dekang Lin, Google Labs, Google
Helen Meng, CUHK
Tim Peak, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Stanley Peters, Stanford University
Roberto Pieracini, SpeechCycle
Stephanie Seneff, MIT
Lenhart Schubert, University of Rochester
Steve Young, Cambridge University
Question and Comments: Please contact Fuliang Weng
CFP-Interdisciplinary Workshop on "The Phonetics of Laughter
5 August 2007
Saarbrücken, Germany
Website
Aim of the workshop
Research investigating the production, acoustics and perception of
laughter is very rare. This is striking because laughter occurs as an
everyday and highly communicative phonetic activity in spontaneous
discourse. This workshop aims to bring researchers together from various
disciplines to present their data, methods, findings, research
questions, and ideas on the phonetics of laughter (and smiling).
The workshop will be held as a satellite event of the 16th International
Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken,
Germany.
Papers
We invite submission of short papers of approximately 1500 words length.
Oral presentations will be 15 minutes plus 5 minutes discussion time.
Additionally, there will be a poster session.
All accepted papers will be available as on-line proceedings on the web,
there will be no printed proceedings. We plan to publish selected
Submissions
All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by two reviewers.
Please send submissions by e-mail to laughter@coli.uni-sb.de specifying
"short paper" in the subject line and providing
1. for each author: name, title, affiliation in the body of the mail
2. Title of paper
3. Preference of presentation mode (oral or poster)
4. Short paper as plain text
In addition you can submit audio files (as wav), graphical files (as
jpg) and video clips (as mpg). All files together should not exceed 1 Mb.
Important dates
Submission deadline for short papers: March 16, 2007
Notification of acceptance: May 16, 2007
Early registration deadline: June 16, 2007
Workshop dates: August 5, 2007
Plenary lecture
Wallace Chafe (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Organisation Committee
Nick Campbell (ATR, Kyoto)
Wallace Chafe (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Jürgen Trouvain (Saarland University & Phonetik-Büro Trouvain, Saarbrücken)
Location
The laughter workshop will take place in the Centre for Language
Research and Language Technology on the campus of the Saarland
University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The campus is located in the woods
and is 5 km from the town centre of Saarbrücken.
Contact
Jürgen Trouvain
Saarland University
FR. 4.7: Computational Linguistics and Phonetics
Building C7.4
Postfach 15 11 50
66041 Saarbrücken
Germany
CfP-14th International Conference on Systems, Signals and Image Processing,
IWSSIP 2007
and
6th EURASIP Conference Focused on Speech and Image Processing, Multimedia Communications and Services
EC-SIPMCS 2007
June 27 – 30, 2007, Maribor, Slovenia
CALL FOR PAPERS
Download Call for Papers
IWSSIP is an International Conference on Systems, Signals and Image Processing which brings together researchers
and developers from both academia and industry to report on the latest scientific and theoretical advances,
to discuss and debate major issues and to demonstrate state of-the-art systems.
The EURASIP conference is initiated by the European Association for Speech, Signal and Image Processing (EURASIP)
that is focused on Speech and Image Processing, Multimedia Communications and Services (EC-SIPMCS).
The goal of EC-SIPMCS is to promote the interface researchers involved in the development and applications of
methods and techniques within the framework of speech/image processing, multimedia communications and services.
Topics of Interest
The program includes keynote and invited lectures by eminent international experts, peer reviewed contributed
papers, posters, invited sessions on the same or related topics, industrial presentations and exhibitions around
but not limited to the following topics for IWSSIP and EC-SIPMCS conferences:
• Signal Processing and Systems
• Artificial Intelligence Technologies
• ICT in E-learning/Consulting
• Standards and Related Issues
• Image Scanning, Display and Printing
• Video Streaming and Videoconferencing
• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB)
• Watermarking and Encryption
• Implementation Technologies
• Applications Areas
• Speech and Audio Processing
• Image and Video Processing and Coding
• Audio, Image and Video Indexing and Retrieval
• Multimedia Signal Processing
• Multimedia Databases
• Multimedia and DTV Technologies
• Multimedia Communications, Networking, Services and Applications
• Multimedia Human-Machine Interface and Interaction
• Multimedia Content Processing and Content Description
• Multimedia Data Compression
• Multimedia Systems
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Dr. Kamisety R. Rao, IEEE Fellow, University of Texas Arlington, USA
Prof. Dr. Markus Rupp, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Prof. Dr. Levent Onural, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Submission of Regular Papers
Papers must be submitted electronically by March 18, 2007. Each paper will be evaluated by at least two independent
reviewers, and will be accepted based on its originality, significance and clarity.
Publications
All accepted papers will be published in CD Proceedings that will be available at the Conference.
Abstracts of accepted papers will be printed and included in the INSPEC database. Selected papers
will be considered for possible publication in scholarly journals.
Tutorial and Special Sessions
Those willing to prepare a tutorial course and those willing to organize special session during EC-SIPMCS 2007 and IWSSIP 2007 Conference should contact dr. Peter Planinši? at ec2007uni-mb.si.
Important Dates
Paper and Poster Submissions: March 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2007
Camera ready copy due: May 6, 2007
Author Registration: May 6, 2007
Contact Information:
Fax: +386 2 220 7272
E-mail
Website
Žarko ?u?ej, General Chair
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Peter Planinši?, Program Chair
University of Maribor, Slovenia
CFP-4th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction (MLMI'07)
28-30 June 2007
Brno, Czech Republic
website
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.
MLMI'07 will follow on directly from the annual conference of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL/EACL 2007), which will take place in Prague on June 25-27, 2007.
Important dates
Submission of full papers: 23 February
Submission of extended abstracts: 23 March 2007
Submission of demonstration proposals: 23 March 2007
Acceptance decisions: 17 April 2007
Workshop: 28-30 June 2007
Workshop topics
MLMI'07 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
- 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'07 will feature special sessions and satellite events such as the Summer school of the
European Masters in Speech and Language (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/) and the PASCAL Speech
Separation Challenge II (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlincol1/SSC2/). To propose other special
sessions or satellite events for MLMI'07, please contact the organizing committee.
Guidelines for submission
In common with the previous MLMI workshops, revised versions of selected papers
will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (cf. LNCS 3361, 3869, 4299).
Submissions are invited in one of the following formats:
- full papers for oral or poster presentation (12 pages)
- extended abstracts for poster presentation only (1-2 pages)
- demonstration proposals (1-2 pages)
Please submit PDF files using the submission website ,
following the Springer LNCS format
for proceedings and other multiauthor volumes.
Venue
Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic and the capital of Moravia. Brno had been a royal city since
1347 and is the country's judiciary and trade-fair center. With a population of almost four hundred thousand and
its six universities, Brno is also the cultural center of the region.
Brno can be easily reached by direct flights from Prague, London and Munich and by trains or buses from Prague
(200 km) or Vienna (130 km).
MLMI'07 will take place at the Hotel Continental (http://www.continentalbrno.cz), a modern hotel located in a
quiet part of the city within walking distance from the city center. The local organizers are members of the
Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, which was founded
in 1899 as the Czech Technological University.
Organizing Committee
Honza Cernocky, Brno University of Technology (organization co-chair)
Andrei Popescu-Belis, University of Geneva (programme chair)
Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh (special sessions)
Pavel Zemcik, Brno University of Technology (organization co-chair)
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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