ISCApad no 91

Dear Members,
Happy New Year to the whole community even also for our Chinese members who celebrate this event later in the year! The board wishes you a very fruitful research year and ISCApad editor will make his best effort to circulate most possible information about speech activity in time. This year, our major event will be our Interspeech conference in Pittsburg and we have special wishes of full success to Rich Stern and his team who are preparing an excellent conference.
This first ISCpad of this year announces a particularly high number of conferences, workshops, special issues...that deserve your attention.
I have a personal wish: I would appreciate it if all ISCA members be active by communicating suggestions to the board, by posting their job offers on our Website and in ISCApad, by participating to our SIG's, by accepting to review papers, by proposing workshop organizations and why not, Interspeech conferences for the future years. Do never forget, ISCA is an international association and it is board's will that ISCA actions are worldwide organized: each of us could locally play a role in this development.
I remind all members to inform our secretariat or myself if they plan to change their email or affiliation in order ISCA will not lose its members and will be able to contact them via ISCApad.

Christian Wellekens

ISCA News
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

-Email aliases
Due to several spam attacks, ISCA board decided to change all aliases used to reach members of the board. Please have a look on our website under the title "Contact ISCA".
-ORGANIZATION of INTERSPEECH 2009 -- EUROSPEECH
Call for proposals
Individuals or organisations interested in organizing INTERSPEECH 2009 -- EUROSPEECH should submit by 15 December 2005 a brief preliminary proposal, including:
* The name and position of the proposed general chair and other principal organizers.
* The proposed period in September/October 2009 when the conference would be held
*The institution assuming financial responsibility for the conference and any other sponsoring institutions
*The city and conference center proposed (with information on that center's capacity)
*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
Guidelines for the preparation of the proposal are available at 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 2006.
Isabel Trancoso
Vice President, ISCA
INESC
9 rua Alves Redol
1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal
phone: +351-21-3100268
FAX:+351-21-3145843
Webaddress

-ISCA GRANTS
are available for students and young scientists attending meetings. Even if no information on the grants is advertised on the conference announcement, they may apply.
For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org/grants

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COURSES, INTERNSHIPS

-RECHERCHES ACTUELLES EN PHONETIQUE ET PHONOLOGIE: UN ETAT DE L'ART

Seminaire organise par Bernard Laks et Noel Nguyen sous l'egide del'Association pour le traitement automatique des langues (ATALA)
21 janvier 2006, 9h30-17h
ENST, 46 rue Barrault 75 013 Paris
website
Programme
1 La phonetique quantique et les primitives phonologiques, Nick Clements (LPP, CNRS & Univ. Paris III)
2 Phonetique et phonologie de corpus, Jacques Durand (ERSS, Univ. Toulouse Le Mirail / CNRS)
3 Modeles exemplaristes du traitement de la parole, Noel Nguyen (LPL, CNRS & Univ. Provence)
4 Phonetics, phonology and neurolinguistics, John Coleman (Univ. Oxford)
5 Intonation et perception de la parole, Jacqueline Vaissiere (LPP, Univ. Paris III / CNRS)
6 Caracterisations d'accents a travers le traitement automatique de la parole, Martine Adda & Philippe Boulay de Mareuil (LIMSI, CNRS)
7 Phonologie declarative, Jean-Pierre Angoujard (Univ. Nantes)
8 Phonologie connexionniste, Bernard Laks & Atanas Tchobanov (MoDyCo, Univ. Paris X / CNRS)
Le seminaire est gratuitement ouvert a toutes les personnes interessees. Il n'est pas necessaire de s'inscrire auparavant.

-1st INTERNATIONAL PhD SCHOOL IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES 2005-2007.

Rovira i Virgili University
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Tarragona, Spain
Website of the Group
Foundational courses (April-June 2006)
Foundations of Linguistics I: Morphology, Lexicon and Syntax -- M. Dolores Jiménez-López, Tarragona
Foundations of Linguistics II: Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse -- Gemma Bel-Enguix, Tarragona
Formal Languages -- Carlos Martín-Vide, Tarragona
Declarative Programming Languages: Prolog, Lisp -- various researchers at the host institute
Procedural Programming Languages: C, Java, Perl, Matlab -- various researchers at the host institute
Main courses (July-December 2006)
POS Tagging, Chunking, and Shallow Parsing -- Yuji Matsumoto, Nara
Empirical Approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling, Semantic Parsing, and Information Extraction -- Raymond Mooney, Austin TX
Ontology Engineering: From Cognitive Science to the Semantic Web -- M. Teresa Pazienza, Roma
Anaphora Resolution in Natural Language Processing -- Ruslan Mitkov, Wolverhampton
Language Processing for Human-Machine Dialogue Modelling -- Yorick Wilks, Sheffield
Spoken Dialogue Systems -- Diane Litman, Pittsburgh PA
Natural Language Processing Pragmatics: Probabilistic Methods and User Modeling Implications -- Ingrid Zukerman, Clayton
Machine Learning Approaches to Developing Language Processing Modules -- Walter Daelemans, Antwerpen
Multimodal Speech-Based Interfaces -- Elisabeth André, Augsburg
Information Extraction -- Guy Lapalme, Montréal QC
Search Methods in Natural Language Processing -- Helmut Horacek, Saarbrücken
Optional courses (from the 5th International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications)
Tree Adjoining Grammars -- James Rogers, Richmond IN
Uni?cation Grammars -- Shuly Wintner, Haifa
Context-Free Grammar Parsing -- Giorgio Satta, Padua
Probabilistic Parsing -- Mark-Jan Nederhof, Groningen
Categorial Grammars -- Michael Moortgat, Utrecht
Weighted Finite-State Transducers -- Mehryar Mohri, New York NY
Finite State Technology for Linguistic Applications -- André Kempe, Xerox, Grenoble
Natural Language Processing with Symbolic Neural Networks -- Risto Miikkulainen, Austin TX
Students:
Candidate students for the programme are welcome from around the world. Most appropriate degrees include Computer Science and Linguistics, but other students (for instance, from Psychology, Logic, Engineering or Mathematics) can be accepted depending on the strengths of their undergraduate training. The ?rst two months of class are intended to homogenize the students’ varied background.
In order to check eligibility for the programme, the student must be certain that the highest university degree s/he got enables her/him to be enrolled in a doctoral programme in her/his home country.
Tuition Fees:
1,700 euros in total, approximately.
Dissertation:
After following the courses, the students enrolled in the programme will have to write and defend a research project and, later, a dissertation in English in their own area of interest, in order to get the so-called European PhD degree (which is a standard PhD degree with an additional mark of quality). All the professors in the programme will be allowed to supervise students’ work.
Funding:
During the teaching semesters, funding opportunities will be provided, among others, by the Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (Becas MAEC), and by the European Commission (Alban scheme for Latin American citizens). Additionally, the host university will have a limited amount of economic resources itself for covering the tuition fees and full-board accommodation of a few students.
Immediately after the courses and during the writing of the PhD dissertation, some of the best students will be offered 4-year research fellowships, which will allow them to work in the framework of the host research group.
Pre-Registration Procedure:
In order to pre-register, one should post (not fax, not e-mail) to the programme chairman:
a xerocopy of the main page of the passport,
a xerocopy of the highest university education diploma,
a xerocopy of the academic record,
full CV,
letters of recommendation (optional),
any other document to prove background, interest and motivation (optional).
Schedule:
Announcement of the programme: September 12, 2005
Pre-registration deadline: November 30, 2005
Selection of students: December 7, 2005
Starting of the classes: April 18, 2006
Summer break (tentative): July 25, 2006
Re-starting of the classes (tentative): September 4, 2006
End of the classes (tentative): December 22, 2006
Defense of the research project (tentative): September 14, 2007
DEA examination (tentative): April 27, 2008
Questions and Further Information:
Please, contact the programme chairman, Carlos Martín-Vide
Postal Address:
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Rovira i Virgili University
Pl. Imperial Tàrraco, 1
43005 Tarragona, Spain
Phone: +34-977-559543, +34-977-554391
Fax: +34-977-559597, +34-977-554391

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BOOKS, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

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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 as well as http://www.elsnet.org Jobs)

-Three research positions in the Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics at Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain).

Available starting in the academic year 2006-2007.
Institute website
ELIGIBLE TOPICS
- Language and automata theory and its applications.
- Biomolecular computing and nanotechnology.
- Bioinformatics.
- Language and speech technologies.
- Formal theories of language acquisition and evolutionary linguistics.
- Computational neuroscience.
Other related fields might still be eligible provided there are strong enough candidates for them.
The scheme, which is funded by the European Commission, is highly competitive (with 5-10% of success rate last time). It includes 3 streams (IE, II, OI), which are described below.
________________________________________________________________________
IE
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
It aims at providing advanced training tailored to the researchers' individual needs with a view to adding different/complementary scientific competencies. This in order to allow them to reach or reinforce a position of professional maturity and independence or to permit them to resume their career. The duration is between 1 and 2 years. Applicant researchers should be from EU or Associated States with at least 4 years research experience or a PhD and willing to spend a mobility period working in a host institution located in another EU or Associated State, different from his/her own and from that where they have been recently active.
JOB PROFILE
- The position is intended to develop an advanced training + research project in collaboration with the host institute for 12-24 months. As well, some doctoral teaching and supervising is expected.
- It will be filled in under the form of a work contract.
- There is no restriction on the candidate's age.
- Though there is no particular preference, candidates in the first decade of their research career are encouraged to apply.
ELIGIBILITY CONDITIONS
- Having got or being about to get a PhD degree by September 19, 2006 at the latest.
- Being national of any of the 25 EU Member States, or of the 4 EU Associated Candidate States (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Turkey), or of the 5 EU Associated States (Iceland, Israel, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), who has not resided and carried out her/his main activity in Spain for more than 12 months in the last 3 years (reference date: January 19, 2006).
- Nationals from third countries that have resided and carried out their main activity in any EU Member State or Associated State for at least 4 of the last 5 years (reference date: January 19, 2006) are eligible, too.
- Spaniards are ineligible unless they have resided and carried out their main activity in a third country for at least 4 of the last 5 years (reference date: January 19, 2006).
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
- A generous monthly living allowance depending on the researcher's experience, family situation, and sort of project (lab or non-lab), plus a travel allowance, a mobility allowance, and a contribution to other expenses (for instance, conference participation).
- Health coverage will be provided by the Spanish public Social Security system.
- Candidates from developing countries or emerging/transition economies will be eligible later for a reintegration grant in their home country for half the time they spent in Spain.
EVALUATION PROCEDURE
It will consist of 2 steps:
- a pre-selection based on CV and carried out by the host institute,
- an on-line application to be assessed externally by the funding agency.
SCHEDULE
Expressions of interest are welcome until December 31st, 2005. They should contain the researcher's CV and mention "2005-14-IE" in the subject line. The outcome of the preselection will be reported immediately after.
Pre-selected candidates will be guided and supported in the application process by the host institute. The deadline for completing the whole process is January 19, 2006.
CONTACT
Carlos Martin-Vide
_________________________________________________________________
II
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
It aims at attracting top-class researchers from third countries to work and undertake research training in Europe from 1 to 2 years (incoming phase), with a view to developing mutually-beneficial research cooperation. In the case of emerging and transition economies and developing countries, the scheme may assist fellows to return to their country of origin for, typically, half the duration of the first phase (re-integration phase).
JOB PROFILE
- The position is intended to develop an advanced training + research project in collaboration with the host institute for 12-24 months. As well, doctoral teaching and supervising are expected.
- It will be filled in under the form of a work contract.
- There is no restriction on the candidate's age.
- Only experienced (top-class) researchers have a real chance to succeed.
ELIGIBILITY CONDITIONS
- Having got or being about to get a PhD degree by September 18, 2006 at the latest.
- Not being national of any of the EU Member States or Associated States.
- Nationals from third countries that have resided and carried out their main activity in any EU Member State or Associated State for at least 4 of the last 5 years (reference date: January 18, 2006) are ineligible.
- Researchers from all other countries are eligible provided they have not spent more than 4 years during the previous 5 years in any of the above-mentioned EU countries.
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
- A generous monthly living allowance depending on the researcher's experience, family situation, and sort of project (lab or non-lab), plus a travel allowance, a mobility allowance, and a contribution to other expenses (for instance, conference participation).
- Health coverage will be provided by the Spanish public Social Security system.
- In the case of researchers from emerging and transition economies and developing countries, the scheme may include additional provision to assist them to return to their country of origin, with typically half the duration of the first phase.
EVALUATION PROCEDURE
It will consist of 2 steps:
- a pre-selection based on CV and carried out by the host institute,
- an on-line application to be assessed externally by the funding agency.
SCHEDULE
Expressions of interest are welcome until December 31st, 2005.
They should contain the researcher's CV and mention "2005-14-II" in the subject line. The outcome of the preselection will be reported immediately after.
Pre-selected candidates will be guided and supported in the application process by the host institute. The deadline for completing the whole process is January 18, 2006.
CONTACT
Carlos Martin-Vide
______________________________________________________________________________
OI
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
It aims at reinforcing the international dimension of the career of European researchers by giving them the opportunity to be trained in a world-level third country research organisation (from 1 to 2 years), and then to apply the experience gained in a return host institution in a Member State or Associated State (typically half the duration of the first phase). It also aims at responding to the researchers' needs in terms of complementing their training in inter/multi-disciplinary research, research management skills and intersectoral mobility.
JOB PROFILE
- The position is intended to develop first an advanced training + research project in a world-level third country research organisation (not in any of the EU Member States or Associated States) for 12-24 months, and then to apply the experience gained to the host institute for 6-12 months. In the second phase, doctoral teaching and supervising are expected too.
- It will be filled in under the form of a work contract.
- There is no restriction on the candidate's age.
ELIGIBILITY CONDITIONS
- Having got or being about to get a PhD degree by September 18, 2006 at the latest.
- Being national of any EU Member State or Associated State.
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
- A generous monthly living allowance depending on the researcher's experience, family situation, and sort of project (lab or non-lab), plus a travel allowance, a mobility allowance, and a contribution to other expenses (for instance, conference participation).
- Health coverage will be provided by the Spanish public Social Security system in the second phase.
EVALUATION PROCEDURE
It will consist of 2 steps:
- a pre-selection based on CV and carried out by the host institute,
- an on-line application to be assessed externally by the funding agency.
SCHEDULE
Expressions of interest are welcome until December 31st, 2005. They should contain the researcher's CV and mention "2005-14-OI" in the subject line. The outcome of the preselection will be reported immediately after.
Pre-selected candidates will be guided and supported in the application process by the host institute. The deadline for completing the whole process is January 18, 2006.
CONTACT
Carlos Martin-Vide

-Engineer in HLT Evaluation Department ELRA-ELDA

ELDA has been strongly expanding its activities in the evaluation of Human Language Technologies (HLT). The evaluation department at ELDA conducts HLT evaluation activities and acts as a clearing house for this area with the support of a network of evaluation units based on a large number of European institutes, both public research centres and private companies.
ELDA is extending its activities and is seeking to fill the following positions:
Engineer in HLT Evaluation Department
He/she will be in charge of managing the evaluation activities in relation with the collection of Language Resources for evaluation, the evaluation of technology components, and in general, the setting up of an HLT evaluation infrastructure. As part of the HLT Evaluation Department, he/she will be working on the European project CHIL (multimodal) and will be involved in the evaluation of technology components related to multimodal interfaces/sensors.
Profile
- Engineer/Master degree (preference for a PhD) in computer science, electrical engineering, computational linguistics, information science, knowledge management or similar fields
- Experience and/or good knowledge of the evaluation programmes in Europe, the US and Japan
- Experience in project management, including the management of European projects
- Experience and/or good knowledge of speech and/or multimodal technologies and LRs
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular the ability to supervise members of a multidisciplinary team
- Proficiency in English
Salary
Commensurate with qualifications and experience.
Applications will be considered until the position is filled. However, a final decision will be made by the end of January 2006. The position is based in Paris and candidates should have the citizenship (or residency papers) of a European Union country.
Applicants should email a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to:
Khalid CHOUKRI
ELRA/ELDA
55-57, rue Brillat Savarin
75013 Paris
FRANCE
Tel : +33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax : +33 1 43 13 33 30
Email

-Post-doc or visiting scientist wanted at the University of Washington

The Signal, Speech and Language Interpretation Lab (SSLI) at the University of Washington (UW) is looking for an entry-level speech scientist in Mandarin speech recognition, which is part of an exciting Mandarin speech to English text translation project.
Term
January-September, 2006 with possible extension
Qualifications
(1) For the post-doc position, a Ph.D. in either Electrical Engineering or Computer Science is required. For the visiting scientist position, a master degree in either of the above two fields is preferred.
(2) Fluent in both Mandarin and English.
(3) Understanding of state-of-the-art large-vocabulary speech recognition systems.
Job responsibility
Research and develop acoustic and language models and algorithms for Mandarin broadcast news speech recognition.
How to apply
Applications should include a vita and the names of at least 2 references (with both a telephone number and email address), sent to Mei-Yuh Hwang or via postal mail to
Dr. Mei-Yuh Hwang
Senior Research Scientist
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
PO Box 352500
Seattle, WA 98195-2500
Email

-PostDoc position in Speech recognition, LORIA-INRIA, France

Background
The work will be carried out within ST-TAP project, grant-aided by the French Research Department. The aim of this project is to use tools provided by speech recognition research to speed up the creation of close captions for TV program for deaf people.
Objectives
The objective of this project is to provide, nearly in real time, close captions for TV broadcast news.
The work is situated at the crossroads of research and implementation. The objective of this research is to investigate approaches to speech recognition that have the potential to improve the generation of close captions. Therefore, two tasks could be investigated:
- when the newscaster reads the teleprompter, the software must perform an alignment between the text of the teleprompter and the audio signal to obtain the beginning and the end of each uttered word.
- when the newscaster improvises or during an interview, an automatic speech recognition will be performed and the result will be manually corrected.
Suitable background of applicants
Previous experiences in engineering, computing and speech recognition. good knowledge in C/C++
Duration of employment
6 months
Salary
1700 euros per month
Starting date
Flexible, but preferably as soon as possible
Applications
Applications should be sent electronically to Dominique Fohr. Applications should include a CV, a detailed resume and name and contact information of two references (e.g. Master thesis supervisor, head of department).
Questions and information
Dominique Fohr (+33) 383 59 20 27
LORIA
BP 239
54506 Vandoeuvre
France

-POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST POSITION IN ARABIC DIALECT NLP AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, USA

Position
The CADIM (Columbia Arabic DIalect Modeling) group at the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University is looking for a postdoc, to start fall 2005/winter 2006.
Project Description We are working on a project to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools for Arabic dialects. Since many of the dialects are resource poor, the premise of the work is to adapt resources from Modern Standard Arabic (fusha). We are interested in using explicit linguistic knowledge in NLP tools. While the engineering goal of the project is to build NLP tools, the scientific goal is to better understand dialectal variation. The candidate will work with a team of researchers on morphology, parsing, analysis of code switching, and related topics.
As minimum requirements, the candidate will have:
* A doctorate in computational linguistics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, electrical engineering, or a related discipline.
* Experience with corpus-based methods.
* Familiarity with linguistic notions from phonology, morphology, syntax and/or semantics.
* Familiarity with Semitic language phenomena
* Programming skills.
The ideal candidate would also have:
* Hands-on experience with machine learning.
* Command of Modern Standard Arabic (fusha) and one of the Arabic dialects.
* Excitement about interdisciplinary work.
The exact start and end dates are open to negotiation. Columbia University will help the candidate obtain any necessary visa and housing. Columbia University is located in the heart of New York City, one of the culturally most exciting, diverse, and inclusive cities in the world. For more information, please contact Mona Diab, Nizar Habash , or Owen Rambow . Also check out the project's website

-MSc researcher at University of Ulm (Germany)

The Dialogue Systems Group in the Department of Engineering Sciences, University of Ulm is seeking a researcher at MSc level to work on aspects of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Development in close cooperation with our industry partner , Tell-Eureka New York (USA).
Task:
building tools for rapid design, adaptation and improvement of high performance statistical spoken language understanding systems.
Perspective: PhD Degree.
Requirements:
Good programming skills in C, C++, Perl, VoiceXML, Java, JavaScript and experience with Unix/Linux are highly desirable; expertise in speech and dialogue technologies would also be appreciated.
Financial support is envisioned on a grant basis within the framework of the Graduate School: Mathematical Analysis of Evolution, Information and Complexity - University of Ulm
Candidates should send their application electronically to Wolfgang Minker. The application should include a short resume and a transcript of records with the results of exams relevant to the Diploma/MSc Degree. A pdf-version of the Diploma/MSc Thesis may also be included.
Professor Wolfgang Minker
University of Ulm
Department of Information Technology
Albert-Einstein-Allee 43
D-89081 Ulm
Phone: +49 731 502 6254/-6251
Fax: +49 691 330 3925516

-Several open positions at the National Centre of Competence in Research on Affective Sciences (NCCR) (Switzerland) .

We invite applications for two research fellowships in a new National Centre of Competence in Research on Affective Sciences (NCCR) financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Geneva
Project 1 Klaus Scherer/Guido Gendolla - Appraisal and Emotion Elicitation
We are conducting research on the role of motivational factors in emotion-antecedent appraisal using a variety of ANS response measures. We are looking for a person having recently terminated a doctorate involving psychophysiological research who might be interested in running such studies as part of a one- or two-year postdoctoral fellowship (a stipend of approx. CHF 45'000 per year plus travel expenses) in the Leading House of the Center at the University of Geneva as well as develop their own research program. Alternatively, we could imagine a graduate student well-trained in psychophysiological methods to use this opportunity for a research internship or a year abroad, allowing participation in the Center's Graduate School (stipend approx. CHF 33'000 plus travel expenses).
Project 2 Klaus Scherer/Susanne Kaiser - Emotional Response Patterning
In the context of empirical research on the synchronisation of multimodal response patterning in emotion episodes, we offer a postdoctoral research position for a signal processing and modeling specialist. The applicant should have a strong background in the mathematical and statistical bases of biosignal processing and have some experience with modeling, including the use of Matlab including Simulink (or other simulation and modeling software). Salary level: Between CHF 50'000 to 60'000 a year depending on age and experience. The postdocs will participate in all activities of the interdisciplinary Center for Affective Sciences, which provides a stimulating and enriching academic experience as well as additional training in both emotion theory and a variety of pertinent methods. Potential candidates can find further information about the NCCR as well as an application form at the following website
Inquiries can be directed to our email address.

- PhD Studentship on Expressive Speech Synthesis at University of Sheffield

Speech and Hearing Research Group
Dept. Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Funding is available immediately for an eligible UK/EU student wishing to undertake a three-year programme of research leading to a PhD in the area of expressive speech synthesis.
Applicants should possess a good honours degree or equivalent in engineering, computer science or other relevant discipline. The successful candidate would ideally have some knowledge of speech processing technology.
For further information, contact Prof. Roger Moore or see our website for how to apply.
The Speech and Hearing research group in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield has an international reputation in the multi-disciplinary field of speech and hearing research. With three chairs, four faculty, five research associates and around twenty research students, this is one of the strongest teams worldwide. A unique aspect of the group is the wide spectrum of research topics covered, from the psychophysics of hearing through to the engineering of state-of-the-art speech technology systems.

JOURNALS

- Call for papers for a Special Issue of Speech Communication: Intrinsic Speech Variation and Speech Recognition

Current research in ASR is emphasizing deficiencies in dealing with speech intrinsic variations like speaker gender, accent, emotion, speaking style and rate. Investigations on factors affecting speech realization and variations within the speech signal that make the ASR task challenging are hence very valuable for future developments of spoken language systems. The goal of this special issue is to present recent advances, trends and reviews that deal with these topics. Studies and algorithms related to ASR sensitivity, genericity, user-independence, robustness or adaptation to variations in speech should be covered. This issue and the Special Issue on "Bridging the Gap Between Human and Automatic Speech Processing" mutually complete each other.
Topics
Topics of interest to this issue include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Foreign and/or regional accented speech modeling and recognition,
• Children and/or elderly speech modeling and recognition,
• Speech non-stationarity and relevant analysis methods,
• Speech spectral (e.g. vocal tract length) and temporal (e.g. speaking rate) variations,
• Spontaneous speech modeling and recognition,
• Speech variation due to emotions, fatigue, frustration,...
• Speech corpora covering sources of variation,
• Acoustic-phonetic correlates of variations,
• Impact and characterization of speech variations on ASR analysis, models and performance,
• Speaker adaptation and normalization (e.g., VTLN); Speaker adapted training methods,
• Novel general or specific compensation and adaptation algorithms,
• Novel analysis and modeling structures and algorithms for handling speech variations,
• Alternative Statistical and Machine Learning Methods for General ASR (e.g., no-HMM methods),
• Experiments making use of corpora with specific variability sources
• Intrinsic variations in multimodal recognition.
Managing and Guest Editors

Prof. Renato De MoriUniversité d'Avignon, France
Prof. Christian Wellekens Eurecom, France
Mr. Stéphane Dupont Multitel, Belgium

Guest editors

Prof. Alfred Mertins U. Oldenburg, Germany
Prof. Pietro Laface Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Mr. Denis JouvetFrance Telecom, France
Mr. Olivier Deroo Acapela Group, Belgium
Mr. Luciano Fissore Loquendo, Italy
Prof. Richard RoseMcGill University, Canada
Important dates
Submission deadline: April 1st, 2006 (earlier submission encouraged)
Notification of acceptance: August 1st, 2006
Final manuscript due: November 1st, 2006
Publication data: First quarter 2007.
Submission
Papers must be submitted by April 1st, 2006 at Elsevier website. During the submission mention that you are submitting to the Special Issue on "Intrinsic speech variation..." in the paper section/category or author comments and request Renato de Mori as managing editor for the paper.

- Call for papers for a Special Issue of Speech Communication: "Bridging the Gap Between Human and Automatic Speech Processing"

This special issue of Speech Communication is entirely devoted to studies that seek to bridge the gap between human and automatic speech recognition. It follows the special session at INTERSPEECH 2005 on the same topic.This issue and the Special Issue on "Intrinsic Speech Variation and Speech Recognition" mutually complete eachother.

Schedule
announcement sent out in January 2006
submission date: March 30 2006
papers out for review: April 7 2006
first round of reviews in: May 30 2006
notification of acceptance/revisions/rejections: June 7 2006
revisions due: August 15
notification of acceptance: August 30 2006
final manuscript due: September 30 2006
tentative publication date: December 2006
Topics
Papers are invited that cover one or several of the following issues:
- quantitative comparisons of human and automatic speech processing capabilities, especially under varying environmental conditions
- computational approaches to modelling human speech perception
- use of automatic speech processing as an experimental tool in human speech perception research
- speech perception/production-inspired modelling approaches for speech recognition, speaker/language recognition, speaker tracking, sound source separation
- use of perceptually motivated models for providing rich transcriptions of speech signals (i.e. annotations going beyond the word, such as emotion, attitude, speaker characteristics, etc.)
- fine phonetic details: how should we envisage the design and evaluation of computational models of the relation between fine phonetic details in the signal on the one hand, and key effects in (human) speech processing on the other hand.
- how can advanced detectors for articulatory-phonetic features be integrated in the computational models for human speech processing
- the influence of speaker recognition on speech processing
Papers must be submitted by April 30, 2006 at Elsevier website. During the submission mention that you are submitting to the Special Issue on "Bridging the Gap..." in the paper section/category or author comments and request Julia Hirschberg as managing editor for the paper.
Guest editors:
Katrin Kirchhoff
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352500
Seattle, WA, 98195
(206) 616-5494

Louis ten Bosch
Dept. of Language and Speech
Radboud University Nijmegen
Post Box 9103
6500 HD Nijmegen
+31 24 3616069

-Papers accepted for FUTURE PUBLICATION in Speech Communication

Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Click on Publications, then on Speech Communication and on Articles in press. The list of papers in press is displayed and a .pdf file for each paper is available.

Laurent Benaroya, Frédéric Bimbot, Guillaume Gravier and Rémi Gribonval, Experiments in audio source separation with one sensor for robust speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 19 December 2005, . (Website)

Naveen Srinivasamurthy, Antonio Ortega and Shrikanth Narayanan, Efficient scalable encoding for distributed speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 December 2005, . (Website)

Leigh D. Alsteris and Kuldip K. Paliwal, Further intelligibility results from human listening tests using the short-time phase spectrum, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 5 December 2005, . (Website)

Luis Fernando D'Haro, Ricardo de Córdoba, Javier Ferreiros, Stefan W. Hamerich, Volker Schless, Basilis Kladis, Volker Schubert, Otilia Kocsis, Stefan Igel and José M. Pardo, An advanced platform to speed up the design of multilingual dialog applications for multiple modalities, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 5 December 2005, . (Website)

Ben Milner and Xu Shao, Clean speech reconstruction from MFCC vectors and fundamental frequency using an integrated front-end, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 November 2005, . (Website)

Min Chu, Yong Zhao and Eric Chang, Modeling stylized invariance and local variability of prosody in text-to-speech synthesis, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2005, . (Website)

Stephen So and Kuldip K. Paliwal, Scalable distributed speech recognition using Gaussian mixture model-based block quantisation, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2005, . (Website)

Junho Park and Hanseok Ko, Achieving a reliable compact acoustic model for embedded speech recognition system with high confusion frequency model handling, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 11 November 2005, . (Website)

Amalia Arvaniti, D. Robert Ladd and Ineke Mennen, Phonetic effects of focus and "tonal crowding" in intonation: Evidence from Greek polar questions, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 26 October 2005, . (Website)

Dimitrios Dimitriadis and Petros Maragos, Continuous energy demodulation methods and application to speech analysis, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 25 October 2005, . (Website)

Daniel Recasens and Aina Espinosa, Dispersion and variability of Catalan vowels, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 October 2005, . (Website)

Cynthia G. Clopper and David B. Pisoni, The Nationwide Speech Project: A new corpus of American English dialects, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 October 2005, . (Website)

Diane J. Litman and Kate Forbes-Riley, Recognizing student emotions and attitudes on the basis of utterances in spoken tutoring dialogues with both human and computer tutors, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 October 2005, . (Website)

Carsten Meyer and Hauke Schramm, Boosting HMM acoustic models in large vocabulary speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 October 2005, . (Website)

SungHee Kim, Robert D. Frisina, Frances M. Mapes, Elizabeth D. Hickman and D. Robert Frisina, Effect of age on binaural speech intelligibility in normal hearing adults, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 October 2005, . (Website)

Tong Zhang, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Stephen E. Levinson, Cognitive state classification in a spoken tutorial dialogue system, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 October 2005, . (Website)

Mark D. Skowronski and John G. Harris, Applied principles of clear and Lombard speech for automated intelligibility enhancement in noisy environments, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 October 2005, . (Website)

Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Speech coding through adaptive combined nonlinear prediction, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 October 2005, . (Website)

Praveen Kakumanu, Anna Esposito, Oscar N. Garcia and Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, A comparison of acoustic coding models for speech-driven facial animation, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 October 2005, . (Website)

Srinivas Bangalore, Dilek Hakkani-Tür and Gokhan Tur, Introduction to the Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding in Conversational Systems, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 28 September 2005, . (Website)

Atsushi Fujii, Katunobu Itou and Tetsuya Ishikawa, LODEM: A system for on-demand video lectures, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 27 September 2005, . (Website)

Marián Képesi and Luis Weruaga, Adaptive chirp-based time-frequency analysis of speech signals, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 September 2005, . (Website)

Hauke Schramm, Xavier Aubert, Bart Bakker, Carsten Meyer and Hermann Ney, Modeling spontaneous speech variability in professional dictation, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 September 2005, . (Website)

Tong Zhang, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Stephen E. Levinson, Extraction of pragmatic and semantic salience from spontaneous spoken English, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 16 August 2005, . (Website)

Hilda Hardy, Alan Biermann, R. Bryce Inouye, Ashley McKenzie, Tomek Strzalkowski, Cristian Ursu, Nick Webb and Min Wu, The Amitiés system: Data-driven techniques for automated dialogue, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 15 August 2005, . (Website)

Ye-Yi Wang and Alex Acero, Rapid development of spoken language understanding grammars, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 8 August 2005, . (Website)

Johan Boye, Joakim Gustafson and Mats Wirén, Robust spoken language understanding in a computer game, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 8 August 2005, . (Website)

Christian Raymond, Frédéric Béchet, Renato De Mori and Géraldine Damnati, On the use of finite state transducers for semantic interpretation, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 28 July 2005, . (Website)

Murat Saraçlar and Brian Roark, Utterance classification with discriminative language modeling, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 25 July 2005, . (Website)

Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Katsuhito Sudoh and Mikio Nakano, Incorporating discourse features into confidence scoring of intention recognition results in spoken dialogue systems, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 25 July 2005, . (Website)

Patrick Haffner, Scaling large margin classifiers for spoken language understanding, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 July 2005, . (Website)

Ruiqiang Zhang and Genichiro Kikui, Integration of speech recognition and machine translation: Speech recognition word lattice translation, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 July 2005, . (Website)

Qiang Huang and Stephen Cox, Task-independent call-routing, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 12 July 2005, . (Website)

Yulan He and Steve Young, Spoken language understanding using the Hidden Vector State Model, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 12 July 2005, . (Website)

Giampiero Salvi, Dynamic behaviour of connectionist speech recognition with strong latency constraints, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 14 June 2005, . (Website)

Christopher Dromey, Shawn Nissen, Petrea Nohr and Samuel G. Fletcher, Measuring tongue movements during speech: Adaptation of a magnetic jaw-tracking system, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 14 June 2005, . (Website)

Erhard Rank and Gernot Kubin, An oscillator-plus-noise model for speech synthesis, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 April 2005, . (Website)

Chai Wutiwiwatchai and Sadaoki Furui, A multi-stage approach for Thai spoken language understanding, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 21 April 2005, . (Website)

Kevin M. Indrebo, Richard J. Povinelli and Michael T. Johnson, Sub-banded reconstructed phase spaces for speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 February 2005, . (Website)

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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 (www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops.

FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

-INTERSPEECH (ICSLP)-2006

17-21 September 2006, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Chair: Richard M.Stern, Carnegie Mellon University,USA http://www.interspeech2006.org

-INTERSPEECH (EUROSPEECH)-2007

August 27-31,2007,Antwerp, Belgium
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves, K.U.Nijmegen
Website

-INTERSPEECH (ICSLP)-2008

September 22-26, 2008, Brisbane, New South Wales, Australia
Chairman: Denis Burnham, MARCS, University of West Sydney.

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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

- ISCA Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing (MULTILING 2006)

REMINDER: Early registration deadline is February 10 2006!!
Organized by: Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology
in collaboration with ISCA
9-11 April 2006, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Keynote speaker: Tanja Schultz - Interactive Systems Laboratories, Carnegie Mellon University
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 12 September 2005
Notification of acceptance: 14 October 2005
Deadline of early registration & full paper submission: 10 February 2006
Workshop dates: 9-11 April 2006
Contact: Justus Roux or consult the workshop website

Workshop on Speech Recognition and Intrinsic Variation - Toulouse, France

May 20th 2006, Toulouse, France
Satellite of ICASSP-2006
Website
email address .
PDF
Topics
- Accented speech modeling and recognition,
- Children speech modeling and recognition,
- Non-stationarity and relevant analysis methods,
- Speech spectral and temporal variations,
- Spontaneous speech modeling and recognition,
- Speech variation due to emotions,
- Speech corpora covering sources of variation,
- Acoustic-phonetic correlates of variations,
- Impact and characterization of speech variations on ASR,
- Speaker adaptation and adapted training,
- Novel analysis and modeling structures,
- Man/machine confrontation: ASR and HSR (human speech recognition),
- Disagnosis of speech recognition models,
- Intrinsic variations in multimodal recognition,
- Review papers on these topics are also welcome,
- Application and services scenarios involving strong speech variations
Important dates
Submission deadline: Feb. 1, 2006
Notification acceptance: Mar. 1, 2006
Final manuscript due: Mar. 15, 2006
Progam available: Mar. 22, 2006
Registration deadline: Mar. 29, 2006
Workshop: May 20, 2006 (after ICASSP 2006)
Workshop
This event is organized as a satellite of the ICASSP 2006 conference. The workshop will take place in Toulouse, on 20 May 2006, just after the conference, which ends May 19. The workshop will consist of oral and poster sessions, as well as talks by guest speakers.
More information
Website
email address .
PDF

ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics

28-30 August 2006, Athens Greece
CALL FOR PAPERS
AIMS
The general aims of the Workshop are to bring together researchers of linguistics and related disciplines in a unified context as well as to discuss the development of experimental methodologies in linguistic research with reference to linguistic theory, linguistic models and language applications.
SUBJECTS AND RELATED DISCIPLINES
1. Theory of language
2. Cognitive linguistics
3. Neurolinguistics
4. Speech production
5. Speech acoustics
6. Phonology
7. Morphology
8. Syntax
9. Prosody
10. Speech perception
11. Psycholinguistics
12. Pragmatics
13. Semantics
14. Discourse linguistics
15. Computational linguistics
16. Language technology
MAJOR TOPICS
I. Lexicon
II. Sentence
III. Discourse
IMPORTANT DATES
1 February 2006, deadline of abstract submission
1 March 2006, notification of acceptance
1 April 2006, registration
1 May 2006, camera ready paper submission
28-30 August 2006, Workshop
CHAIR
Antonis Botinis, University of Athens, Greece
Marios Fourakis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Barbara Gawronska, University of Skövde, Sweden
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Aikaterini Bakakou-Orphanou, University of Athens
Antonis Botinis, University of Athens
Christoforos Charalambakis, University of Athens
SECRETARIAT
ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
University of Athens
GR-15784, Athens GREECE
Tel.: +302107277668
Fax: +302107277029
e-mail
Workshop site address

- Second ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on PERCEPTUAL QUALITY OF SYSTEMS

Berlin, Germany, 4 - 6 September 2006
Location: Harnack-Haus, Berlin, Germany, Website
Organizers
Ute Jekosch (IAS, Technical University of Dresden)
Sebastian Moeller (Deutsche Telekom Labs, Technical University of Berlin)
Alexander Raake (Deutsche Telekom Labs, Technical University of Berlin)
Detailed information on the workshop and a Call for Papers will follow in the next ISCApad.

-ITRW on Statistical and Perceptual Audition (SAPA 2006)

A satellite workshop of ICSLP-Interspeech 2006
September 16, 2006, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Website
Topics
Generalized audio analysis
Speech analysis
Music analysis
Audio classification
Scene analysis
Signal separation
Speech recognition
Multi-channel analysis
Important dates
Submission of a 4-6 pages long paper deadline (double column) April 21 2006
Notification of acceptance June 9, 2006

-NOLISP'07: Non linear Speech Processing

May 22-25, 2007 , Paris, France

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

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

-ITRW on Robustness

November 2007, Santiago, Chile

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA

- SPEECH PROSODY 2006

International Conference on Speech Prosody
May 2-5 2006
International Congress Center, Dresden, Germany
For further information, visit our website
Topics
We invite contributions in any of the following areas and also appreciate suggestions for Special Sessions:
* Prosody and the Brain
* Prosody and Speech Production
* Analysis, Formulation and Modeling of Prosody
* Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Prosody
* Cross-linguistic Studies of Prosody
* Prosodic Variability
* Prosody of Dialogues and Spontaneous Speech
* Prosody and Affect
* Prosody and Speech Perception
* Prosody in Speech Synthesis
* Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding
* Prosody in Language Learning
* Auditory-Visual Production and Perception of Prosody
* Pathology of Prosody and Aids for the Impaired
* Annotation and Speech Corpus Creation
* Others
Organizing Committee:
Ruediger Hoffmann - Chair
Hansjoerg Mixdorff - Program Chair
Oliver Jokisch - Technical Chair
Important Dates:
Proposals for special sessions: November 11, 2005
Full 4-page paper submission: December 31, 2005 EXTENDED DEADLINE
Advanced registration deadline: February 28, 2006
Conference: May 2-5, 2006
Post-conference day: May 6, 2006

- ISCA 2nd Workshop on Multimodal User Authentication

A satellite conference of ICASSP 2006 in Toulouse France.
May 11-12,2006
Workshop website
Topics
Iris identification
Eye and face analysis
Speaker recognition/verification
Fingerprint recognition
Audio/Image indexing and retrieval
Joint audio/video processing
Gesture analysis
Signature recognition
Multimodal Fusion and Integration Techniques for Authentication
Intelligent interfaces for biometric systems and data bases and tools for system evaluation
Applications and implementations of multimodal user authentication systems
Privacy issues and standards
Important dates
Electronic submission of photo ready paper January 15, 2006
Notification of acceptance March 8 2006
Advance registration before March 15 2006
Final papers due March 15, 2006

-HLT-NAACL 2006 Call for Demos

2006 Human Language Technology Conference and North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics annual meeting.
New York City, New York
Conference date: June 4-9, 2006
Submission deadline: March 3, 2006
Website
Proposals are invited for the HLT-NAACL 2006 Demonstrations Program. This program is aimed at offering first-hand experience with new systems, providing opportunities to exchange ideas gained from creating systems, and collecting feedback from expert users. It is primarily intended to encourage the early exhibition of research prototypes, but interesting mature systems are also eligible. Submission of a demonstration proposal on a particular topic does not preclude or require a separate submission of a paper on that topic; it is possible that some but not all of the demonstrations will illustrate concepts that are described in companion papers.
Demo Co-Chairs
John Dowding, University of California/Santa Cruz
Natasa Milic-Frayling, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Alexander Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University.
Areas of Interest
We encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of software and hardware related to all areas of human language technology. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, natural language, speech, and text systems for:
- Speech recognition and generation;
- Speech retrieval and summarization;
- Rich transcription of speech;
- Interactive dialogue;
- Information retrieval, filtering, and extraction;
- Document classification, clustering, and summarization;
- Language modeling, text mining, and question answering;
- Machine translation;
- Multilingual and cross-lingual processing;
- Multimodal user interface;
- Mobile language-enabled devices;
- Tools for Ontology, Lexicon, or other NLP resource development;
- Applications in growing domains (web-search, bioinformatics, ...).
Please be referred to the HLT-NAACL 2006 CFP for a more detailed but not necessarily an exhaustive list of relevant topics.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: March 3, 2006
Notification of acceptance: April 6, 2006
Submission of final demo related literature: April 17, 2006
Conference: June 4-9, 2006
Submission
Format
A demo proposal should consist of the following parts:
- An extended abstract of up to four pages, including the title, authors, full contact information, and technical content to be demonstrated. It should give an overview of what the demonstration is aimed to achieve, how the demonstration illustrates novel ideas or late-breaking results, and how it relates to other systems or projects described in the context of other research (i.e., references to related literature).
- A detailed requirement description of hardware, software, and network access expected to be provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be flexible in their requirements (possibly preparing different demos for different logistical situations). Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely must be provided with. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but at this point we cannot guarantee anything beyond the space and power supply.
- A concise outline of the demo script, including the accompanying narrative, and either a web address to access the demo or visual aids (e.g., screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). The demo script should be no more than 6 pages.
The demo abstract must be submitted electronically in the Portable Document Format (PDF). It should follow the format guidelines for the main conference papers. Authors are encouraged to use the style files provided on the HLT-NAACL 2006 website. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that their proposals use no unusual format features and can be printed on a standard Postscript printer.
Procedure
Demo proposals should be submitted electronically to the demo co-chairs.
Reviewing
Demo proposals will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to the conference, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, and usability, as well as potential logistical constraints.
Publication
The accepted demo abstracts will be published in the Companion Volumne to the Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2006 Conference.
Further Details
Further details on the date, time, and format of the demonstration session(s) will be determined and provided at a later date. Please send any inquiries to the demo co-chairs.

-HLT-NAACL 2006

Call for Tutorial Proposals
Proposals are invited for the Tutorial Program for HLT-NAACL 2006, to be held at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge from June 4 to 9, 2006. The tutorial day is June 4, 2006. The HLT-NAACL conferences combine the HLT (Human Language Technology) and NAACL (North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) conference series, and bring together researchers in NLP, IR, and speech. For details, see our website .
We seek half-day tutorials covering topics in Speech Processing, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing, including their theoretical foundations, intersections, and applications. Tutorials will normally move quickly, but they are expected to be accessible, understandable, and of interest to a broad community of researchers, preferably from multiple areas of Human Language Technology. Our target is to have four to six tutorials.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Proposals for tutorials should be submitted by electronic mail, in plain text, PDF, Microsoft Word, or HTML. They should be submitted, by the date shown below, by email. The subject line should be: "HLT-NAACL'06 TUTORIAL PROPOSAL".
Proposals should contain:
1. A title and brief (2-page max) description of the tutorial topic and content. Include a brief outline of the tutorial structure showing that the tutorial's core content can be covered in a three hours (two 1.5 hour sessions). Tutorials should be accessible to the broadest practical audience. In keeping with the focus of the conference, please highlight any topics spanning disciplinary boundaries that you plan to address. (These are not strictly required, but they are a big plus.)
2. An estimate of the audience size. If approximately the same tutorial has been given elsewhere, please list previous venues and approximate audience sizes. (There's nothing wrong with repeat tutorials; we'd just like to know.)
3. The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests and areas of expertise.
4. A description of special requirements for technical needs (computer infrastructure, etc). Tutorials must be financially self-supporting. The conference organizers will establish registration rates that will cover the room, audio-visual equipment, internet access, snacks for breaks, and reproduction the tutorial notes. A description of any additional anticipated expenses must be included in the proposal.
PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS
Accepted tutorial speakers will be asked to provide descriptions of their tutorials suitable for inclusion in all of: email announcements, the conference registration material, the printed program, the website, and the proceedings. This will involve producing text and/or HTML and/or LaTeX/Word/PDF versions of appropriate lengths.
Tutorial notes will be printed and distributed by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). These materials, containing at least copies of the slides that will be presented and a bibliography for the material that will be covered, must be submitted by the date indicated below to allow adequate time for reproduction. Presenters retain copyright for their materials, but ACL requires that presenters execute a non-exclusive distribution license to permit distribution to participants and sales to others.
Tutorial presenters will be compensated in accordance with current ACL policies; see details .
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission: Jan 20, 2006
Notification: Feb 10, 2006
Descriptions due: Mar 1, 2006
Course material due: May 1, 2006
Tutorial date: Jun 4, 2006
TUTORIAL CHAIRS
Jim Glass, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christopher Manning, Stanford University
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland

- Call for papers:IEEE Odyssey 2006: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop

28 - 30 June 2006
Ritz Carlton Hotel, Spa & Casino
San Juan, Puerto Rico

The IEEE Odyssey 2006 Workshop on Speaker and Language Recognition will be held in scenic San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. This Odyssey is sponsored by the IEEE, is an ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop of the ISCA Speaker and Language Characterization SIG, and is hosted by The Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
Topics
Topics of interest include speaker recognition (verification, identification, segmentation, and clustering); text-dependent and -independent speaker recognition; multispeaker training and detection; speaker characterization and adaptation; features for speaker recognition; robustness in channels; robust classification and fusion; speaker recognition corpora and evaluation; use of extended training data; speaker recognition with speech recognition; forensics, multimodality, and multimedia speaker recognition; speaker and language confidence estimation; language, dialect, and accent recognition; speaker synthesis and transformation; biometrics; human recognition; and commercial applications.
Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers written in English via the Odyssey website. The style guide, templates, and submission form can be downloaded from the Odyssey website. Two members of the Scientific Committee will review each paper. At least one author of each paper is required to register. The workshop proceedings will be published on CD- ROM.
Schedule
Proposal due 15 January 2006
Notification of acceptance 27 February 2006
Final papers due 30 March 2006
Preliminary program 21 April 2006
Workshop 28-30 June 2006
Registration and Information
Registration will be handled via the Odyssey website.
NIST SRE ‘06 Workshop
The NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2006 Workshop will be held immediately before Odyssey ‘06 at the same location on 25-27 June. Everyone is invited to evaluate their systems via the NIST SRE. The NIST Workshop is only for participants and by prearrangement. Please contact Dr. Alvin Martin to participate and see the NIST website for details.
Chairs
Kay Berkling, Co-Chair, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
Pedro A. Torres-Carrasquillo, Co-Chair, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA

- 7th SIGdial workshop on discourse and dialogue

Sydney (co-located with COLING/ACL)
June 15-16,2006 (tentative dates)
Website
Contact: Dr Jan Alexandersson

-International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT2006)

ATR Kyoto (Japan)
November 30-December 1 2006
Website

-IV Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla

Zaragoza, Spain
November _-10, 2006
Website

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-Call for papers International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'2006) Special Session on Speaker Recognition

Singapore Dec. 13-16, 2006
Conference website
Topics
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 before registration opens (February 1, 2006). 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
* Feb. 01, 2006: On-line registration open
* Mar. 01, 2006: Development data made available
* Apr. 03, 2006: Test data made available
* Apr. 14, 2006: Test results due
* Apr. 28, 2006: Results released to participants
* Jun. 01, 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 any enquiries to chairman of the session Dr. Thomas Fang Zheng , Tsinghua Univ., Beijing.

FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS

-TC-STAR Workshop on Speech Translation: Trento Italy

TC-STAR Workshop on Speech Translation
Trento, 29-31 March 2006 (before EACL 2006)
First Call For Participation
This workshop is sponsored by the European Integrated Project TC-STAR (Technologies and Corpora for Speech-to-speech Translation Research). It aims to expand outside the TC-STAR research community and to work in the areas of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Spoken Language Translation (SLT).
Topics
Students and researchers in the field of human language technology are invited to contribute to the following topics proposed by the organizers:
* Integration of ASR and SLT
* System combination in ASR and SLT

Some months before the workshop, shared tasks will be defined and language resources and tools for them will be made available to registered participants. The considered application domain will be the translation of European Parliament speeches from Spanish to English, and vice versa. For both tasks, word graphs and n-best lists generated by different ASR and SLT systems will be provided. Training and testing collections to develop and evaluate a SLT system will distributed, too.

Participants will be given the opportunity to present and discuss their results at the workshop and to attend tutorials held by experts in the field. A limited number of grants will be made available to students and junior researchers to cover lodging and food expenses.
Organizers:
Marcello Federico, ITC-irst, Trento
Ralf Schlüter, RWTH, Aachen
Contact

-TC-STAR Second Evaluation Campaign 2006

TC-STAR is an European integrated project focusing on Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST). To encourage significant advances in all SST technologies, annual competitive evaluations are organized. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Translation (SLT) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) are evaluated independently and within an end-to-end system. The project targets a selection of unconstrained conversational speech domains-speeches and broadcast news-and three languages: European English, European Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. The first evaluation took place in March 2005 for ASR and SLT and September 2005 for TTS. TC-STAR welcomes outside participants in its 2nd evaluation of January-February 2006. This participation is free of charge. The TC-STAR 2006 evaluation campaign will consider:
· SLT in the following directions :
o Chinese-to-English (Broadcast News)
o Spanish-to-English (European Parliament plenary speeches)
o English-to-Spanish (European Parliament plenary speeches)
· ASR in the following languages :
o English (European Parliament plenary speeches)
o Spanish (European Parliament plenary speeches)
o Mandarin Chinese (Broadcast News)
· TTS in Chinese, English, and Spanish under the following conditions:
o Complete system: participants use their own training data
o Voice conversion intralingual and crosslingual, expressive speech: data provided by TC-STAR
o Component evaluation
For ASR and SLT, training data will be made available by the TC-STAR project for English and Spanish and can be purchased at LDC for Chinese. Development data will be provided by the TC-STAR project. Legal issues regarding the data will be detailed in the 2nd Call For Participation.
All participants will be given the opportunity to present and discuss their results in the TC-STAR evaluation workshop in Barcelona in June 2006.
Tentative schedule:
Registration: October 2005 (early expression of interest is welcome)
ASR evaluation: from mid January to end of January 2006
SLT evaluation: from begin February to mid February 2006
TTS evaluation: from begin February to end of February 2006
Release: April 2006
Submission of papers: May 2006
Workshop: June 2006
Contact: Djamel Mostefa (ELDA)
tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33

- SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TONAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGES TAL 2006

La Rochelle (France) April 27-29th, 2006
CALL FOR PAPERS
Jointly organised by La Rochelle University and Paris 3 University( Phonetics & Phonology laboratory, UMR 7018 CNRS).
Satellite conference of Prosody 2006 that will be held in Dresden (Germany) in May 02-05, 2006.
The aim of the TAL 2006 conference is to bring together researchers interested in all areas of tone languages.
The conference welcomes papers on the following topics:
- typology and phonology of tone languages
- tone languages acquisition
- speech physiology and pathology in tone languages
- tones production
- perception in tone languages
- tone languages prosody
- modelling of tones and intonation
- speech processing in tone languages
- cognitive aspects of tone languages
- others
PAPER SUBMISSION
The deadline for full paper submission (4 pages, 2 columns, simple-spaced, Time New Roman 10 points) is January 15, 2006.
Paper submission is possibly exclusively via the conference website, in accordance with the submission guidelines. No previously published papers should be submitted.
Each corresponding author will be notified by e-mail of the acceptance of the paper by January, 31, 2006.
IMPORTANT DATES
Intention of participation: before October 30, 2005
Full paper submission deadline: January 15, 2006
Notification of paper acceptance/rejection: February 1st, 2006
Early registration deadline: February 28, 2005
final paper: March 31, 2005
INFORMATIONS
If you want to be updated as more information becomes available, please send an email.

-Call for papers: 3rd Joint Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms

Washington DC, USA
1-3 May 2006
Workshop website
OVERVIEW
The third MLMI workshop is coming to Washington DC, USA and will feature talks (including a number of invited speakers), posters, and demonstrations. In common with MLMI'05, the workshop will be immediately followed by the NIST meeting recognition workshop, centering on the Rich Transcription 2006 Meeting Recognition (RT-06) evaluation. This workshop will take place at the same location during 3-4 May 2006.
Topics
The following areas of interest, related to multimodal interaction:
* human-human communication modeling
* speech processing
* visual processing
* multimodal processing, fusion and fission
* multimodal discourse and dialog modeling
* human-human interaction modeling
* multimodal indexing, structuring, summarization and presentation
* multimodal annotation
* applications and HCI issues
* machine learning applied to the above
Workshop proceedings will be published by Springer, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS
Submissions may be:
* full papers for oral or poster presentation, and inclusion in the proceedings
* extended abstracts for poster presentation only
* demonstration proposals
Full papers and extended abstracts should be submitted as PDF, and follow the Springer LNCS format for 'Proceedings and Other Multiauthor Volumes'
Length:
Full papers - 12 pages maximum
Extended abstracts - 2 pages maximum
Submissions should be made following the link on the workshop website.
Final versions of accepted full papers, which will appear in the proceedings will be due approximately 2 months after the workshop.
Demonstration proposals should be made using the form on the workshop website
IMPORTANT DATES
17 February 2006: Submission of full papers
10 March 2006: Submission of extended abstracts and demonstration proposals
24 March 2006: Acceptance notifications
1-3 May 2006: MLMI'06 workshop
30 June 2006: Submission of final versions of accepted full papers

MLMI is supported by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), through the AMI and CHIL Integrated Projects and the PASCAL Network of Excellence funded by the FP6 IST priority of the European Union, and through the Swiss National Science Foundation National Centre of Competence in Research IM2.
AMI
CHIL
PASCAL
IM2.

- LREC 2006 - 5th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center, GENOA - ITALY
Deadlines for proposals of panes, workshops, tutorials and for paper submissions are extended to October 20
MAIN CONFERENCE: 24-25-26 MAY 2006
WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 22-23 and 27-28 MAY 2006
Conference web site
The fifth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and organisations.
CONFERENCE TOPICS
Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs)
Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation
Special Highlights
LREC targets the integration of different types of LRs (spoken, written, and other modalities), and of the respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues which are common to different types of LRs and language technologies, such as dialogue strategy, written and spoken translation, domain-specific data, multimodal communication or multimedia document processing, and will organise, in addition to the usual tracks, common sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs.
The 2006 Conference emphasises in particular the importance of promoting:
- synergies and integration between (multilingual) LRs and Semantic Web technologies,
- new paradigms for sharing and integrating LRs and LT coming from different sources,
- communication with neighbouring fields for applications in e-government and administration,
- common evaluation campaigns for the objective evaluation of the performances of different systems,
- systems and products (also industrial ones) based on large-size and high quality LRs.
LREC therefore encourages submissions of papers, panels, workshops, tutorials on the use of LRs in these areas.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations should consist of about 1000 words.
A limited number of panels, workshops and tutorials is foreseen: proposals will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.
For panels, please send a brief description, including an outline of the intended structure (topic, organiser, panel moderator, tentative list of panelists).
For workshops and tutorials, see the dedicated section below.
Only electronic submissions will be considered. Further details about submission will be circulated in the 2nd Call for Papers to be issued at the end of July and posted on the LREC web site (www.lrec-conf.org).
IMPORTANT DATES
* Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 14 October 2005
* Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced demos: 14 October 2005
* Notification of acceptance of panels, workshops and tutorials proposals: 7 November 2005
* Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced demos: 16 January 2006
* Final versions for the proceedings: 20 February 2006
* Conference: 24-26 May 2006
* Pre-conference workshops and tutorials: 22 and 23 May 2006
* Post-conference workshops and tutorials: 27 and 28 May 2006
WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS
Pre-conference workshops and tutorials will be organised on 22 and 23 May 2006, and post-conference workshops and tutorials on 27 and 28 May 2006. A workshop/tutorial can be either half day or full day. Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be no longer than three pages, and include:
* A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the workshop/tutorial will address.
* The reasons why the workshop/tutorial is of interest this time.
* The names, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers and email addresses of the workshop/tutorial organising committee, which should consist of at least three people knowledgeable in the field, coming from different institutions.
* The name of the member of the workshop/tutorial organising committee designated as the contact person.
* A time schedule of the workshop/tutorial and a preliminary programme.
* A summary of the intended workshop/tutorial call for participation.
* A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room requirements.
CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS
Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising meetings should contact the ELDA office .
Email
Web Elra
Web Elda

-XXVIèmes Journées d'Étude sur la Parole

12-16 juin 2006
Bretagne
Website
OBJECTIFS
Themes
Les principaux thèmes retenus pour la conférence sont:
1 Production de parole
2 Acoustique de la parole
3 Perception de parole
4 Phonétique et phonologie
5 Prosodie
6 Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole
7 Reconnaissance de la langue et du locuteur
8 Modèles de langage
9 Synthèse de la parole
10 Analyse, codage et compression de la parole
11 Applications à composantes orales (dialogue, indexation...)
12 Évaluation, corpus et ressources
13 Psycholinguistique
14 Acquisition de la parole et du langage
15 Apprentissage d'une langue seconde
16 Pathologies de la parole
17 Autres ...
DATES À RETENIR
Date limite de soumission des propositions 1 mars 2006
Notification aux auteurs de l'acceptation ou du refus 3 avril 2006
Soumission des articles finaux 1 mai 2006
Date du congrès 12-16 juin 2006
CONTACTS
Pour les questions scientifiques, contactez Pascal Perrier, Président de l'AFCP.
Pour des renseignements pratiques, jep2006@irisa.fr.

-PERCEPTION AND INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES (PIT06)

Kloster Irsee in southern Germany from June 19 to June 21, 2006.
Website.
Submissions will be short/demo or full papers of 4-10 pages.
Important dates
January 31, 2006: Deadline for Long, Short and Demo Papers
March 15, 2006: Notification of acceptance/rejection
April 1, 2006: Deadline for final submission of accepted paper
April 1, 2006: Deadline for advance registration
June 7, 2006: Final programme available on the web
It is envisioned to publish the proceedings in the LNCS/LNAI Series by Springer.
PIT'06 Organising Committee:
Elisabeth André, Laila Dybkjaer, Wolfgang Minker, Heiko Neumann, Michael Weber, Marcus Hennecke, Gregory Baratoff

- 9th Western Pacific Acoustics Conference(WESPAC IX 2006)

June 26-28, 2006
Seoul, Korea
Program Highlights of WESPAC IX 2006
(by Session Topics)
* Human Related Topics- Aeroacoustics
* Product Oriented Topics
* Speech Communication
* Analysis: Through Software and Hardware
* Underwater Acoustics
* Physics: Fundamentals and Applications
* Other Hot Topics in Acoustics
WESPAC IX 2006 Secretariat
SungKyunKwan University, Acoustics Research Laboratory
300 Chunchun-dong, Jangan-ku, Suwon 440-746, Republic of Korea
Tel: +82-31-290-5957 Fax: +82-31-290-7055
E-mail
Website

- Call for papers:11-th International Conference SPEECH AND COMPUTER (SPECOM'2006)

25-29 June 2006
St. Petersburg, Russia
Conference website
Organized by St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS)
Supported by SIMILAR NoE, INTAS association, ELSNET and ISCA.
Topics
- Signal processing and feature extraction;
- Multimodal analysis and synthesis;
- Speech recognition and understanding;
- Natural language processing;
- Speaker and language identification;
- Speech synthesis;
- Speech perception and speech disorders;
- Speech and language resources;
- Applied systems for Human-Computer Interaction;
IMPORTANT DATES
- Papers and proposals submission start: 15 January 2006
- Proposals for special sessions: 1 February 2006
- Full paper submission: 1 March 2006
- Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2006
- Early registration deadline: 15 April 2006
- Conference SPECOM: 25-29 June 2006
The conference venue and dates were selected so that the attendees can possibly be exposed to St. Petersburg unique and wonderful phenomenon known as the White Nights, for our city is the world's only metropolis where such a phenomenon occurs every summer.
CONTACT INFORMATION
SPECOM'2006, SPIIRAS, 39, 14th line, St-Petersburg, 199178, RUSSIA
Tel.: +7 812 3287081 Fax: +7 812 3284450
E-mail
Web

- Call for papers:AAAI Workshop on Statistical and Empirical Approaches for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Boston, Massachusetts, USA
16 or 17 July 2006
Workshop website
OVERVIEW
This workshop seeks to draw new work on statistical and empirical approaches for spoken dialogue systems. We welcome both theoretical and applied work, addressing issues such as:
* Representations and data structures suitable for automated learning of dialogue models
* Machine learning techniques for automatic generation and improvement of dialogue managers
* Machine learning techniques for ontology construction and integration
* Techniques to accurately simulate human-computer dialogue
* Creation, use, and evaluation of user models
* Methods for automatic evaluation of dialogue systems
* Integration of spoken dialogue systems into larger intelligent agents, such as robots
* Investigations into appropriate optimization criteria for spoken dialogue systems
* Applications and real-world examples of spoken dialogue systems incorporating statistical or empirical techniques
* Use of statistical or empirical techniques within multi-modal dialogue systems
* Application of statistical or empirical techniques to multi-lingual spoken dialogue systems
* Rapid development of spoken dialogue systems from database content and corpora
* Adaptation of dialogue systems to new domains and languages
* The use and application of techniques and methods from related areas, such as cognitive science, operations research, emergence models, etc.
* Any other aspect of the application of statistical or empirical techniques to Spoken Dialogue Systems.
WORKSHOP FORMAT
This will be a one-day workshop immediately before the main AAAI conference and will consist mainly of presentations of new work by participants.
The day will also feature a keynote talk from Satinder Singh (University of Michigan), who will speak about using Reinforcement Learning in the spoken dialogue domain.
Interaction will be encouraged and sufficient time will be left for discussion of the work presented. To facilitate a collaborative environment, the workshop size will be limited to authors, presenters, and a small number of other participants.
Proceedings of the workshop will be published as an AAAI technical report.
SUBMISSION AND REVIEW PROCESS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 6-page, camera-ready papers via email. Authors are requested to use the AAAI paper template and follow the AAAI formatting guidelines.
AAAI paper template
AAAI formatting guidelines.
Authors are asked to email papers to Jason Williams.
All papers will be reviewed electronically by three reviewers. Comments will be provided and time will be given for incorporation of comments into accepted papers.
For accepted papers, at least one author from each paper is expected to register and attend. If no authors of an accepted paper register for the workshop, the paper may be removed from the workshop proceedings. Finally, authors of accepted papers will be expected to sign a standard AAAI-06 "Permission to distribute" form.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Friday 17 March 2006 : Camera-ready paper submission deadline
* Monday 24 April 2006 : Acceptance notification
* Friday 5 May 2006 : AAAI-06 and workshop registration opens
* Friday 12 May 2006 : Final camera-ready papers and "AAAI Permission to distribute" forms due
* Friday 19 May 2006 : AAAI-06 Early registration deadline
* Friday 16 June 2006 : AAAI-06 Late registration deadline
* Sunday 16 or Monday 17 July 2006 : Workshop
* Tuesday-Thursday 18-20 July 2006 : Main AAAI-06 Conference
ORGANIZERS
Pascal Poupart, University of Waterloo
Stephanie Seneff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jason D. Williams, University of Cambridge
Steve Young, University of Cambridge
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
For additional information please contact: Jason D. Williams
Submissions
Phone: +44 7786 683 013
Fax: +44 1223 332662
Cambridge University
Department of Engineering
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1PZ
United Kingdom

-Call for papers: 2006 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing

(Formerly the IEEE Workshop on Neural Networks for Signal Processing)
September 6 - 8, 2006, Maynooth, Ireland
MLSP'2006 webpage
Deadlines:
Paper Submission March 31, 2006
Data analysis competition March 1, 2006
The sixteenth in a series of IEEE workshops on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) will be held in Maynooth, Ireland, September 6-8, 2006. Maynooth is located 15 miles west of Dublin in Co. Kildare, Ireland?s equestrian and golfing heartland (and home to the 2006 Ryder Cup). It is a pleasant 18th century planned town, best known for its seminary, St. Patrick's College, where Catholic Priests have been trained since 1795. Co.Kildare.
The workshop, formally known as Neural Networks for Signal Processing (NNSP), is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing society (SPS) and organized by the MLSP technical committee of the IEEE SPS. The name of the NNSP technical committee, and hence the workshop, was changed to Machine Learning for Signal Processing in September 2003 to better reflect the areas represented by the technical committee.
Topics
The workshop will feature keynote addresses, technical presentations, special sessions and tutorials, all of which will be included in the registration. Papers are solicited for, but not limited to, the following areas:
Learning Theory and Modeling; Bayesian Learning and Modeling; Sequential Learning; Sequential Decision Methods; Information-theoretic Learning; Neural Network Learning; Graphical and Kernel Models; Bounds on performance; Blind Signal Separation and Independent Component Analysis; Signal Detection; Pattern Recognition and Classification, Bioinformatics Applications; Biomedical Applications and Neural Engineering; Intelligent Multimedia and Web Processing; Communications Applications; Speech and Audio Processing Applications; Image and Video Processing Applications.
A data analysis and signal processing competition is being organized in conjunction with the workshop. This competition is envisioned to become an annual event where problems relevant to the mission and interests of the MLSP community will be presented with the goal of advancing the current state-of-the-art in both theoretical and practical aspects. The problems are selected to reflect the current trends to evaluate existing approaches on common benchmarks as well as areas where crucial developments are thought to be necessary. Details of the competition can be found on the workshop website.
Selected papers from MLSP 2006 will be considered for a special issue of Neurocomputing to appear in 2007. The winners of the data analysis and signal processing competition will also be invited to contribute to the special issue.
Paper Submission Procedure
Prospective authors are invited to submit a double column paper of up to six pages using the electronic submission procedure described at the workshop homepage. Accepted papers will be published in a bound volume by the IEEE after the workshop and a CDROM volume will be distributed at the workshop.
Chairs
General Chair:Seán MCLOONE, NUI Maynooth,
Technical Chair:Tülay ADALI , University of Maryland, Baltimore County

- MMSP 2006 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing

October 3-6th, 2006
Fairmont Empress Hotel
Victoria,BC, Canada
Website.
Topics
Multimedia processing: all modalities
Multimedia data bases
Multimedia security
Multimedia networking
Multimedia Systems Design, Implementation and Applications
Human Machine Interfaces and Interaction using multimodalities
Human Perception
Standards
Important dates
Special sessions (see website) March 6, 2006
Papers April 8th,2006
Notification of acceptance June 8th, 2006
Camera ready paper July 8th, 2006

-Call for papers: Workshop on Multimedia Content Representation, Classification and Security (MRCS)

September 11 - 13, 2006
Istanbul, Turkey
Workshop website
In cooperation with
The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
The European Association for Signal-Image Processing (EURASIP)
GENERAL CHAIRS
Bilge Gunsel,Istanbul Technical Univ.,Turkey
Anil K. Jain, Michigan State University, USA
TECHNICAL PROGRAM CHAIR
Murat Tekalp,Koc University, Turkey
SPECIAL SESSIONS CHAIR
Kivanc Mihcak, Microsoft Research, USA
Prospective authors are invited to submit extended summaries of not more than six (6) pages including results, figures and references. Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Conference Proceedings will be available on site. Please check the website for further information.
IMPORTANT DATES
Special Sessions (contact the special sesions chair): March 10, 2006
Submission of Extended Summary: April 10, 2006
Notificatin of Acceptance: June 10, 2006
Camera-ready Paper Submission Due: July 10, 2006
Topics
The areas of interest include but are not limited to:
- Feature extraction, multimedia content representation and classification techniques
- Multimedia signal processing
- Authentication, content protection and digital rights management
- Audio/Video/Image Watermarking/Fingerprinting
- Information hiding, steganography, steganalysis
- Audio/Video/Image hashing and clustering techniques
- Evolutionary algorithms in content based multimedia data representation, indexing and retrieval
- Transform domain representations
- Multimedia mining
- Benchmarking and comparative studies
- Multimedia applications (broadcasting, medical, biometrics, content aware networks, CBIR.)

-Ninth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2006)

Brno, Czech Republic, 11-15 September 2006
Website
The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International Speech Communication Association.
TSD SERIES
TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.
TOPICS
Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):
text corpora and tagging
transcription problems in spoken corpora
sense disambiguation
links between text and speech oriented systems
parsing issues, especially parsing problems in spoken texts
multi-lingual issues, especially multi-lingual dialogue systems
information retrieval and information extraction
text/topic summarization
machine translation semantic networks and ontologies
semantic web speech modeling
speech segmentation
speech recognition
search in speech for IR and IE
text-to-speech synthesis
dialogue systems
development of dialogue strategies
prosody in dialogues
emotions and personality modeling
user modeling
knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue applied systems and software facial animation visual speech synthesis Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.
ORGANIZERS
Frederick Jelinek, USA (general chair)
Hynek Hermansky, USA (executive chair)
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Eduard Hovy, USA
Louise Guthrie, GB
James Pustejovsky, USA
FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE
The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and a poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.
Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal interactions.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
The conference program will include oral presentations and poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of the issues raised. The conference will welcome three keynote speakers - Eduard Hovy, Louise Guthrie and James Pustejovsky, and it will offer two special panels devoted to Emotions and Search in Speech.
IMPORTANT DATES
March 15 2006 ............ Submission of abstract
March 22 2006 ............ Submission of papers
May 15 2006 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2006 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
July 23 2006 ............. Submission of demonstration abstracts
July 30 2006 ............. Notification of acceptance for demonstrations sent to the authors
September 11-15 2006 ..... Conference date
The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time of the conference.
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
of the conference will be English.
ADDRESS
All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to
Dana Hlavackova, TSD 2006
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
phone: +420-5-49 49 33 29
fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
email
LOCATION
Brno is the the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the south-east part of the Czech Republic. It had been a Royal City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural center of the region.
Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London and Munich and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

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