ISCA Scientific Achievement Medal for 2010

Professor Steve Young

The ISCA Board has great pleasure in announcing the ISCA Scientific

Achievement Medalist for 2010: Prof. Steve Young. I hope that you all join

us in congratulating him.  To hear Steve's plenary talk will be one more

excellent reason to come to Interspeech in Japan, next year. For me, it will

be a great honor to introduce him, and list his outstanding contributions to

spoken language processing.

Congratulations, Steve!

Professor Isabel Trancoso

ISCA President

In the closing ceremony of Interspeech 2009, the ISCA president announced that she had finally received the acceptance from Thomson Reuters (ISI) to index Interspeech Proceedings of 2006 and 2007. The day after, she received the same answer from the Engineering Index of Elsevier. She will now start the process of indexing the proceedings of 2008 and 2009 in these two databases and continue the efforts concerning other major citation indexes.

Dear students,

The International Speech Communication Association ISCA is now opening an online system to build a database of résumés of researchers/students working in the various fields of speech communication.
The goal of  this service is to build a centralized place where many interested employers/corporations can access and search for potential candidates.

Please be advised that the posting service will be updated at 4 month intervals. Next switch will be mid October 2009.

We encourage all of you to upload an updated version of your résumé to: http://www.isca-speech.org/resumes/ and wish you good luck with a fruitful career.


Professor Helen Meng 

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERSPEECH is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on issues surrounding the science and technology of spoken language processing both in humans and in machines. It is our great pleasure to host INTERSPEECH 2010 in Japan, the birthplace of ICSLP, which has held two ICSLPs, in Kobe and Yokohama, in the past. The theme of INTERSPEECH 2010 is "Spoken Language Processing for All Ages, Health Conditions, Native Languages and Environments". INTERSPEECH 2010 emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach covering all aspects of speech science and technology spanning the basic theories to applications. Besides regular oral and poster sessions, plenary talks by internationally renowned experts, tutorials, exhibits, and special sessions are planned. We invite you to submit original papers in any related area, including but not limited to:

HUMAN SPEECH PRODUCTION, PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION

* Human speech production * Human speech and sound perception * Linguistics, phonology and phonetics * Discourse and dialogue * Prosody (e.g. production, perception, prosodic structure, modeling) * Paralinguistic and nonlinguistic cues (e.g. emotion and expression) * Physiology and pathology of spoken language * Spoken language acquisition, development and learning * Speech and other modalities (e.g. facial expression, gesture)

SPEECH AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY

* Speech analysis and representation * Speech segmentation * Audio segmentation and classification * Speaker turn detection * Speech enhancement * Speech coding and transmission * Voice conversion * Speech synthesis and spoken language generation * Automatic speech recognition * Spoken language understanding * Language and dialect identification * Cross-lingual and multi-lingual speech processing * Multimodal/multimedia signal processing (including sign languages) * Speaker characterization and recognition * Signal processing for music and song * Spoken language technology for prosthesis, rehabilitation, wellness and welfare

SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS

* Spoken dialogue systems * Systems for information extraction/retrieval * Systems for spoken language translation * Applications for aged and handicapped persons * Applications for learning and education * Other applications

RESOURCES, STANDARDIZATION AND EVALUATION

 * Spoken language resources and annotation * Evaluation and standardization of spoken language systems

 PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers for the INTERSPEECH 2010 proceedings should be up to four pages in length and conform to the format given in the paper preparation guidelines and author kits which will be available on the INTERSPEECH 2010 website along with the Final Call for Papers. Optionally, authors may submit additional files, such as multimedia files, to be included on the Proceedings CD-ROM. Authors shall also declare that their contributions are original and not being submitted for publication elsewhere (e.g. another conference, workshop, or journal). Papers must be submitted via the on-line paper submission system, which will open early in 2010. The deadline for submitting a paper is 30 April 2010. This date will not be extended. Inquiries regarding paper submissions should be directed via email to submission@interspeech2010.org.

LANGUAGE

The working language of the conference is English.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: 30 April 2010

Notification of acceptance or rejection: 2 July 2010

Camera-ready paper due: 9 July 2010

Early registration deadline: 28 July 2010

Conference dates: 26-30 September 2010

WEBSITE & MAIL

http://www.interspeech2010.org/

mail: office@interspeech2010.org

VENUE

Makuhari Messe International Conference Hall Nakase 2-1, Mihama-ku, Chiba-city Chiba 261-0023 Japan http://www.m-messe.co.jp/en/access/index.html

Interspeech 2011

Palazzo dei Congressi,  Italy, August 27-31, 2011.

Organizing committee

Piero Cosi (General Chair),

Renato di Mori (General Co-Chair),

Claudia Manfredi (Local Chair),

Roberto Pieraccini (Technical Program Chair),

Maurizio Omologo (Tutorials),

Giuseppe Riccardi (Plenary Sessions).

More information www.interspeech2011.org

 The Multilingual Information Access Technology Transfer Day will take place on 8 December 2009 in  the World Business Alliance Center in Berlin. The event is promoted by the TrebleCLEF project.

The registration is still open. Participation is free of charge but places are limited.

Register now at http://celct.isti.cnr.it/MLIA-Day/

********************************************************************************************************************************************************
The aim of the MLIA Technology Transfer Day is to facilitate a two-way communication of research priorities, advances and results between researchers, software developers and users.

The event will begin with the presentation of a set of Best Practice recommendations in the areas of MLIA System Development and Search Assistance, Test Collection Creation, Evaluation Methodologies and Language Processing Technologies.

Key speakers from the business and application communities will present their experiences, requirements and problems with respect to Multilingual Information Access.

There will also be a demo session and  a panel discussion on the current state of the art, focusing on those areas where the application communities have problems in identifying  the best solutions for their particular requirements.

Join us for an in-depth discussion on key issues in the Multilingual Information Access domain.

For more details contact:

Pamela Forner, CELCT, at  forner@celct.it
Tel: +39 0461 314804

IMPORTANT NOTE

 Special Highlight: Contribute to building the LREC2010 Map!

Proposition de sujet de thèse 2009
Ecole Doctorale EDISCE (http://www-sante.ujf-grenoble.fr/edisce/)
Financement ANR (http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~schwartz/Multistap/Multistap.html)

Analyse de scènes de parole : le problème du liage audio-visuo-moteur à la lumière de données comportementales et neurophysiologiques


Deux questions importantes traversent les recherches actuelles sur le traitement cognitif de la parole : la question de la multisensorialité (comment se combinent les informations auditives et visuelles dans le cerveau) et celle des interactions perceptuo-motrices.

Une question manquante est selon nous celle du « liage » (binding) : comment dans ces processus de traitement auditif ou audiovisuel, le cerveau parvient-il à « mettre ensemble » les informations pertinentes, à éliminer les « bruits », à construire les « flux de parole » pertinents avant la prise de décision ? Plus précisément, les objets élémentaires de la scène de parole sont les phonèmes, et des modules spécialisés auditifs, visuels, articulatoires contribuent au processus d'identification phonétique, mais il n'a pas été possible jusqu'à présent d'isoler leur contribution respective, ni la manière dont ces contributions sont fusionnées. Des expériences récentes permettent d'envisager le processus d'identification phonétique comme étant de nature non hériarchique, et essentiellement instancié par des opérations associatives. La thèse consistera à développer d’autres paradigmes expérimentaux originaux, mais aussi à mettre en place des expériences de neurophysiologie et neuroimagerie (EEG, IRMf) disponibles au laboratoire et dans son environnement Grenoblois, afin de déterminer la nature et le fonctionnement des processus de groupement audiovisuel des scènes de parole, en relation avec le mécanismes de production.

Cette thèse se réalisera dans le cadre d’un projet ANR « Multistap » (Multistabilité et groupement perceptif dans l’audition et dans la parole » http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~schwartz/Multistap/Multistap.html). Ce projet fournira à la fois le support de financement pour la bourse de thèse, et un environnement stimulant pour le développement des recherches, en partenariat avec des équipes de spécialistes d’audition et de vision, de Paris (DEC ENS), Lyon (LNSCC) et Toulouse (Cerco).

Responsables
Jean-Luc Schwartz (DR CNRS, HDR) : 04 76 57 47 12,
Frédéric Berthommier (CR CNRS) : 04 76 57 48 28
Jean-Luc.Schwartz, Frederic.Berthommier@gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr

PhD position in Automatic Speech Recognition
=====================================

Starting in september-october 2009.

The ASH (Attelage de Systèmes Hétérogènes) project is a project funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency). Three French academic laboratories are involved: LIUM (University of Le Mans), LIA (University of Avignon) and IRISA (Rennes).

The main objective of the ASH project is to define and experiment an original methodological framework for the integration of heterogeneous automatic speech recognition systems. Integrating heterogeneous systems, and hence heterogeneous sources of knowledge, is a key issue in ASR but also in many other applicative fields concerned with knowledge integration and multimodality.

Clearly, the lack of a generic framework to integrate systems operating with different viewpoints, different types of knowledge and at different levels is a strong limitation that needs to be overcome: the definition of such a framework is the fundamental challenge of this work.

By defining a rigorous and generic framework to integrate systems, significant scientific progresses are expected in automatic speech recognition. Another objective of this project is to enable the efficient and reliable processing of large data streams by combining systems on the y.
At last, we expect to develop an on-the-fly ASR system as a real-time demonstrator of this new approach.

The thesis will be co-supervised by Paul Deléglise, Professeur at LIUM, Yannick Estève, Assistant Professor  at LIUM and Georges Linarès, Assistant Professor at LIA. The candidate will work at Le Mans (LIUM), but will regularly spend a few days in Avignon (LIA)

Applicants should hold a strong university degree entitling them to start a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, etc).

The applicants for this PhD position should be fluent in English or in French. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during training. This position is funded by the ANR.

Strong software skills are required, especially Unix/linux, C, Java, and a scripting language such as Perl or Python.

Contacts:
Yannick Estève: yannick.esteve@lium.univ-lemans.fr
Georges Linarès: georges.linares@univ-avignon.fr 

Two post-doctoral positions in the framework of the Carnegie Mellon
University-Portugal program are available at the Spoken Language Systems
Lab (www.l2f.inesc-id.pt), INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal.
Positions are for a fixed term contract of length up to two and a half
years, renewable in one year intervals, in the scope of the research
projects PT-STAR (Speech Translation Advanced Research to and from
Portuguese) and REAP.PT (Computer Aided Language Learning – Reading
Practice), both financed by FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology).
The starting date for these positions is September 2009, or as soon as
possible thereafter.
Candidates should send their CVs (in .pdf format) before July 15th, to
the email addresses given below, together with a motivation letter.
Questions or other clarification requests should be emailed to the same
addresses.
======== PT-STAR (project CMU-PT/HuMach/0039/2008) ========
Topic: Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation
Description: We seek candidates with excellent knowledge in statistical
approaches to machine translation (and if possible also speech
technologies) and strong programming skills. Familiarity with the
Portuguese language is not at all mandatory, although the main source
and target languages are Portuguese/English.
Email address for applications: lcoheur at l2f dot inesc-id dot pt
======== REAP.PT (project CMU-PT/HuMach/0053/2008) ========
Topic: Computer Aided Language Learning
Description: We seek candidates with excellent knowledge in automatic
question generation (multiple-choice synonym questions, related word
questions, and cloze questions) and/or measuring the reading difficulty
of a text (exploring the combination of lexical features, grammatical
features and statistical models). Familiarity with a romance language is
recommended, since the target language is Portuguese.
Email address for applications: nuno dot mamede at inesc-id dot pt

POSTDOC POSITION in SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR UNDER-RESOURCED LANGUAGES (18 months ; starting January 2010 or later) IN GRENOBLE (France)

=============================================================================

PI (ANR BLANC 2009-2012) is a cooperative project sponsored by the French National Research Agency, between the University of Grenoble (France), the University of Avignon (France), and the International Research Center MICA in Hanoï (Vietnam).


PI addresses spoken language processing (notably speech recognition) for under-resourced languages (or ?-languages). From a scientific point of view, the interest and originality of this project consists in proposing viable innovative methods that go far beyond the simple retraining or adaptation of acoustic and linguistic models. From an operational point of view, this project aims at providing a free open source ASR development kit for ?-languages. We plan to distribute and evaluate such a development kit by deploying ASR systems for new under-resourced languages with very poor resources from Asia (Khmer, Lao) and Africa (Bantu languages).

The POSTDOC position focus on the development of ASR for two low-resourced languages from Asia and Africa. This includes : supervising the resource collection (in relation with the language partners), propose innovative methods to quickly develop ASR systems for these languages, evaluation., etc.

The salary of the POSTDOC position is roughly 2300€ net per month. Applicants should hold a PhD related to spoken language processing. The applicants should be fluent in English. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during the postdoc.

For further information, please contact Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr).

  Vocal Prosthesis Based on Machine Learning(2)

Two PhD students for Second Language Acquisition/Computational Linguistics (1,0 fte)

Faculty of Arts, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Vacancy number: 23.24.09
Closing date: 1 September 2009

Job description
As a PhD student you will take part in the larger research project ‘Corrective feedback and the acquisition of syntax in oral proficiency’. The goal of this research project is to investigate the essential role of corrective feedback in L2 learning of syntax in oral proficiency. It will proceed from a granular level investigating the short-term effects of different types of feedback moves on different types of learners, to a global level by studying whether the granular, short-term effects also generalize to actual learning in the long term. Corrective feedback will be provided through a CALL system that makes use of automatic speech recognition. This will make it possible to assess the learner’s oral production online and to provide corrective feedback immediately under near-optimal conditions.
As a PhD student you will study which feedback moves lead to immediate uptake and acquisition in learners with a high level of education (PhD1) or learners with a low level of education (PhD2).
You are expected to start in November 2009. You will be part of an international and interdisciplinary team and will work in a motivating research environment.
For more information, see: http://lands.let.ru.nl/~strik/research/ASOP.html; http://www.ru.nl/cls/.

Requirements
You must have:
- a Master’s degree in (Applied) Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Psycholinguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science or Education;
- programming skills (e.g. Matlab, Perl);
- an interest in second language acquisition;
- a working knowledge of Dutch and a good command of the English language.

Organization
The Faculty of Arts consists of eleven departments in the fields of language and culture, history, history of arts, linguistics and business communication, which together cater for about 2,800 students and collaborate closely in teaching and research. The project will be carried out at the Centre for Language Studies as part of the Linguistic Information Processing and Communicative Competences research programmes.
Website: http://www.ru.nl/cls/

Conditions of employment
Employment: 1,0 fte

Additional conditions of employment
The total duration of the contract is 3.5 years. The PhD students will receive an initial contract for 18 months with possible extension by 2 years.
The starting gross salary is €2,042 per month based on full-time employment.

The short-listed applicants will be interviewed in September 2009

Other Information
Please include:
- a copy of your university degree (in English or Dutch)
- a list of all your university marks (in English or Dutch)
- a motivation letter with details of research interests/experience, programming skills and knowledge of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics.

Additional Information
Prof. Roeland van Hout (r.vanhout@let.ru.nl)
Dr. Catia Cucchiarini (c.cucchiarini@let.ru.nl)
Dr. Helmer Strik (h.strik@let.ru.nl)

Application
You can apply for the job (mention the vacancy number 23.24.09) before 1 September 2009 by sending your application -preferably by email- to:

RU Nijmegen, Faculty of Arts, Personnel Department
P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: vacatures@let.ru.nl

Acoustic Signal Detection Engineer

OSU’s Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies offers one year of support, with the possibility of additional support, for a researcher on a project studying passive acoustic monitoring of large whales under the direction of Dr. David Mellinger. This is a full-time (1.0 FTE), 12-month-per-year, fixed-term Faculty Research Assistant position. Individuals with a Ph.D. may be appointed as a Research Associate (Postdoc). To see full details and to apply, please see http://oregonstate.edu/jobs, then search for posting #0004462 (the leading zeros are required). For questions, please email Jessica.Waddell@oregonstate.edu or David.Mellinger@oregonstate.edu. For full consideration, apply by September 21, 2009. OSU is an Affirmative Action/Office of Equal Opportunity employer. 

PHD OPPORTUNITY:

A full-time 3 year PhD position is available at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

The position is within the Speech and Audio Research Lab, part of Smart Systems Theme of the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, and the Information Securities Institute.  The lab conducts world class research and  postgraduate training in a variety of speech and audio processing areas (speaker recognition, diarisation, speech detection, speech enhancement, multi-microphone speech technology, automatic language identification, keyword spotting)

Project title: Speaker Diarisation
Starting date: November/December 2009
Research fields:  Speech and audio processing, pattern recognition, bayesian theory, machine learning, biometrics and security.
Project Description:  
Large volumes of spoken audio are being recorded on a daily basis and audio archives of these recordings around the world are expanding rapidly. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to efficiently and automatically search, index and access information from these audio information sources. Speaker diarisation is an important, fundamental task in this process which aims to annotate the audio stream with speaker identities for each temporal region—determining “who spoke when.”

Current diarisation systems are susceptible to a number of impediments including wide variability in the acoustic characteristics of recordings from different sources, differences in the number of speakers present in a recording, the dominance of speakers, and the style and structure of the speech.  All can affect the diarisation performance dramatically.

The aim of this research is to develop a framework and methods for better exploiting the sources of prior information that are generally available in many applications with the view to making portable, robust speaker diarisation systems a reality.  Examples of relevant prior information include identities of participating speakers, models describing the characteristics of speakers in general or of a specific known speaker, models of the effects that recording conditions and domains have on acoustic features and knowledge of the recording domain.

Information for Applicants:
Applicants should hold a strong university degree which would entitle them to embark on a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (computer science, mathematics, computer systems engineering etc). International students are encouraged to apply. The project is part of a ARC linkage between QUT, a commercial partner, and two  partner speech/audio processing laboratories at European universities.  Opportunities for exchange/internships at these partner institutions exist.  The opportunity also exists for cotutelle PhD with the French partner university.  

Information on Brisbane and Queensland University of Technology can be found at www.qut.edu.au

The salary of the PhD position is provided as a Linkage APAI scholarship ($26,669 in 2009, indexed annually) + top-up scholarship (approx $5,000pa). The salary is tax-exempt.   
Funding is also available for conference/internship travel.

Interested students are encouraged to contact both the project leader Prof. Sridha Sridharan  (s.sridharan@qut.edu.au), and Dr Brendan Baker (bj.baker@qut.edu.au).  

Applicants are asked to provide:
- cover letter describing your interest in the project
- curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, disciplines covered (list of courses), publications, and other relevant experience.  
- sample of written work (research papers in English) is also desirable.  
- references along with contact details

As the start date is later this year, potential applicants are encouraged to contact the project coordinators as soon as possible to register their interest.

Deadlines for applications: 10 September 2009. (international applicants should apply as soon as possible)

PhD Positions

The Applied Informatics Group, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University is looking for PhD candidates for grants and project positions in the following areas:

* Dialog modeling for human-robot interaction

* Speech signal modelling and analysis for speech recognition and synthesis

* Modeling and combining bottom-up with top-down attentional-processes

We invite applications from motivated young scientists with a background in computer science, linguistics, psychology, robotics, mathematics, cognitive science or similar areas, that are willing to contribute to the cross-disciplinary research agenda of our research group. Research and development are directed towards understanding the processes and functional constituents of cognitive interaction, and establishing cognitive interfaces and robots that facilitate the use of complex technical systems. Bielefeld University provides a unique environment for research in cognitive and intelligent systems by bringing together researchers from all over the world in a variety of relevant disciplines under the roof of central institutions such as the Excellence Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) or the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab).

Successful candidates should hold an academic degree (MSc/Diploma) in a related discipline and have a strong interest in research and social robotics.

All applications should include: a short cover letter indicating the motivation and research interests of the candidate, a CV including a list of publications, and relevant certificates of academic qualification.

Bielefeld University is an equal opportunity employer. Women are especially encouraged to apply and in the case of comparable competences and qualification, will be given preference. Bielefeld University explicitly encourages disabled people to apply. Bielefeld University offers a family friendly environment and special arrangements for child care and double carrier opportunities.

Please send your application with reference to one of the three offered research areas no later than 15.9.2009 to Ms Susanne Hoeke (shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de).

Contact:

Susanne Hoeke

AG Applied Informatics

Faculty of Technology

Universitaetsstr. 21-23

33615 Bielefeld

Germany

Email: shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Le laboratoire LIG propose un sujet de recherche
    pour un post-doctorant
    CDD de 12 mois
    Grenoble, campus
    année 2009-2010

Sujet de recherche
------------------
Apprentissage Parallèle pour l'Indexation Multimédia Sémantique
Mots-clés : Apprentissage, Parallélisme, Indexation Multimédia.

Contexte
--------
Le poste est proposé dans le contexte du projet APIMS (Apprentissage
Parallèle pour l'Indexation Multimédia Sémantique) soutenu par le pôle
MSTIC de l’Université Joseph Fourrier.

La quantité de documents image et vidéo numériques croît de manière
exponentielle depuis de nombreuses années et cette tendance devrait se
poursuivre encore longtemps grâce aux progrès technologiques dans ce
domaine. L’indexation par concepts des documents image et vidéo est une
nécessité pour gérer de manière efficace les masses de données
correspondantes. En effet, les mots-clés nécessaires pour la recherche
par le contenu n’y sont pas explicitement présents comme dans le cas
des documents textuels. La recherche à partir d’exemples ou à partir
de caractéristiques dites « de bas niveau » présente également de
sérieuses limitations : les exemples nécessaires ne sont généralement
pas disponibles et les caractéristiques de bas niveau ne sont pas
aisément manipulables et interprétables par un utilisateur. Par ailleurs,
une similarité au niveau de ces caractéristiques ne correspond pas
forcément à une similarité au niveau sémantique. L’indexation par
concepts est un grand challenge en raison du « fossé sémantique »
séparant le contenu brut de ces documents (pixels, échantillons audio)
et les concepts qui on un sens pour un utilisateur.

Des progrès importants ont été accomplis ces dernières années, notamment
dans le cadre des campagnes d’évaluation TRECVID [1]. Ces campagnes
annuelles organisées par le National Institute of Standards and
Technologies (NIST) américain fournissent des données en quantité
importante, des tâches bien définies, des « vérités terrain », des
métriques et des outils d’évaluation associés. Elles contribuent
largement à fédérer les recherches dans le domaine de l’indexation
et de la recherche par le contenu des documents vidéo.
Les méthodes fonctionnant le mieux actuellement sont des méthodes
statistiques fonctionnant par apprentissage supervisé à partir
d’exemples annotés manuellement. Des caractéristiques dites de bas
niveau sont extraites à partir du signal audio ou image brut (des
histogrammes de couleur ou des transformées de Gabor par exemple) et
sont ensuite envoyées à des classifieurs qui sont entraînés à partir
d’exemples positifs et négatifs des concepts à reconnaître. Pour
obtenir de bons résultats, il est nécessaire de multiplier les
caractéristiques utilisées et de les combiner en utilisant des
techniques de fusion appropriées. Un gain supplémentaire est obtenu
en utilisant les relations entre les concepts comme les relations
statistiques (cooccurrences) ou logiques (générique-spécifique par
exemple).

Les principes généraux étant les mêmes, les différences entre les
approches concernent les choix sur les caractéristiques, sur les
outils de classification et/ou de fusion, et sur la façon de prendre
en compte le contexte. La qualité et la quantité des exemples positifs
et négatifs utilisés fait également une différence importante. L’état
de l’art actuel est l’extraction conjointe de plusieurs centaines de
concepts définis dans l’ontologie LSCOM [2]. Cependant, malgré les
efforts très importants fournis par un grand nombre d’équipes (plus
de 40 équipes ont participé à la tâche d’extraction de concepts dans
les plans vidéo lors de la campagne TRECVID 2008), la précision
moyenne des meilleurs systèmes ne dépasse pas 20%.

L’équipe MRIM du LIG a développé des méthodes et des outils pour
l’extraction automatique de concepts dans les plans vidéo et a
obtenu des résultats un peu supérieurs à la moyenne dans les
campagnes TRECVID 2005 à 2007 [3]. L’objectif de ce projet est
d’améliorer de manière importante ces méthodes et de leur faire
rejoindre voire définir l’état de l’art dans le domaine. Pour
cela, il faut d’une part les optimiser en prenant en compte tous
les facteurs importants et de leur ajouter un certain nombre
d’innovations comme l’utilisation de concepts de niveau
intermédiaire, la combinaison de méthodes génériques et
spécifiques, et l’apprentissage actif pour l’amélioration de
la quantité et qualité de l’annotation servant à l’entraînement
des systèmes.

Un des facteurs limitant est la puissance de calcul nécessaire.
Il faut en effet entraîner et évaluer les systèmes sur plusieurs
centaines de concepts et sur plusieurs dizaines de milliers
d’images ou de plans vidéo. Il faut en outre faire cela en
étudiant de multiples combinaisons de caractéristiques de bas
et moyen niveau, de méthodes de classification et de méthodes
de fusion. Nous envisageons pour cela d’utiliser les ressources
du projet GRID 5000 [4] afin de pouvoir étudier à grande échelle
l’influence combinée de ces différents facteurs. Dans sa version
simple, le problème se parallélise assez facilement (on peut faire
faire l’apprentissage et l’évaluation d’un concept sur un
processeur) mais lorsqu’on veut utiliser le contexte, c'est-à-dire
les relations statistiques ou ontologiques des concepts entre eux,
il y a lieu de faire coopérer les différents processus entre eux
et cela devient un réel problème de programmation parallèle.
L’équipe MESCAL du LIG dispose d’une grande expertise dans ce
domaine et participera à l’étude et à la mise en œuvre des versions
parallèles des méthodes d’extraction de concepts.

L’utilisation de la multi modalité naturellement présente dans
les documents vidéo est également essentielle pour la performance
des systèmes d’indexation par concepts. L’équipe GETALP du LIG
dispose de compétences dans le domaine du traitement du signal
audio et de parole et participera à la définition et à
l’optimisation des caractéristiques de bas et moyen niveau pour
l’indexation des concepts à partir de la piste audio. De même,
l’équipe GPIG de GIPSA-Lab dispose de compétences dans l’analyse
et l’indexation du mouvement dans les documents vidéo et participera
à la définition et à l’optimisation des caractéristiques de bas et
moyen niveau pour l’indexation des concepts à partir du mouvement
dans la piste image.

Références
[1] Smeaton, A. F., Over, P., and Kraaij, W. TRECVID: evaluating
    the effectiveness of information retrieval tasks on digital video.
    In Proceedings of the 12th Annual ACM international Conference on
    Multimedia, New York, NY, USA, October 10-16, 2004.
[2] M. Naphade, J.R. Smith, J. Tesic, S.-F. Chang, W. Hsu,
    L. Kennedy, A. Hauptmann and J. Curtis, Large-Scale Concept
    Ontology for Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia 13(3), pp. 86-91, 2006.
[3] Stéphane Ayache, Georges Quénot and Jérôme Gensel, CLIPS-LSR
    Experiments at TRECVID 2006, TRECVID’2006 Workshop, Gaithersburg,
    MD, USA, November 13-14, 2006.
[4] Bolze, R. et al, Grid'5000: a large scale and highly reconfigurable
    experimental Grid testbed International Journal of High Performance
    Computing Applications, 20(4), pp 481-494, 2006.

Description du poste
--------------------
La première partie du travail consistera à mettre en œuvre des
versions parallèles des méthodes de classification développées dans
l’équipe MRIM et à utiliser ces versions parallèles pour optimiser
conjointement les différents éléments (jeux de caractéristiques,
opérateurs de classification et opérateurs de fusion) intervenant
dans celles-ci. Cette optimisation devra être faire de manière aussi
systématique que possible. Compte tenu de l’aspect hautement
combinatoire et du coût de calcul (même sur une architecture
parallèle) de celle-ci, des méthodes heuristiques appropriées devront
être étudiées et mises en œuvre afin d’obtenir le meilleur résultat
dans un temps donné.

Dans une deuxième partie, il faudra mettre en œuvre des approches
intégrées pour la reconnaissance simultanée de plusieurs centaines
de concepts en prenant en compte dès les premiers niveaux de
l’apprentissage les corrélations existant entre ceux-ci.

Ces travaux seront, dans la mesure du possible, planifiés en fonction
des évaluations TRECVID sur la détection de concepts dans les plans
vidéo. Les expérimentations on lieu en général pendant l’été
(juillet-août) et les campagnes s’étendent de février à novembre de
l’année en cours. L’objectif est de pouvoir évaluer lors des campagnes
2009 et 2010 ce qu’il est prévu de développer dans la première et la
deuxième partie décrites ci-dessus.

Type de poste et localisation
-----------------------------
CDD de 12 mois au laboratoire LIG.

Intégration dans l’équipe MRIM du LIG (recherche en recherche
d’information multimédia et systèmes de recommandation) et
collaboration avec les équipes GETALP et MESCAL du LIG et
l’équipe GPIG du laboratoire GIPSA.

Localisation : Grenoble, campus de Saint Martin d’Hères.
Salaire : 2 000 euros nets / mois environ.

Formation et compétences nécessaires
------------------------------------
Profil demandé
o Expérience importante et compétences reconnues en conception –
  développement de logiciels.
o Connaissances et expérience significative en langage C ou C++.
o Thèse dans l’un des domaines suivants : programmation parallèle,
  systèmes de recherche d’information, apprentissage automatique,
  traitement statistique des données, traitement d’images.

Compétences complémentaires intéressantes pour le poste
o Expérience dans l’optimisation des performances des algorithmes.
o Expérience du travail en équipe.

Date limite de candidature
--------------------------
Les candidatures peuvent être déposée jusqu’au 30 septembre 2009.
Le poste est à pourvoir début novembre ou décembre 2009 au plus tard.
Dès qu'une candidature sera retenue, le poste sera affecté.

Contact
-------
Georges Quénot – Laboratoire LIG – Equipe MRIM – http://mrim.imag.fr/georges.quenot
Adresse : Bâtiment B – 385 avenue de la Bibliothèque – 38400 Saint Martin d’Hères
E-mail : Georges.Quenot@imag.fr – Tél : 04 76 63 58 55

Profil du poste PR0035 "Phonologie - phonétique générale et expérimentale" qui sera mis au concours au printemps 2010.

*Phonologie - phonétique générale et expérimentale*
• *Enseignement :*
• filières de formation concernées :
Parcours LMD de la filière de Sciences du Langage
• objectifs pédagogiques et besoin d’encadrement :
Le professeur recruté devra assurer des enseignements de phonétique et phonologie proposés par l’UFR des Sciences du Langage :
– dans le cursus de Licence : développement de la parole, phonétique articulatoire et acoustique, prosodie, phonologies linéaires et multilinéaires, phonétique expérimentale ;
– dans le Master Sciences du Langage, spécialité « Linguistique, sociolinguistique et acquisition du langage », orientation Recherche, en particulier les cours de phonologie.
Le professeur recruté devra prendre en charge ces enseignements en intégrant les apports des travaux sur les approches phonologiques (géométrie des traits, théorie des éléments, phonologie de laboratoire, phonologie prosodique, tonologie, phonologie cognitive, théorie de l’optimalité, etc.) et sur la diversité des réalisations sonores des langues du monde, en particulier les langues à tradition orale.
Le professeur devra s’impliquer dans la direction et l’encadrement de mémoires de master recherche ainsi que dans la formation des jeunes chercheurs en phonologie, typologie et linguistique de terrain (recueil de données, corpus, etc.), phonétique expérimentale, phonétique générale.
*• Recherche :*
La recherche s’effectuera au sein du département Parole et Cognition (DPC) de l’UMR 5216 GIPSA-lab. Le DPC mène des recherches multidisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage en s’appuyant en particulier sur quatre domaines de compétence: traitement du signal, physique, cognition et sciences du langage. Dans notre approche de l’analyse des langues naturelles, les aspects phonétiques, phonologiques, lexico-sémantiques et prosodiques, incluant les champs de la perspective temporelle (étude diachronique) et spatiale (géolinguistique), sont plus particulièrement l’objet d’étude de l’équipe Systèmes Linguistiques et Dialectologie du DPC.
Les axes de cette équipe concernent l’émergence des phénomènes linguistiques – et particulièrement dans des situations de contacts de langues –, la description et la documentation des systèmes linguistiques à tradition orale, l’étude de la prosodie et des fonctions communicatives. Ces recherches s’inscrivent dans le contrat quadriennal 2011-2014 du laboratoire et font l’objet depuis plusieurs années de collaborations nationales et internationales (notamment avec l’Amérique Latine) soutenues, entre autres, par l’ANR et la Communauté Européenne.
Les thématiques de recherche du Professeur recruté devront s’inscrire dans ces axes de recherche en explorant plus particulièrement la variabilité et les dynamiques temporelles et spatiales des systèmes linguistiques aux niveaux segmental et suprasegmental. Le Professeur s’appuiera sur les acquis et expériences de la linguistique de terrain, de la linguistique de corpus, de la phonétique expérimentale et de la phonologie de laboratoire. Il pourra être amené à proposer des
éléments de modélisation cognitive et computationnelle. Il est attendu que la personne recrutée ait une expérience confirmée dans l’animation d’équipe et s’investisse activement dans la mise en place de projets collectifs nationaux et internationaux. Il devra bien évidemment travailler dans une dynamique de collaboration inter-équipes au sein du GIPSA-lab.
*• Laboratoire d’accueil :*
Laboratoire Grenoble, Image, Parole, Signal, Automatique GIPSA-lab UMR 5216, site : http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr/
*• Contacts :*
– Enseignement :
o Marinette.Matthey@u-grenoble3.fr pour le niveau M
o Francoise.Boch@u-grenoble3.fr pour le niveau L
– Recherche :
o Gerard.Bailly@gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr

Job offer: Researcher in expressive speech synthesis

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH), with sites in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen and Berlin is the leading German research institute in the field of innovative software technology.

DFKI's Language Technology Lab is looking for a Researcher to work in either Saarbrücken or Berlin in the DFG-funded project PAVOQUE ( PArametrisation of prosody and VOice QUality for concatenative speech synthesis in view of Emotion expression). The contract should start on 1 November 2009 or 1 December 2009, and is limited to the project duration of one year.

Main Tasks

• Develop and extend speech synthesis technologies in the speech synthesis system MARY TTS, in view of the realisation of prosody and voice quality modifications in unit selection;

• Develop and apply algorithms to annotate prosody and voice quality in expressive speech synthesis corpora;

• Carry out a listener evaluation study of expressive synthetic speech.

Profile

The ideal candidate holds a PhD, or is close to finishing a PhD, in a relevant topic area such as speech signal processing or computer science. The candidate must have demonstrable experience with programming algorithms of unit selection synthesis, speech signal processing and/or voice conversion, and should have experience with Java programming. Knowledge in the area of planning, carrying out and evaluating perception tests would be a plus. Highly valued personal qualities include creativity, open-mindedness, team spirit, and a willingness to address novel challenges. Fluency in English as a working language is required.

For more information about MARY TTS, see http://mary.dfki.de.

Contact for Questions

Dr. Marc Schröder
Tel. +49-681-302-5303
http://dfki.de/~schroed
marc.schroeder@dfki.de

Closing date: 20 October 2009

Please send your electronic application with all usual documents to: lt-jobs@dfki.de

The Faculty of Information Sciences and Engineering of the University of Canberra is offering a top-up stipend of $7,000 per annum for a student undertaking a PhD thesis in the National Centre for Biometric Studies. The project is related to the Thinking Head Project (www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/ise/ncbs/thinkinghead) and will be in one of the following research areas:  *	Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Audio-Video Speech Recognition (AVSR) *	Speaker Recognition / Verification / Authentication *	Face Recognition or Facial Feature Tracking *	Speaker Characterisation or Facial Expression Recognition *	Affective Computing / Affective Sensing *	Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction (MM-HCI) *	Pattern Recognition / Multimodal Fusion Algorithms  The stipend is available for up to 3 years either to an Australian-resident student having gained an APA place or to an international student having gained a scholarship for international students in the Faculty of ISE commencing in 2010 (http://www.canberra.edu.au/research-students/scholarships/).   Further information from Prof. Michael Wagner (michael.wagner@canberra.edu.au) or Dr Roland Goecke (roland.goecke@canberra.edu.au). 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington. A tenure-track appointment is intended in the area of computational linguistics beginning September 2010 associated with the professional MA program and PhD track in Computational Linguistics. University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service; the successful applicant will teach graduate and undergraduate courses, supervise student research, and develop a high-impact research program. This position is full-time (100% FTE), with a 9-month service period.  Applicants should have a Ph.D. degree in Linguistics, Computer Science, or related field and be highly qualified for undergraduate and graduate teaching and independent research. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply.  However, we are particularly interested in scholars active in the areas of machine learning, speech technology, computational semantics and dialogue systems.   The ideal candidate will complement and build on existing strengths within the department, and will be eager to interact with students and faculty from the broader linguistics and language processing community at the University of Washington.  The University of Washington is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. The University is building a culturally diverse faculty and staff and strongly encourages applications from women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and covered veterans. The University of Washington, a recipient of the 2006 Alfred P. Sloan award for Faculty Career Flexibility, is committed to supporting the work-life balance of its faculty.  Applications, including a curriculum vitae, statement of research and teaching interests, and three letters of recommendation, should be sent to Prof. Emily M. Bender, Chair, Computational Linguistics Search Committee, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Box 354340, Seattle, WA 98195-4340.  Questions regarding the position can be directed to ebender -at- uw.edu. Priority will be given to applications received before November 20, 2009.  Please include your email address.

### Post-doc position in speech recognition/modeling at TTI-Chicago ###     A post-doc position is available at TTI-Chicago.  It includes opportunities for work on articulatory modeling, graphical models, discriminative learning, large-scale data analysis, and multi-modal (e.g. audio-visual) modeling.  The post-doc will be mainly working with Karen Livescu, and will interact with collaborators Jeff Bilmes (U. Washington), Eric Fosler-Lussier (Ohio State U.), and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). To apply, or for additional information, please contact Karen Livescu at klivescu@uchicago.edu.  There is also an opportunity for a shorter-term post-doc project on annotation of speech at the articulatory level. Please contact klivescu@uchicago.edu for more details.

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: German Linguists (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: German Linguists (M/F)), is seeking a part-time or full-time temporary language expert in the German language, for a 2 month contract, renewable, to work in language technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be native or near native German speaker

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics (with good computational skills) or Computational Linguistics (Master’s or PhD)

·         Have an advanced level of English (oral and written)

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – being able to run tools, being comfortable to work with Microsoft Office tools and having some programming fundamentals, though no programming is required

·         Have team work skills

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to work in a multicultural and multinational team across the globe

·         Willing to start immediately

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions.

Deadline for submissions: open until filled.

Bruno Reis Bechtlufft| MLDC Trainee

CFP: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

16th Annual JHU Summer Workshop

CALL FOR TEAM RESEARCH PROPOSALS

Deadline: Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/ws10/CFP

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins

University invites one-page research proposals for a

Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held

in Baltimore, MD, USA, June 21 to July 30, 2010.

Proposals should be suitable for a six-week team exploration, and

should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various

fields of Human Language Technology (HLT).  This year, proposals in

related areas of Machine Intelligence that share techniques with

HLT, such as Computer Vision (CV), are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and

technically related areas.  For example, proposals may address

novel topics or long-standing problems in one of the following

areas.

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY:  Proposals are welcomed that address any

  aspect of information extraction from speech signal (message,

  speaker identity, language,...). Of particular interest are

  proposals for techniques whose performance would be minimally

  degraded by input signal variations, or which require minimal

  amounts of training data.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Proposals for knowledge discovery

  from text are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional

  fields such as parsing, machine translation, information

  extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, and question

  answering.  Proposals may aim to improve the accuracy or enrich

  the output of such systems, or extend their reach by improving

  their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres.

* VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to

  parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an

  image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies

  may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g.,

  generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned

  image features that have recently become popular for object

  detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search

  for the best analysis.

* UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques

  that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data

  to address any of the challenges above could potentially make

  large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater

  robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and

  unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV

  are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in

past workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal

(http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals

for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated

no later than November 20, 2009. Authors passing this initial

screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas

to a peer-review panel on December 4-6, 2009.  It is expected

that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any

outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and

the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2010 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop

to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.

Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.

Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and

students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry

and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with

the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated

performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a

national search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing

outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2010 Summer

Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for

consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your

proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join

us for the December 4-6 meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for

further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area

of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued

next summer, we expect you to be available for participation

in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad

commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding

that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will

actively pursue it.  We in turn will make a good faith effort to

accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week

participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp@jhu.edu by

4PM EST on Wed, November 18, 2009.

Call for Papers IEEE Signal Processing Society IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing  Special Issue on Speech Processing for Natural Interaction                   with Intelligent Environments  With the advances in microelectronics, communication technologies and smart materials, our environments are transformed to be increasingly intelligent by the presence of robots, bio-implants, mobile devices, advanced in-car systems, smart house appliances and other professional systems. As these environments are integral parts of our daily work and life, there is a great interest in a natural interaction with them. Also, such interaction may further enhance the perception of intelligence. "Interaction between man and machine should be based on the very same concepts as that between humans, i.e. it should be intuitive, multi-modal and based on emotion," as envisioned by Reeves and Nass (1996) in their famous book "The Media Equation". Speech is the most natural means of interaction for human beings and it offers the unique advantage that it does not require carrying a device for using it since we have our "device" with us all the time.  Speech processing techniques are developed for intelligent environments to support either explicit interaction through message communications, or implicit interaction by providing valuable information about the physical ("who speaks when and where") as well as the emotional and social context of an interaction. Challenges presented by intelligent environments include the use of distant microphone(s), resource constraints and large variations in acoustic condition, speaker, content and context. The two central pieces of techniques to cope with them are high-performing "low-level" signal processing algorithms and sophisticated "high-level" pattern recognition methods.  We are soliciting original, previously unpublished manuscripts directly targeting/related to natural interaction with intelligent environments. The scope of this special issue includes, but is not limited to:  * Multi-microphone front-end processing for distant-talking interaction * Speech recognition in adverse acoustic environments and joint          optimization with array processing * Speech recognition for low-resource and/or distributed computing          infrastructure * Speaker recognition and affective computing for interaction with          intelligent environments * Context-awareness of speech systems with regard to their applied          environments * Cross-modal analysis of speech, gesture and facial expressions for          robots and smart spaces * Applications of speech processing in intelligent systems, such as          robots, bio-implants and advanced driver assistance systems.  Submission information is available at http://www.ece.byu.edu/jstsp. Prospective authors are required to follow the Author's Guide for manuscript preparation of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing at http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tsp. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed according to the standard IEEE process.  Manuscript submission due:    		 		  		 		  Jul. 3, 2009 First review completed:       		 		  		 		  Oct. 2, 2009 Revised manuscript due:      		 		  		 		  Nov. 13, 2009 Second review completed:      		 		  		 		  Jan. 29, 2010 Final manuscript due:         		 		  		 		  Mar. 5, 2010  Lead guest editor:         Zheng-Hua Tan, Aalborg University, Denmark             zt@es.aau.dk  Guest editors:         Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, University of Paderborn, Germany             haeb@nt.uni-paderborn.de         Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan             furui@cs.titech.ac.jp         James R. Glass, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA             glass@mit.edu         Maurizio Omologo, FBK-IRST, Italy             omologo@fbk.eu

CALL FOR PAPERS
IEEE Signal Processing Society
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
Special Issue on Voice Transformation
With the increasing demand for Voice Transformation in areas such as
speech synthesis for creating target or virtual voices, modeling various
effects (e.g., Lombard effect), synthesizing emotions, making more natural
dialog systems which use speech synthesis, as well as in areas like
entertainment, film and music industry, toys, chat rooms and games, dialog
systems, security and speaker individuality for interpreting telephony,
high-end hearing aids, vocal pathology and voice restoration, there is a
growing need for high-quality Voice Transformation algorithms and systems
processing synthetic or natural speech signals.
Voice Transformation aims at the control of non-linguistic information of
speech signals such as voice quality and voice individuality. A great deal
of interest and research in the area has been devoted to the design and
development of mapping functions and modifications for vocal tract
configuration and basic prosodic features.
However, high quality Voice Transformation systems that create effective
mapping functions for vocal tract, excitation signal, and speaking style
and whose modifications take into account the interaction of source and
filter during voice production, are still lacking.
We invite researchers to submit original papers describing new approaches
in all areas related to Voice Transformation including, but not limited to,
the following topics:
* Preprocessing for Voice Transformation
(alignment, speaker selection, etc.)
* Speech models for Voice Transformation
(vocal tract, excitation, speaking style)
* Mapping functions
* Evaluation of Transformed Voices
* Detection of Voice Transformation
* Cross-lingual Voice Transformation
* Real-time issues and embedded Voice Transformation Systems
* Applications
The call for paper is also available at:
http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tap/sp_issue/VoiceTransformationCFP.pdf
Prospective authors are required to follow the Information for Authors for
manuscript preparation of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and
Language Processing Signal Processing at
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/periodicals/journals/taslp-author-information/
Manuscripts will be peer reviewed according to the standard IEEE process.
Schedule:
Submission deadline: May 10, 2009
Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2009
Final manuscript due: October 30, 2009
Publication date: January 2010
Lead Guest Editor:
Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Crete, Greece
yannis@csd.uoc.gr
Guest Editors:
Tomoki Toda, Nara Inst. of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan
tomoki@is.naist.jp
Chung-Hsien Wu, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
chwu@csie.ncku.edu.tw
Alexander Kain, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland Oregon, USA
kaina@ohsu.edu
Olivier Rosec, Orange-France Telecom R&D, Lannion, France
olivier.rosec@orange-ftgroup.com

Samy Bengio, Google Inc., Mountain View (CA), USA, bengio@google.com 

Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices
A book edited by Dr. Diana Perez-Marin and Dr. Ismael Pascual-Nieto
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain

We cordially invite you to submit a chapter for the forthcoming Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices book to be published by IGI Global (http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=754)

-------------
Introduction
-------------
Human-Computer Interaction can be understood as two potent information processors (a human and a computer) trying to communicate with each
other using a highly restricted interface. Natural Language (NL) Interaction, that is, to let the users express in natural language could be the solution to
improve the communication between human and computers. Conversational agents exploit NL technologies to engage users in text-based information-seeking and task-oriented dialogs for a broad range of applications such as e-commerce, help desk, Web site navigation,
personalized service, and education.

The benefits of agent expressiveness have been highlighted both for verbal expressiveness and for non-verbal expressiveness. On the other hand, there
are also studies indicating that when using conversational agents mixed results can appear. These studies reveal the need to review the research in a
field with a promising future and a great impact in the area of Human-Computer Interaction.

-----------------------
Objective of the Book
------------------------
The main objective of the book is to identify the most effective practices when using conversational agents for different applications. Some secondary
objectives to fulfill the main goal are:
- To gather a comprehensive number of experiences in which conversational agents have been used for different applications
- To review the current techniques which are being used to design conversational agents
- To encourage authors to publish not only successful results, but also non-successful results and a discussion of the reasons that may have
caused them

------------------
Target Audience
------------------
The proposed book is intended to serve as a reference guide for researchers who want to start their research in the promising field of conversational
agents. It will not be necessary that readers have previous knowledge on the topic.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. Fundamental concepts
- Definition and taxonomy of conversational agents
- Motivation, benefits, and issues of their use
- Underlying psychological and social theories
2. Design of conversational agents
- Techniques
- Frameworks
- Methods
3. Practices
- Experiences of use of conversational agents in:
- E-commerce
- Help desk
- Website navigation
- Personalized service
- Training or education
- Results achieved
- Discussion of the reasons of their success of failure
4. Future trends
- Issues that should be solved in the future
- Expectations for the future

-----------------------
Submission Procedure
-----------------------
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before December 16, 2009, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and
concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 16, 2010 about the status of their proposals and sent
chapter guidelines. Full chapters (8,000–10,000 words) are expected to be submitted by April 16, 2010. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a
double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

----------
Publisher
----------
This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2011.

-----------------
Important Dates
-----------------
December 16, 2009: Proposal Submission Deadline
January 16, 2010: Notification of Acceptance
April 16, 2010: Full Chapter Submission
June 30, 2010: Review Results Returned
July 30, 2010: Final Chapter Submission
September 30, 2010: Final Deadline

------------------------------------
Editorial Advisory Board Members
--------------------------------------
Dr. Rafael Calvo, University of Sydney, Australia
Dr. Diane Inkpen, University of Ottawa, Canada
Dr. Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
Dr. Ramón López Cózar, Universidad de Granada, Spain
Dr. Max Louwerse, University of Memphis, U.S.A.
Dr. José Antonio Macías, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Dr. Mick O’Donnell, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Dr. George Veletsianos, University of Manchester, U.K.
Incompleted list, full list to be announced on November, 16

--------------------------
Inquiries and submissions
---------------------------
Please send all inquiries and submissions (preferably through e-mail) to:

Dr. Diana Perez-Marin, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Email: diana.perez@urjc.es

and

Dr. Ismael Pascual Nieto, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Email: ismael.pascual@uam.es 

Entertainment=Emotion (International workshop) – From November 15 to 21, 2009 - Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual (Spanish Pyrenees)

What is the relationship between entertainment and emotions in the consumption of new forms of media?
How does said relationship affect the attitudes, behaviors and thoughts of audiences?
What new emotions are generated by the new forms of interactive entertainment?
How does interactivity affect the emotional experience of entertainment?
What is the importance of morality or aesthetic appreciation in the experience of emotions during the consumption of media entertainment?
What emotions do we consume through new interactive products?
How do the intensity and valence of emotions change our aesthetic perception of entertainment products?
How are we influenced both by the emotions experienced during the processes of media entertainment, and by the perception of entertainment we obtain from experiencing these emotions?
Where are we taken by the emotions that entertain us?
Are there other ways of entertaining ourselves that make us freer?
In what products, and with what characteristics, are emotions stimulated or presented nowadays?

What are the cultural, economic, ideological, sociological, or artistic consequences of experiencing media emotions nowadays?

Does entertaining ourselves essentially mean generating emotions?

These are the kind of questions that will be answered at Entertainment=Emotion (E=E), the first edition of a very special workshop that will be held at the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual (CCBPP) from November 15 to 21, co-managed by María Teresa Soto Sanfiel (Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Peter Vorderer (Center for Advanced Media Research -CAMeRA-, Free University Amsterdam).

E=E is an international workshop to which researchers, professionals and students of media entertainment are invited. The event, which follows a very special format, far removed from the traditional meetings held in the area, seeks to create the right atmosphere for prominent international researchers, media professionals, creators of content and students to think together about the phenomenon of emotions in the audiovisual consumption of entertainment. Of special interest to E=E are the new forms of interactive entertainment that provoke new emotional experiences among audiences.

The organizers are hoping that such a meeting, in the magnificent setting of the CCBPP, surrounded by beautiful mountains and delightful scenery, will encourage relaxed exchange between researchers and professionals from different traditions and of differing levels of experience, and for this to produce new visions and problems to be investigated, and the inspiration to create content. They also hope to create a permanent meeting point for media entertainment researchers that sets a first class international standard.

The organizers also hope to help generate aesthetic, philosophical, sociological and political discourse on the good for cultural progress signified by the different forms of emotional experience obtained during media entertainment processes. In this sense, the ultimate aim of E=E is to generate knowledge that arouses positive, free and responsible attitudes to the use, and experience, of emotions in relation to the consumption of audiovisual entertainment.

Similarly, the organizers of E=E seek to promote the creation, at the CCBPP, of a high level academic space where professionals and researchers can exchange and experience in situ the emotions produced through exposure to products that can generate emotion in order to entertain.

Finally, the organizers aim to investigate new forms of interactive entertainment and the emotional experiences they generate, and we therefore invite any developments to be exhibited or presented.

The application period for the presentation of communications, reports, presentations, exhibitions, audiovisual performances and poster session ends on September 7. The candidatures will be evaluated by a scientific committee, after which a list of those accepted will be published. For more information about the requirements for participation, please visit the website (http://www.benasque.org/2009emotion/) or write to Maria Teresa Soto (mariateresa.soto@uab.es <mailto:mariateresa.soto@uab.es>).

The best selected full papers from Entertainment=Emotion (International workshop) will be considered to be published in a *special issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART)*, the leading journal in the area (http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijart).

A limited number of people can attend the workshop, so we advise you to send in your application as early as possible.

The CCBPP is managed by Physics Professors José Ignacio Latorre (UB) and Manuel Asorey (UZAR) and is supported by the Spanish Ministry for Education and Science, the Benasque Town Council, the Government of Aragon, the University of Zaragoza and the BBV. The CCBPP is a centre of renowned international prestige and is used to hold high level scientific meetings and, as well as hosting this meeting, seeks to stimulate the production of significant advances both in the study of science as in the professional creation of content, associated to the experience of emotions in media entertainment. 

Appel à participation RJCP 2009 :
8ème Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs en Parole
********************************************************************



16-18 novembre 2009 à Avignon

http://rjcp2009.univ-avignon.fr

INSCRIPTION : http://rjcp2009.univ-avignon.fr/inscription.php


PRESENTATION
____________________________________________________________________

Cette manifestation, parrainée par l’Association Francophone de la
Communication Parlée (AFCP), donne aux (futurs) doctorants ou jeunes
docteurs l’occasion de se rencontrer, de présenter leurs travaux et
d’échanger sur les divers domaines de la Parole.

Des jeunes chercheurs de différentes disciplines seront invités lors
de ces rencontres et viendront disserter sur les travaux en cours
dans leurs domaines respectifs. Leurs conseils et questions vous
permettront de porter un regard nouveau sur vos travaux de
recherche.

Des sessions "poster" ainsi que des sessions orales seront proposées
aux participants souhaitant exposer leurs travaux. Ces journées
sont bien sûr ouvertes à tous ceux qui désirent simplement assister
aux présentations sans proposer eux-mêmes une communication.



DATES IMPORTANTES
____________________________________________________________________


Conférence : 16,17 et 18 novembre 2009


Pour la bonne organisation de ces rencontres, merci de vous inscrire
le plus rapidement possible, votre article pourra être envoyé par
la suite.


SOUMISSIONS
____________________________________________________________________

Les propositions de communication sous forme de résumé de
4 à 6 pages devront être envoyées avant le 2 juillet 2009
sur le site de la conférence : http://rjcp2009.univ-avignon.fr.

Un comité de lecture, composé de scientifiques du domaine, examinera
les articles soumis et communiquera à chaque participant ses
remarques éventuelles.

Les instructions spécifiques et feuilles de style prédéfinies sont
disponibles sur le site. Un recueil des articles sera publié et
distribué à l’issue de ces rencontres.




DEROULEMENT DE LA CONFERENCE
____________________________________________________________________

La conférence se tiendra sur 3 jours dans les locaux de l'Université
d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse. Outre les présentations des
participants et les sessions "poster", des personnalités issues du
monde académique et industriel animeront des conférences plénières.
De plus, un forum d'entreprises sera organisé, permettant ainsi la
rencontre entre chercheurs et industriels.

Toutes les informations pratiques concernant le déroulement de la
conférence seront disponibles sur le site.



CONTACT
____________________________________________________________________

Pour plus de renseignements, vous pouvez envoyer un mail à :
contact.rjcp2009@univ-avignon.fr



THEMATIQUES
____________________________________________________________________

Les thématiques abordées (liste non exhaustive) :

- Phonétique et phonologie
- Traitement automatique de la langue naturelle orale
- Production/perception de la parole
- Pathologies de la parole
- Acoustique de la parole
- Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole
- Acquisition de la parole et du langage
- Applications à composante orale (dialogue, indexation,...)
- Prosodie
- Diversité linguistique
- Surdité
- Gestualité 

16-19 November 2010. Tutorial and Special Session on Forensic Voice Comparison and Forensic Acoustics at 2nd Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics, Cancún, Mexico. http://cancun2010.forensic-voice-comparison.net/

Jeudi 19 novembre 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================

*Didier Demolin *
Laboratoire de Phonologie, Université libre de Bruxelles

*
Titre à venir*
Résumé à venir

* *
Jeudi 26 novembre 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================

*Henrike Beaumotte*

Institute for Natural Language Processing, Universität Stuttgart, Allemagne

* Velarization degree and coarticulatory resistance in /l/ of L2 English as a signature of language talent*

**On the basis of the commonplace observation that language learners can be highly differentiated with regard to phoneticarticulatory aspects of their second language aptitude, the author investigates the production of English /l/ by speakers of Standard German. Within a large scale of phonetic ability tests (Jilka 2009), the research project Language Talent and Brain Activity categorized 117 speakers as proficient, average and less proficient in their L2 English.

41 native German speakers have again been recruited for the subsequent analysis concerning the pattern of velarization, as well as the degree of coarticulatory resistance (CR) in /l/ considering proficient vs. average vs. less proficient speakers. Formant frequency data were collected out of nonwords spoken as close as possible to native English speech. F2 and the frequency distance between F2 and F1, Fv, served as indicators for the degree of consonantal velarization (Recasens, Fontdevila & Pallarès 1995:41). The author forecasts less proficient speakers to show higher F2and Fvvalues, more tongue fronting and raising, than proficient

speakers. F2 and F2' were used to calculate the coarticulatory distance values for a close look at coarticulatory resistance properties (s. Bladon & AlBamerni 1976:142). Following Recasens, Fontdevila and Pallarès (1995:47), the author predicts that coarticulatory sensitivity is inversely related to the degree of consonantal velarization, i.e. /l/ should be more contextdependent in German low proficient speakers of English than in high proficient learners.

ANOVAs for the velarization distinction revealed significant differences in F2 (F(2)=5.083, p<.006), as well as Fv (F(2)=3.449, p<.032) across proficiency levels. In line with the prediction mean values of less proficient speakers are always higher than those of proficient speakers. Obviously, proficient speakers are better able to converge with native English, while integrating the pattern of velarization which is a characteristic feature of English compared to German speech.

On the contrary, results for CRvalues are less clearcut, but significant correlations for F2 and F2’ in /əly/ vs. /əlaɪ/ and tendencies for coarticulation and coarticulatory resistance in /əly/ vs. /əleɪ/ might be attributable to the same mechanism of articulatory coordination pointed out for the degree of velarization results, in which proficient speakers velarize more than average as compared with less proficient speakers.

* *
Jeudi 3 décembre 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================

*Marie Leroy*
Laboratoire MoDyCo - Université Paris Descartes - Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense

* Acquérir le langage dans sa dimension multimodale : verbal, intonation et posturo-mimo-gestualité dans le développement normal et le développement autistique*

Pour comprendre le processus d’acquisition du langage chez le jeune enfant, il faut envisager le langage humain dans sa dimension multimodale : le locuteur combine des phonèmes pour former des mots et des mots pour former des phrases, mais il doit également articuler ses verbalisations avec la prosodie de sa langue, avec des paramètres posturo-mimo-gestuels, et surtout (et avant tout), il doit adapter son langage à la situation et s’articuler avec l’autre, son partenaire dans l’interaction.

Le nouveau-né est exposé dès sa naissance (et même avant, in utero) au langage et manifeste très tôt des aptitudes à la communication, à l’interaction avec son entourage (Boysson-Bardies, 1996). Les différents paramètres constitutifs du langage vont se structurer progressivement : le nourrisson va d’abord intégrer les règles de l’interaction, puis va entrer dans le langage par la prosodie et le geste, pour accéder enfin au langage articulé.

L’articulation entre ces différents niveaux est progressive et le processus d’acquisition se caractérise par un va-et-vient entre structuration « mécanique » du langage, mise en place d’un « moule », d’un « format » (interaction et prosodie), et structuration « linguistique » (phonologie, morphosyntaxe, sémantique, pragmatique), les différents acquis s’intégrant dans des formats de plus en plus complexes.

Cette capacité d’articulation, à l’intérieur des différentes modalités constitutives du langage, entre les différentes modalités, et avec autrui, est au cœur du processus d’acquisition. Il arrive toutefois que des enfants présentent des dysfonctionnements dans le développement (voire une absence de développement) du langage, comme c’est le cas dans l’autisme, et n’accèdent pas aux combinaisons morphosyntaxiques. Cependant, certains d’entre eux semblent mettre en place les différents paramètres constitutifs du langage au cours de leur première année (Sheinkopf et al., 2000).

Nous tenterons d’illustrer les différences entre développement normal et développement autistique et de cerner les limites du développement langagier de l’enfant autiste, en observant les étapes de la construction du langage et particulièrement l’articulation des différents paramètres qui le constituent (vocalisations, verbalisations, prosodie, mimo-gestualité…). En nous appuyant sur des études longitudinales d’enfants tout venant et d’une enfant autiste entre la naissance et deux ans, nous essayerons de montrer que l’âge de 18 mois semble constituer l’âge-charnière pour l’articulation des différentes modalités, à savoir la syllabation, l’intonation, les mimiques, les gestes et l’intégration des règles d’interaction, préalable nécessaire au bon fonctionnement du langage et de la communication.

En effet, chez l’enfant autiste, même si on constate souvent un développement plus ou moins conforme avant 18 mois, les dysfonctionnements communicatifs et langagiers deviennent souvent saillants à cet âge (Baron-Cohen et al., 1992 ; Maestro et Muratori, 2005). Ils peuvent être reliés aux difficultés d’articulation des différentes modalités constitutives du langage, qui représenteraient pour ces enfants une charge cognitive trop importante. Par exemple, une mise en conformité de la syllabation s’accompagnera d’une atypie de la prosodie, et inversement, une prosodie conforme s’accompagnera de productions comportant des syllabes non canoniques.

Les difficultés d’articulation de l’enfant autiste se situent également au niveau du pointage. En effet, dans le cas où il apparaît, il diffère qualitativement de celui de l’enfant tout-venant : l’enfant autiste est incapable, notamment, d’articuler les différents paramètres qui accompagnent le geste (regard sur l’objet, regard sur l’adulte et vocalisation) de façon simultanée. Nous illustrerons ce point grâce à des comparaisons de pointages d’un enfant autiste et d’enfants tout-venant à 15 mois.

* *

* *Jeudi 10 décembre 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================

*Jack Loomis*
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara**


 Increasing the effectiveness of virtual reality through research on
 perception, cognition, and action

The effectiveness of virtual reality for a wide range of applications is limited by perceptual error and inadequate locomotion interfaces.
I will discuss research on visual and auditory perception in virtual environments, showing how imperfection in the implementation of virtual reality has resulted in errors in distance perception, errors which reduce the effectiveness of virtual reality as a medium for training new skills.
I will also discuss research showing how the fidelity of the locomotion interface greatly impacts performance on spatial cognition tasks.



Jeudi 17 décembre 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================

*Suzanne Fuchs*
ZAS/Phonetik, Berlin, Allemagne

*Titre à venir*
Résumé à venir

JPC3

Troisièmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique

Appel à Communication
**4-5 décembre 2009, Aix-en-Provence, France

_http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~jpc3/ <http://www.lpl-aix.fr/%7Ejpc3/>
_********************************************************************************************************
 Les inscriptions aux 3èmes journées de phonétique clinique sont désormais ouvertes.

Vous pouvez vous inscrire au tarif normal jusqu'au 18 octobre.

Pour vous inscrire :
http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~jpc3/inscription.php

Le comité d'organisation
org.jpc3@lpl-aix.fr
*
Ces journées s’inscrivent dans la lignée des premières et deuxièmes journées d’études de phonétique clinique, qui s’étaient tenues respectivement à Paris en 2005 et Grenoble en 2007. La phonétique clinique réunit des chercheurs, enseignants-chercheurs, ingénieurs, médecins et orthophonistes, différents corps de métiers complémentaires qui poursuivent le même objectif : une meilleure connaissance des processus d’acquisition et de dysfonctionnement de la parole et de la voix. Cette approche interdisciplinaire vise à optimiser les connaissances fondamentales relatives à la communication parlée chez le sujet sain et à mieux comprendre, évaluer, diagnostiquer et remédier aux troubles de la parole et de la voix chez le sujet pathologique.

Les communications porteront sur les études phonétiques de la parole et de la voix pathologiques, chez l’adulte et chez l’enfant. Les *thèmes* du colloque incluent, de façon non limitative :

   Perturbations du système oro-pharyngo-laryngé    Perturbations du système perceptif    Troubles cognitifs et moteurs    Instrumentation et ressources en phonétique clinique    Modélisation de la parole et de la voix pathologique    Evaluation et traitement des pathologies de la parole et de la voix
*Les contributions sélectionnées seront présentées sous l’une des deux formes suivantes :*

   Communication longue: 20 minutes, pour l’exposé de travaux aboutis    Communication courte: 8 minutes pour l’exposé d'observations
   cliniques, de travaux préliminaires, de problématiques émergentes
   afin de favoriser au mieux les échanges interdisciplinaires entre
   phonéticiens et cliniciens.
*Format de soumission:
*Les soumissions aux JPC se présentent sous la forme de résumés rédigés en français, d’une longueur maximale d’une page A4, police Times New Roman, 12pt, interligne simple. Les résumés devront être soumis au format PDF à l’adresse suivante: _soumission.jpc3@lpl-aix.fr


_*Date limite de soumission: 15 mai 2009
Date de notification auteurs : 1er juillet 2009

*Pour toute information complémentaire, contactez les organisateurs:
_org.jpc3@lpl-aix.fr

_/L’inscription aux JPC3 (1^er juillet 2009) sera ouverte à tous, publiant ou non publiant.

 http://www.icon2009.in   7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India December 14-17, 2009 

http://www.aicl2009.in All-India Conference of Linguists University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India December 15-17, 2009

http://www.icscat2010.in/ International Conference on Socio-Cultural Approaches to Translation University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India Feb 10-12, 2010 

SpokenQuery Voice Search Workshop 2010 (SQ 2010)

13 March 2010, Dallas, TX

http://www.spokenquery.org/

Aims

Papers are solicited for the SpokenQuery 2010 Workshop on Voice Search (SQ2010), to be held in Dallas, Texas as a satellite to to ICASSP 2010.

Small devices with high computing power have become ubiquitous, via cellphone-like devices, car communication systems, etc. This new reality makes it feasible to utilize speech as the preferred input mode. Searching for information from a spoken query brings its own challenges that go beyond the inherent difficulties of speech recognition or information retrieval.

The first SQ workshop aims at bringing together researchers working in the area that overlaps speech processing and information retrieval. This workshop is intended to be an open forum that will allow different research communities to become better acquainted with each other and to share ideas.

This one-day workshop will include a limited number of oral presentations, chosen for breadth and stimulation, and an informal atmosphere to promote discussion. We hope this workshop will expose participants to a broad perspective of techniques, tools, best practices, and innovation, which will provide the impetus for new research and compelling variants on current approaches.

Papers describing relevant research and new concepts are solicited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

·        Spoken queries in various languages

·        Retrieval of spoken or text documents via spoken query

·        Handling of new vocabulary words

·        Tools and databases

·        Commercial applications

·        Automotive spoken query applications

·        Spoken query applications via a mobile phone

·        Server-based and client-based approaches to automatic speech recognition

·        Novel adaptation and noise robustness methods

·        Novel demonstrations

Manuscripts must be between 4 and 6 pages long, in standard ICASSP double-column format. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Important Dates

Paper submission: 30 November 2009

Notification of paper acceptance: 15 January 2010

Workshop: 13 March 2010

Organizers

Bhiksha Raj, CMU, USA

Evandro Gouvêa, MERL, USA

Tony Ezzat, MERL, USA

Technical Committee

Michiel Bacchiani, Google, USA

Fabio Crestani, UNISI, Switzerland

Ute Ehrlich, DaimlerAG, Germany

Mazin Gilbert,  ATT, USA

Prasad Venkatesh, Ford, USA

Chao Wang, Vlingo, USA

Geoffrey Zweig, Microsoft, USA

Contact

To email the organizers, please send email to organizers@spokenquery.org.

IEEE ICASSP 2010   International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing                            March 15 – 19, 2010                Sheraton Dallas Hotel * Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.                         http://www.icassp2010.com/     The 35th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, March 15 – 19, 2010. The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:   * Audio and electroacoustics  * Bio imaging and signal processing  * Design and implementation of signal processing systems  * Image and multidimensional signal processing  * Industry technology tracks  * Information forensics and security  * Machine learning for signal processing  * Multimedia signal processing  * Sensor array and multichannel systems  * Signal processing education  * Signal processing for communications  * Signal processing theory and methods  * Speech processing  * Spoken language processing  Welcome to Texas, Y’All! Dallas is known for living large and thinking big. As the nation’s ninth-largest city, Dallas is exciting, diverse and friendly — factors that contribute to its success as a leading leisure and convention destination. There’s a whole “new” vibrant Dallas to enjoy-new entertainment districts, dining, shopping, hotels, arts and cultural institutions- with more on the way. There’s never been a more exciting time to visit Dallas than now.  Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The ICASSP 2010 website www.icassp2010.com will provide you with further details. Please note that all submission deadlines are strict.  Tutorial and Special Session Proposals: Tutorials will be held on March 14 and 15, 2010. Brief proposals should be submitted by July 31, 2009, through the ICASSP 2010 website and must include title, outline, contact information for the presenter, and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants. Special sessions proposals should be submitted by July 31, 2009, through the ICASSP 2010 website and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited papers. Tutorial and special session authors are referred to the ICASSP website for additional information regarding submissions.  * Important Deadlines *  Submission of Camera-Ready Papers      September 14, 2009  Notification of Paper Acceptance      December 11, 2009  Revised Paper Upload Deadline      January 8, 2010  Author’s Registration Deadline      January 15, 2010  For more detailed information, please visit the ICASSP 2010 official website, http://www.icassp2010.com/.

CMU Sphinx Users and Developers Workshop 2010 (CMU-SPUD 2010)

20 March 2010, Dallas, TX

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sphinx/Sphinx2010

Papers are solicited for the CMU Sphinx Workshop for Users and Developers (CMU-SPUD 2010), to be held in Dallas, Texas as a satellite to to ICASSP 2010.

CMU Sphinx is one of the most popular open source speech recognition systems. It is currently used by researchers and developers in many locations world-wide, including universities, research institutions and in industry. CMU Sphinx's liberal license terms has made it a significant member of the open source community and has provided a low-cost way for companies to build businesses around speech recognition.

The first SPUD workshop aims at bringing together CMU Sphinx users, to report on applications, developments and experiments conducted using the system. This workshop is intended to be an open forum that will allow different user communities to become better acquainted with each other and to share ideas. It is also an opportunity for the community to help define the future evolution of CMU Sphinx.

We are planning a one-day workshop with a limited number of oral presentations, chosen for breadth and stimulation, held in an informal atmosphere that promotes discussion. We hope this workshop will expose participants to different perspectives and that this in turn will help foster new directions in research, suggest interesting variations on current approaches and lead to new applications.

Papers describing relevant research and new concepts are solicited on, but not limited to, the following topics. Papers must describe work performed with CMU Sphinx:

·        Decoders: PocketSphinx, Sphinx-2, Sphinx-3, Sphinx-4

·        Tools: SphinxTrain, CMU/Cambridge SLM toolkit

·        Innovations / additions / modifications of the system

·        Speech recognition in various languages

·        Innovative uses, not limited to speech recognition

·        Commercial applications

·        Open source projects that incorporate Sphinx

·        Novel demonstrations

Manuscripts must be between 4 and 6 pages long, in standard ICASSP double-column format. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 30 November 2009

Notification of paper acceptance: 15 January 2010

Workshop: 20 March 2010

Organizers

Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Evandro Gouvêa, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, USA

Richard Stern, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Rita Singh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

David Huggins-Daines, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Nickolay Schmyrev, Nexiwave, Russian Federation

Yannick Estève, Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université du Maine, France

Contact

To email the organizers, please send email to sphinx+workshop@cs.cmu.edu

http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/~glow33/phon.html

 Workshop: Positional phenomena in phonology and phonetics

(Organised by Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

*Date:* 13 April 2010
*Organisers:* Marzena Zygis, Stefanie Jannedy, Susanne Fuchs
*Deadline for abstract submission:* 1st November 2009
*Abstracts submitted to:* zygis@zas.gwz-berlin.de
*Invited speakers:*

  * Taehong Cho (Hanyang University, Seoul) confirmed
  * Grzegorz Dogil (University of Stuttgart) confirmed

*Venue:* /Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuz'nicza 22, 50-138 Wroc?aw/

Positional effects found cross-linguistically at the edges of prosodic
constituents (e.g. final lengthening, final lowering, strengthening
effects, or final devoicing) have increasingly received attention in
phonetic-phonological research. Recent empirical investigations of such
positional effects and their variability pose, however, a great number
of questions challenging e.g. the idea of perceptual invariance. It has
been claimed that acoustic variability is a necessary prerequisite for
the perceptual system to parse segmental strings into words, phrases or
larger prosodic units.

This workshop will provide a forum for discussing controversies and
recent developments regarding positional phenomena. We invite abstracts
bearing on positional effects from various perspectives.The following
questions can be addressed, but are not limited to:

 1. What kind of variability is found in the data, and how does such
    variability need to be accounted for? What positional effects are
    common cross-linguistically and how can they be attributed to
    perceptual, articulatory or aerodynamic principles?
 2. How does positional prominence (lexical stress; accent) interact
    with acoustic and articulatory realizations of prosodic
    boundaries? What are the positional (a)symmetries in the
    realizations of boundaries, and what are the mechanisms underlying
    them?
 3. How does left- and right-edge phrasal marking interact with the
    acoustic and articulatory realizations at these prosodic
    boundaries? How are these interpreted in phonetics and in phonology?
 4. What are the necessary prerequisites for the interpretation of
    prosodic constituents? Which auditory cues are essential for the
    perception of boundaries and positional effects? Are such cues
    language-specific?
 5. To what extent do lexical frequency, phonotactic probability, and
    neighbourhood density contribute to the production and recognition
    of prosodic boundaries in (fluent/spontaneous) speech?
 6. How are positional characteristics exploited during the process of
    language acquisition? How are they learned during the process of
    language acquisition? Are positional effects salient enough for L2
    learners?

Abstracts are invited for a 20-min. presentation (excluding discussion).
Abstracts should be sent in two copies: one with a name and one without
as attached files (the name(s) should also be clearly mentioned in the
e-mail) to: zygis@zas.gwz-berlin.de in .pdf format. Only electronic
submissions will be considered. Abstracts may not exceed two pages of
text with at least a one-inch margin on all four sides (measured on A4
paper) and must employ a font not smaller than 12 point. Each page may
include a maximum of 50 lines of text. An additional page with
references may be included.

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2009.

Contact person: Marzena Zygis

Extended deadline November 2009   Speech Prosody 2010 Satellite Workshop May 10th, 2010, Chicago, Illinois      Description of the workshop: Efficient tools for (semi-)automatic prosodic annotation are becoming more and more important for the speech community, as most systems of prosodic annotation rely on the identification of syllabic prominence in spoken corpora (whether they lead a phonological interpretation or not). The use of automatic and semi-automatic annotation has also facilitated multilingual research; many experiments on prosodic prominence identification have been conducted for European and non-European languages, and protocols have been written in order to build large databases of spoken languages prosodically annotated all around the world. The aim of this workshop is to bring together specialists of automatic prosodic annotation interested in the development of robust algorithms for prominence detection, and linguists who developed methodologies for the identification of prosodic prominence in natural languages on perceptual bases. The conference will include oral and poster sessions, and a final round table.   Scientific topics: 1. Annotation of prominence 2. Perceptual processing of prominences: gestalt theories’ background 3. Acoustic correlates of prominence 4. Prominence and its relations with prosodic structure 5. Prominence and its relations with accent, stress, tone and boundary 6. The use of syntactic/pragmatic information in prominence identification 7. Perception of prominence by naive/expert listeners 8. Statistical methods for prominence’s detection 9. Number of relevant prominence degrees : categorical or continuous scale 10.Prosodic prominence and visual perception   Submission of papers: Anonymous four-page papers (including figures and references) must be written in English, and be uploaded as pdf files here: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=prom2010. All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the scientific committee. Accepted four-page papers will be included in the online proceedings of the workshop published on the workshop website. The publication of extended selected papers after the workshop in a special issue of a journal is being considered.   Organizing Committee: Mathieu Avanzi (Université de Neuchâtel, CH) Anne Lacheret-Dujour (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre) Anne-Catherine Simon (Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve)  Scientific committee: the names of the scientific committee will be announced in the second circular.   Venue: The workshop will take place in The Doubletree Hotel Magnificent Mile, in Chicago. See the Speech prosody 2010 website (http://www.speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/index.html) for further information.   Important deadlines: Submission of four-page papers: November 15, 2009 Notification of acceptation: January 15, 2009 Author's Registration Deadline: March 2, 2010 Workshop: March 10, 2010    Website of the workshop: http://www2.unine.ch/speechprosody-prominence

SPEECH PROSODY 2010

===============================================================

Call For Special Session Proposals

===============================================================

Speech Prosody 2010, the fifth international conference on speech prosody, invites proposals for special sessions addressing exciting current topics in the science and technology of spoken language prosody.  Special sessions may address any topic among the key topic areas of Speech Prosody 2010 (http://speechprosody2010.org/), or a topic that is too new to be included in the standard topic list.

Proposals for special sessions should include the names and affiliations of the organizers, an abstract describing the topic of the special session, and a list of six to twelve potential authors doing current research in the topic area.  Proposals should be submitted by e-mail to speechprosody2010@yahoogroups.com.  In order to receive full consideration, proposals should be submitted by November 15, 2009.

===================

IMPORTANT DATES

===================

November 15, 2009: Manuscript deadline for regular Speech Prosody papers

November 15, 2009: Special Session Proposal deadline for full consideration

November 20, 2009: Acceptance letters mailed to Special Session organizers

December 15, 2009: Manuscript deadline for Special Session papers

January 15, 2010: Acceptance letters mailed to manuscript authors

May 11-14, 2010:  Conference, Speech Prosody 2010

SPEECH PROSODY 2010   (New submission deadline)

Deadline Extension: REVISIONS ONLY ==================================

The Speech Prosody 2010 Organizing Committee is happy to announce a REVISIONS ONLY extension of our manuscript deadline. Authors who submit a draft manuscript by November 15 will be allowed to revise their manuscript, as often as necessary, until 8:00 AM Chicago time on November 23. The November 15 draft should include preliminary title, abstract, list of authors, and content adequate for selection of appropriate reviewers. Reviewers will not see the initial draft, however; only the final uploaded draft (8:00 AM Chicago time, November 23) will be sent to reviewers.

===============================================================
Every Language, Every Style: Globalizing the Science of Prosody
===============================================================
Call For Papers
===============================================================

Prosody is, as far as we know, a universal characteristic of human speech, founded on the cognitive processes of speech production and perception.  Adequate modeling of prosody has been shown to improve human-computer interface, to aid clinical diagnosis, and to improve the quality of second language instruction, among many other applications.

Speech Prosody 2010, the fifth international conference on speech prosody, invites papers addressing any aspect of the science and technology of prosody.  Speech Prosody is the only recurring international conference focused on prosody as an organizing principle for the social, psychological, linguistic, and technological aspects of spoken language.  Speech Prosody 2010 seeks, in particular, to discuss the universality of prosody.  To what extent can the observed scientific and technological benefits of prosodic modeling be ported to new languages, and to new styles of spoken language?  Toward this end, Speech Prosody 2010 especially welcomes papers that create or adapt models of prosody to languages, dialects, sociolects, and/or communicative situations that are inadequately addressed by the current state of the art.

=======
TOPICS
=======

Speech Prosody 2010 will include keynote presentations, oral sessions, and poster sessions covering topics including:

* Prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects
* Communicative situation and speaking style
* Dynamics of prosody: structures that adapt to new situations
* Phonology and phonetics of prosody
* Rhythm and duration
* Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
* Meta-linguistic and para-linguistic communication
* Signal processing
* Automatic speech synthesis, recognition and understanding
* Prosody of sign language
* Prosody in face-to-face interaction: audiovisual modeling and analysis
* Prosodic aspects of speech and language pathology
* Prosody in language contact and second language acquisition
* Prosody and psycholinguistics
* Prosody in computational linguistics
* Voice quality, phonation, and vocal dynamics

====================
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
====================

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, at http://speechprosody2010.org. All Speech Prosody papers will be handled and reviewed electronically.

===================
VENUE
===================

The Doubletree Hotel Magnificent Mile is located two blocks from North Michigan Avenue, and three blocks from Navy Pier, at the cultural center of Chicago.  The Windy City has been the center of American innovation since the mid nineteenth century, when a railway link connected Chicago to the west coast, civil engineers reversed the direction of the Chicago river, Chicago financiers invented commodity corn (maize), and the Great Chicago Fire destroyed almost every building in the city. The Magnificent Mile hosts scores of galleries and museums, and hundreds of world-class restaurants and boutiques.

===================
IMPORTANT DATES
===================

Submission of Papers (http://speechprosody2010.org): November 15, 2009
Notification of Acceptance:                                           December 15, 2009
Conference:                                                                    May 11-14, 2010

4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2010)

Trier, Germany, May 24-28, 2010

http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2010/

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

AIMS:

LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications that was developed at Rovira i Virgili University (the host of the previous three editions and co-organizer of this one) in the period 2002-2006, LATA 2010 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.).

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

- algebraic language theory

- algorithms on automata and words

- automata and logic

- automata for system analysis and programme verification

- automata, concurrency and Petri nets

- cellular automata

- combinatorics on words

- computability

- computational complexity

- computer linguistics

- data and image compression

- decidability questions on words and languages

- descriptional complexity

- DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing

- document engineering

- foundations of finite state technology

- fuzzy and rough languages

- grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.)

- grammars and automata architectures

- grammatical inference and algorithmic learning

- graphs and graph transformation

- language varieties and semigroups

- language-based cryptography

- language-theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life

- neural networks

- parallel and regulated rewriting

- parsing

- pattern matching and pattern recognition

- patterns and codes

- power series

- quantum, chemical and optical computing

- semantics

- string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics

- symbolic dynamics

- term rewriting

- text algorithms

- text retrieval

- transducers

- trees, tree languages and tree machines

- weighted machines

STRUCTURE:

LATA 2010 will consist of:

- 3 invited talks

- 2 invited tutorials

- refereed contributions

- open sessions for discussion in specific subfields, on open problems, or on professional issues (if requested by the participants)

INVITED SPEAKERS:

John Brzozowski (Waterloo), Complexity in Convex Languages

Alexander Clark (London), Three Learnable Models for the Description of Language

Lauri Karttunen (Palo Alto), to be announced (tutorial)

Borivoj Melichar (Prague), Arbology: Trees and Pushdown Automata

Anca Muscholl (Bordeaux), Communicating Automata (tutorial)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)

Henning Fernau (Trier, co-chair) 

Maria Gindorf (Trier)

Stefan Gulan (Trier)

Anna Kasprzik (Trier)

Carlos Martín-Vide (Brussels, co-chair) 

Norbert Müller (Trier)

Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0). Submissions have to be uploaded at:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2010

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (Elsevier) will be later published containing refereed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be only by invitation.

A special issue of another major journal containing papers oriented to applications is under consideration.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration will be open since September 1, 2009 until May 24, 2010. The registration form can be found at the website of the conference: http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2010/

Early registration fees: 500 Euro

Early registration fees (PhD students): 400 Euro

Late registration fees: 530 Euro

Late registration fees (PhD students): 430 Euro

On-site registration fees: 550 Euro

On-site registration fees (PhD students): 450 Euro

At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have a registered author by February 15, 2010 will be excluded from the proceedings.

Fees comprise access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings volume, coffee breaks, lunches, excursion, and conference dinner.

PAYMENT:

Early (resp. late) registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before February 15, 2010 (resp. May 14, 2010) to the conference series account at Open Bank (Plaza Manuel Gomez Moreno 2, 28020 Madrid, Spain): IBAN: ES1300730100510403506598 - Swift code: OPENESMMXXX (account holder: Carlos Martin-Vide & URV – LATA 2010).

Please write the participant’s name in the subject of the bank form. Transfers should not involve any expense for the conference.

On-site registration fees can be paid only in cash.

A receipt for the payment will be provided on site.

Besides paying the registration fees, it is required to fill in the registration form at the website of the conference.

BEST PAPER AWARDS:

An award will be offered to the authors of the two best papers accepted to the conference. Only papers fully authored by PhD students are eligible. The award intends to cover their travel expenses.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: December 3, 2009

Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: January 21, 2010

Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: February 3, 2010

Early registration: February 15, 2010

Late registration: May 14, 2010

Starting of the conference: May 24, 2010

Submission to the post-conference special issue(s): August 27, 2010

FURTHER INFORMATION:

gindorf-ti@informatik.uni-trier.de

CONTACT:

LATA 2010

Universität Trier

Fachbereich IV – Informatik

Campus II, Behringstraße

D-54286 Trier

Phone: +49-(0)651-201-2836

Fax: +49-(0)651-201-3954

NAACL-HLT-10: Call for Tutorial Proposals

Proposals are invited for the Tutorial Program of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT) 2010 Conference. The conference is to be held from June 1 to 6, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. The tutorials will be held on Tuesday,  June 1.

We seek proposals for half-day (or exceptionally full-day) tutorials on all topics in computational linguistics, speech processing, information extraction and retrieval, and natural language processing, including their theoretical foundations, algorithms, 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.

Information on the tutorial instructor payment policy can be found at http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Policy_on_tutorial_teacher_payment 

PLEASE NOTE: Remuneration for Tutorial presenters is fixed according to the above policy and does not cover registration fees for the main conference.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Proposals for tutorials should contain:

1. A title and brief description of the tutorial content and its relevance to the NAACL-HLT community (not more than 2 pages).
2. A brief outline of the tutorial structure showing that the tutorial's core content can be covered in a three-hour slot (including a coffee break). In exceptional cases six-hour tutorial slots are available as well.
3. The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the tutorial instructors, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests and areas of expertise.
4. A list of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial has been given elsewhere; otherwise an estimate of the audience size.
5. A description of special requirements for technical equipment (e.g., internet access).

Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail, in plain ASCII text, no later than January 15, 2010 to tutorials.hlt10@gmail.com. The subject line should be: "NAACL HLT 2010: TUTORIAL PROPOSAL".

PLEASE NOTE: 

1. Proposals will not be accepted by regular mail or fax, only by email to: tutorials.hlt10@gmail.com.
2. You will receive an email confirmation from us within 24 hours that your proposal has been received.

TUTORIAL SPEAKER RESPONSIBILITIES

Accepted tutorial speakers will be notified by February 1, 2010, and must then provide abstracts of their tutorials for inclusion in the conference registration material by March 1, 2010. The description should be in two formats: an ASCII version that can be included in email announcements and published on the conference web site, and a PDF version for inclusion in the electronic proceedings (detailed instructions will be given). Tutorial speakers must provide tutorial materials, at least containing copies of the course slides as well as a bibliography for the material covered in the tutorial, by April 15, 2010.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 15, 2010
• Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2010
• Tutorial descriptions due: March 1, 2010
• Tutorial course material due: April 15, 2010
• Tutorial date: June 1, 2010

TUTORIALS CO-CHAIRS

• Jason Baldridge, The University of Texas at Austin
• Peter Clark, The Boeing Company
• Gokhan Tur, SRI International

Please send inquiries concerning NAACL-HLT-10 tutorials to tutorials.hlt10@gmail.com

NAACL HLT 2010, ACL 2010 and COLING 2010

                             JOINT CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

http://people.ict.usc.edu/~traum/naacl10-workshops/cfwp

                           * * * Proposal deadline: Oct 30, 2009 * * *

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the

International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) invite

proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with one of the three

2010 flagship conferences in computational linguistics: NAACL HLT 2010,

ACL 2010 and COLING 2010. We solicit proposals on any topic of interest

to the ACL/ICCL community. Workshops will be held at one of the

following conference venues:

    * NAACL HLT 2010 is the 11th annual meeting of the North American

chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It will be

held in Los Angeles, June 1-6, 2010. The dates for the NAACL HLT

workshops will be June 5-6. The webpage for NAACL HLT 2010 is:

http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/.

    * The 48th annual meeting of the ACL (ACL 2010) will be held in

Uppsala, July 11-16, 2010. The ACL workshops will be held July 15-16.

The webpage for ACL 2010 is http://acl2010.org/.

    * The 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics

(COLING 2010) will be held in Beijing, August 23-27, 2010. There will be

pre-conference workshops on August 21-22, and post-conference workshops

on August 28. The webpage for the conference is:

http://www.coling-2010.org/.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

As in 2009, we will coordinate the submission and reviewing of workshop

proposals for all three ACL/ICCL 2010 conferences.

Proposals for workshops should contain:

    * A title and brief (2-page max) description of the workshop topic

and content.

    * The desired workshop length (one or two days), and an estimate of

the audience size.

    * The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of

the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research

interests and areas of expertise.

    * A list of potential members of the program committee, with an

indication of which members have already agreed.

    * A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop.

    * A description of special requirements for technical needs.

    * A venue preference specification.

The venue preference specification should list the venues at which the

organizers would be willing to present the workshop (NAACL HLT, ACL, or

COLING). A proposal may specify one, two, or three acceptable workshop

venues; if more than one venue is acceptable, the venues should be

preference-ordered. There will be a single workshop committee,

coordinated by the three sets of workshop chairs. This single committee

will review the quality of the workshop proposals. Once the reviews are

complete, the workshop chairs will work together to assign workshops to

each of the three conferences, taking into account the location

preferences given by the proposers.

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL's

general policies on workshops at

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshop-support-general-policy.html,

the financial policy for workshops at

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshop-conf-financial-policy.html,

and the financial policy for SIG workshops at

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshops-Sig-financial-policy.html.

This year we will be using the START system for submission and reviewing

of workshop proposals. Please submit proposals to

https://www.softconf.com/a/ACLWorkshops2010 no later than 12 Midnight,

Pacific Standard Time, October 30, 2009.

Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals will occur no later

than November 20, 2009. Since the three ACL/ICCL conferences will occur

at different times, the timescales for the submission and reviewing of

workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be

different for the three conferences. Suggested timescales for each of

the conferences are given below.

TIMELINES FOR 2010 WORKSHOPS

Oct 30, 2009     Workshop proposal deadline

Nov 20, 2009     Notification of acceptance

NAACL 2010    

Dec 18, 2009: Proposed workshop CFP

Mar 1, 2010: Proposed paper due date

Mar 30, 2010: Proposed notification of acceptance

Jun 5-6, 2010: Workshops

ACL 2010    

Jan 18, 2010: Proposed workshop CFP

Apr 5, 2010: Proposed paper due date

May 6, 2010: Proposed notification of acceptance

Jul 15-16, 2010: Workshops

COLING 2010    

Feb 25, 2010: Proposed workshop CFP

May 30, 2010: Proposed paper due date

Jun 30, 2010: Proposed notification of acceptance     

Aug 21-22, 2010: Pre-conference workshops

Aug 28, 2010: Post-conference workshops

Workshop Co-Chairs

    * Richard Sproat, NAACL, Oregon Health & Science University

    * David Traum, NAACL, University of Southern California

    * Pushpak Bhattacharyya, ACL, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

    * David Weir, ACL, University of Sussex

    * Noah Smith, COLING, Carnegie Mellon University

    * Takenobu Tokunaga, COLING, Tokyo Institute of Technology

    * Haifeng Wang, COLING, Toshiba (China) Research and Development Center

For inquiries, send email to: cl.workshops.2010@gmail.com

48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

                       July 11-16, 2010

                       Uppsala, Sweden

* * * Paper Submission Deadline: February 15, 2010 * * *

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

(ACL) is the flagship conference for research on language and

computation. The 48th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL 2010) seeks

submission of papers on original and unpublished research in all areas

of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include areas such

as psycholinguistics, speech, information retrieval, multimodal

language processing, and language issues in emerging domains such as

bioinformatics. In addition, we want to stress that both theoretical,

as well as practical and empirical papers, are sought for the

conference.

ACL 2010 has the goal of a broad technical program. Thus, ACL 2010

invites papers in the following categories:

   Research papers

     - theoretical computational linguistics

     - empirical/data-driven approaches

     - paradigms/techniques/strategies

     - resources and evaluation

     - applications/systems

     - negative result (report of a sensible experiment or approach

                        that failed to achieve the desired results)

   Survey papers (new emerging area, field relevant to computational

                  linguistics, etc.)

   Position papers (we are particularly soliciting papers co-authored

                    by two individuals with opposing positions, though

                    single-authored papers are welcome)

   Challenge papers (a challenge to the field in terms of setting out

                     a goal for the next 5/10/20 years)

The above categories include types of papers that have not typically

been part of the ACL conference program. Since the appropriate

criteria for evaluating papers is not identical for the above

categories (and subcategories), ACL 2010 will use a different review

form for each category of paper, with the review form tailored to the

type of submission. For example, the review criteria for an

applications/systems research paper will include whether a substantive

evaluation or user experiments are reported and whether a demo will be

available at the conference, whereas the review form for a theoretical

computational linguistics research paper will include a different set

of review criteria. The review forms will be available on the

conference web site at least 3 months prior to the submission

deadline. At the time of submission, authors will be asked to

designate the category under which they believe that their paper

should be evaluated. However, the program committee chairs reserve the

right to change the selected category if they feel that the submission

falls into a different category of paper.

If you are unsure about whether your submission is appropriate for ACL

2010 please email the program chairs at program@acl2010.org.

LONG VERSUS SHORT PAPERS:

The submission deadlines for long and for short papers are identical.

Long papers are appropriate for:

1) reporting substantial, completed, and previously unpublished research;

2) presenting a survey of a subfield that would be of interest to

   computational linguists;

3) a two-author position paper in which the co-authors take

   opposing positions.

Short papers typically constitute more focused contributions. Thus

they are appropriate for:

1) reporting smaller experiments;

2) describing work-in-progress;

3) single-author position papers;

4) challenge papers;

5) descriptions of new language resources or evaluation methodologies

   (although these could be long papers);

6) presenting negative results.

Long papers will be allocated 8 pages of content in the

conference proceedings, and short papers will be allocated 4 pages

of content. Both long and short papers may have any number of

pages consisting solely of references. Long papers will generally be

presented as 20-minute talks plus questions (although authors will be

given the option of instead selecting a poster presentation or a

10-minute oral presentation followed by a poster); short papers will

be presented either as a poster or as a 10-minute talk followed by a

poster session. There will be no distinction in the conference

proceedings between papers that are assigned different presentation

modes (such as oral versus poster).

IMPORTANT DATES:

Feb 15, 2010 - Paper submissions due (both long and short papers);

July 11-16, 2010 - ACL 2010

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Discourse, dialogue, and pragmatics

* Grammar engineering

* Information extraction

* Information retrieval

* Knowledge acquisition

* Large scale language processing

* Language generation

* Language processing in domains such as bioinformatics, legal, medical, etc.

* Language resources, evaluation methods and metrics, science of annotation

* Lexical/ontological/formal semantics

* Machine translation

* Mathematical linguistics, grammatical formalisms

* Mining from textual and spoken language data

* Multilingual language processing

* Multimodal language processing (including speech, gestures, and other

                                  communication media)

* NLP applications and systems

* NLP on noisy unstructured text, such as emails, blogs, sms

* Phonology/morphology, tagging and chunking, word segmentation

* Psycholinguistics

* Question answering

* Semantic role labeling

* Sentiment analysis and opinion mining

* Spoken language processing

* Statistical and machine learning methods

* Summarization

* Syntax, parsing, grammar induction

* Text mining

* Textual entailment and paraphrasing

* Topic and text classification

* Word sense disambiguation

SUBMISSIONS:

The deadline for both long and short papers is February 15, 2010.

Submission will be electronic in PDF format through the conference

website.

Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content (excluding

references), and short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content

(excluding references). Both long and short papers may include any

additional number of pages consisting solely of references. Both long

and short paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL

2010 proceedings. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style

files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's

conference, which will be available on the conference website. All

submissions must conform to the official ACL 2010 style guidelines to

be announced on the conference website.

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must

not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore,

self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We

previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use

citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do

not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

MULTIPLE SUBMISSION POLICY:

ACL 2010 will not accept for publication or presentation work that

will be (or has been) published at other meetings or in other

publications. However, papers that have been or will be submitted

elsewhere may be submitted to ACL 2010 provided that this fact is

stated at the time of submission. If the paper is accepted by both

ACL 2010 and another meeting or publication, it must be withdrawn

from one of them; furthermore, its authors must notify the program

chairs, within two days of receiving the ACL acceptance notification,

indicating which meeting or publication they choose for presentation

of their work.

MENTORING SERVICE: ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for

authors from regions of the world where English is less emphasized as

a language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions,

although able to read the scientific literature in English, have

little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences

such as the ACL meetings. If you would like to take advantage of the

service, please upload your paper in PDF format by January 1, 2010

using the paper submission software for the mentoring service which

will be available at the conference website.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CO-CHAIRS:

   Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA

   Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge, UK

ACL 2010 Student Research Workshop

                  July 11-16, 2010

                  Uppsala, Sweden

             http://acl2010.org/srw.html

* * * Paper submission deadline: February 15, 2010 * * *

General Invitation for Submissions

The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL

conferences. The workshop provides a venue for student researchers

investigating topics in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language

Processing to present their work and receive feedback. Participants will

have the opportunity to receive feedback from a general audience as well

as from panelists; the panelists are experienced researchers who will

prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the presentation.

We would like to invite student researchers to submit their work to the

workshop. Since this workshop is an excellent opportunity to ask for

suggestions, to receive useful feedback and to run your ideas by an

international audience of researchers, the emphasis of the workshop will

be on work in progress. The research being presented can come from any

topic area within computational linguistics including, but not limited

to, the following topic areas:

    * pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon

    * phonetics, phonology and morphology

    * linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language

    * information retrieval, information extraction, question answering

    * summarization and paraphrasing

    * language generation

    * speech recognition, speech synthesis

    * corpus-based language modeling

    * multi-lingual processing, machine translation, translation aids

    * spoken and written natural language interfaces, dialogue systems

    * multi-modal language processing, multimedia systems

    * message and narrative understanding system

Submission Requirements

The emphasis of the workshop is on original and unpublished research.

The papers should describe original work in progress. Students who have

settled on their thesis direction but still have significant research

left to do are particularly encouraged to submit their papers.

Since the main purpose of presenting at the workshop is to exchange

ideas with other researchers and to receive helpful feedback for further

development of the work, papers should clearly indicate directions for

future research wherever appropriate. All authors of multi-author papers

MUST be students. Papers submitted for this workshop are eligible only

if they have not been presented at any other meeting with publicly

available published proceedings. Students who have already presented at

an ACL/EACL/NAACL Student Research Workshop may not submit to this

workshop. They should submit their papers to the main conference

instead. It must be indicated if a paper has been submitted to another

conference or workshop.

Submission Format

Paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL 2010

proceedings without exceeding six (6) pages, including references. We

strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word

style files tailored for this year's conference. These files will be

available soon from this page. Submissions must conform to the official

ACL 2010 style guidelines and they must be electronic in PDF. Please use

the submission system to submit your paper.

Reviewing Procedure

Reviewing of papers submitted to the Student Research Workshop will be

managed by the Student Workshop Co-Chairs, with the assistance of a team

of reviewers. Each submission will be matched with a mixed panel of

student and senior researchers for review. The final acceptance decision

will be based on the results of the review. As the reviewing will be

blind, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations.

Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g.,

"We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use

citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers

that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Important Dates:

  Paper submission deadline: February 15, 2010

  Notification of acceptance: April 12, 2010

  Camera-ready submission deadline: May 10, 2010

  Conference dates: July 11-16, 2010 (The workshop will be held during

the main conference)

Funding for Travel

There will be funding to assist student participants with travel and

conference expenses. This information will be available soon from the

workshop webpage.

Contact Information

If you need to contact the Co-Chairs of the Student Workshop, please

use: srw@acl2010.org. An e-mail sent to this address will be forwarded

to all Co-Chairs.

Tomek Strzalkowski (Faculty Advisor) University at Albany, SUNY, USA

Seniz Demir (Co-Chair) University of Delaware, USA

Jan Raab (Co-Chair) Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Nils Reiter (Co-Chair) Heidelberg University, Germany

Announcement

Summer School CPMSP2 - 2010

“Cognitive and Physical Models of Speech Production, Speech Perception and Production-Perception Interaction”

Part III: Planning and Dynamics

Berlin – September 27-October 1, 2010

After two successful editions in Lubmin (2004) and Autrans (2007), we are pleased to announce the 3^rd International CPMSP2 Summer School on “Cognitive and Physical Models of Speech Production, Speech Perception and Production-Perception Interaction”. The summer school will be held in Berlin from the 27^th of September to the 1^st of October 2010.

The focus of this summer school will be the planning of speech sequences and its interactions with dynamical properties of speech production and speech perception. It will be organized around 9 tutorials addressing related issues from the linguistic, neurophysiologic, motor control, and perception perspectives. The following invited speakers have accepted to present these tutorials:

§ Rachine Ridouane – LPP – Paris: Units in speech planning