We are pleased to announce the start of a new monthly section of ISCAPad called "Industry Notes". The purpose of this section is to allow our Industry Affiliates (MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www-isca-spech.org" claiming to be http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=78) to post items of a timely interest to ISCA members. If you would like your company to become an ISCA Industry Affiliate please contact Industry-Liaison@isca-speech.org. 

Odyssey 2010: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop will be hosted by Brno University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic. Odyssey’10 is an ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop held in cooperation with the ISCA Speaker and Language Characterization SIG. The need for fast, efficient, accurate, and robust means of recognizing people and languages is of growing importance for commercial, forensic, and government applications. The aim of this workshop is to continue to foster interactions among researchers in speaker and language recognition as the successor of previous successful events held in Martigny (1994), Avignon (1998), Crete (2001), Toledo (2004), San Juan (2006) and Stellenbosch (2008). 

http://www.speakerodyssey.com

Topics

Topics of interest include speaker and language recognition (verification, identification, segmentation, and clustering): text-dependent and -independent speaker recognition; multispeaker training and detection; speaker characterization and adaptation; features for speaker recognition; robustness in channels; robust classification and fusion; speaker recognition corpora and evaluation; use of extended training data; speaker recognition with speech recognition; forensics, multimodality, and multimedia speaker recognition; speaker and language confidence estimation; language, dialect, and accent recognition; speaker synthesis and transformation; biometrics; human recognition of speaker and language; and commercial applications.

Schedule

Draft papers due:

15 February 2010

Notification of acceptance:

16 April 2010

Final papers due:

30 April 2010

Preliminary program:

17 May 2010

Workshop:

28 June – 1 July 2010 

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

Call for Tutorials

The Interspeech 2010 Organization Committee invites proposals for Tutorials at Interspeech 2010 - the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, to be held on September 26-30, 2010, in Makuhari, Chiba, Japan. The theme of INTERSPEECH 2009 is "Spoken Language Processing for All Ages, Health Conditions, Native Languages and Environments".

Proposal Submission

The following information should be included in each Tutorial proposal:

1. Title of the proposed tutorial
2. Names and affiliation of the presenters, 
   including a brief biography and contact information
3. Introduction (1 page), 
   including the importance of the topic, the objectives of the proposed tutorial, and brief outline of the main target audience.
4. Presentation outline (max. 2 pages ), 
   an outline of the presentation and, if multiple presenters are proposed, how the presentation will be shared.
5. Requirements, 
   including any special equipment necessary for the presentation.

Proposals will be evaluated by the Organization Committee based on the relevance and significance of the topic and potential interest to the conference attendees.

Submission Procedure

Prospective tutorial presenters should submit proposals by email to Tatsuya Kawahara (kawahara@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp) and Masato Akagi (akagi@jaist.ac.jp) before January 4, 2010. Notification of acceptance of proposals is scheduled for January 31, 2010. 

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

IMPORTANT NOTE

 Special Highlight: Contribute to building the LREC2010 Map!

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.

Le groupe "Traitement du Langage Parlé" du LIMSI/CNRS
(http://www.limsi.fr/tlp) recrute un post-doctorant pour participer au
projet ANR EDyLex.

Le projet EDyLex est un projet financé par l'ANR dans le cadre du
programme CONTINT (Contenus et interactions); il porte sur
l'acquisition dynamique de nouvelles entrées lexicales dans des
chaines d'analyse linguistiques (analyse syntaxique/sémantique ou
systèmes de transcription de la parole) : comment détecter et
qualifier un mot inconnu ou une entité nommée nouvelle dans un texte
ou dans un flux de parole ? Comment lui attribuer une phonétique, une
catégorie, des propriétés syntaxiques, une place dans un réseau
sémantique ?

Le travail concerné par cette annonce porte plus spécifiquement sur la
gestion des mots nouveaux ou inconnus, afin qu'ils puissent être
reconnus par un système de transcription de la parole. Ceci implique
la détection des mots inconnus, l'utilisation d'unités sous-lexicales,
la phonétisation avec variantes de mots nouveaux, l'adaptation des
modèles de langage. Ces méthodes seront validées en interne dans le
projet , et lors des futures campagnes nationales ou internationales
comme STD (Spoken Term Detection) organisée par le NIST
(http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/std/index.html).

Le consortium de Edylex est composé de l'équipe Alpage
(INRIA-Univ. Paris 7), qui coordonne le projet, du Laboratoire
d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille (UMR du CNRS), de Syllabs et
Vecsys Research, deux laboratoires de recherche privés, la première
spécialisée dans le traitement du langage naturel, la deuxième dans le
traitement de la parole, de l'AFP qui fournit les corpus et qui
évaluera l'apport des techniques développées dans son système
d'information, et du LIMSI, dans ses deux composantes, écrit (groupe
ILES) et parole (groupe TLP).

Le projet a commencé le 1er novembre 2009 et durera 3 ans.

Les candidats devront savoir programmer dans un environnement Unix, et
être capable de parler et écrire en anglais et en français.
Ils devront avoir obtenu un doctorat dans l'un des domaines
suivants : traitement de la parole, traitement du langage naturel.

Être impliqué dans un projet de recherche dans le groupe TLP au LIMSI
offre une opportunité exceptionnelle de travailler sur des problèmes
de recherche variés, au sein d'une équipe de recherche de premier
plan, et d'être en contact avec les laboratoires académiques ou
industriels les plus importants dans le domaine.

La durée du contrat est de 1 an renouvelable.

Le travail se déroulera au LIMSI/CNRS qui se situe à Orsay, au sud de Paris.

Les candidatures devront être adressées, accompagnées d'un CV, à
Gilles ADDA (gadda@limsi.fr) 

Ircam recruits a Researcher W/M under limited-term contract of 18 months and full-time

From January 4th, 2010

Introduction to IRCAM

IRCAM is a leading non-profit organization associated to Centre Pompidou, dedicated to music production, R&D and education in acoustics and music. It hosts composers, researchers and students from many countries cooperating in contemporary music production, scientific and applied research. The main topics addressed in its R&D department include acoustics, audio signal processing, computer music, interaction technologies, musicology. Ircam is located in the center of Paris near the Centre Pompidou, at 1, Place Igor Stravinsky 75004 Paris.

Introduction to Quaero project

Quaero is a 200 M€ collaborative research and development program focusing on the areas of automatic extraction of information, analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content for professionals and consumers. The research work shall concentrate on managing virtually unlimited quantities of multimedia and multilingual information,  including text, speech, music, image and video. Five main application areas have been identified by the partners:

1.       multimedia internet search

2.       enhanced access services to audiovisual content on portals

3.       personalized video selection and distribution

4.       professional audiovisual asset management

5.       digitalization and enrichment of library content, audiovisual cultural heritage and scientific information.

The Quaero consortium was created to meet new multimedia content analysis requirements for consumers and professionals, faced with the explosion of accessible digital information and the proliferation of access means (PC,  TV, handheld devices). More information can be found at www.quaero.org/.

Role of Ircam in Quaero Project

In the Quaero project, Ircam is in charge of the coordination of audio/music indexing research and of development of music-audio indexing technology: music content-description (tempo, rhythm, key, chord, singing-voice, and instrumentation description), automatic indexing (music genre/style, mood), music similarity, music audio summary, chorus detection and audio identification. A specificity of the project is the creation of a large-music-audio corpus in order to train and validate all the algorithms developed during the project.

Position description

The Researcher would be in charge of the development of the technologies related to audio identification. Researcher will also collaborate with the evaluation team who evaluate algorithms performances and with the developer team.

Required profile

 Very high skills in audio signal processing (spectral analysis, partial tracking, audio coding, audio-feature extraction, parameter estimation)

Very high skills in audio indexing and data mining (statistical modelling, automatic feature selection algorithm, …)

Very high-skills in large-database search algorithms (structure indexing)

Good knowledge of Linux, Windows, MAC-OS environments

High-skill in Matlab programming, skills in C/C++ programming

High productivity, methodical work, excellent programming style.

Salary

According to background and experience

Applications

Please send an application letter together with your resume and any suitable information addressing the above issues preferably by email to: peeters_a_t_ircam dot fr with cc to vinet_a_t_ircam dot fr, rod_a_t_ircam dot fr

Proposition de Thèse CIFRE en informatique : Compilation d'unités phono-lexicales du langage parlé.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un projet de réalisation d'une plate-forme numérique comportant la conception d'un système logiciel permettant, notamment, l'apprentissage de l'écriture à partir de l'expression orale, la correction automatique d'erreurs orthographiques et grammaticales, et l'indexation sémantique de textes. Ce projet allie des chercheurs en phonétique, en linguistique (syntaxe et sémantique intrinsèque) et en informatique (compilation et optimisation de codes).

L'approche adoptée consiste à considérer que l’écriture implique la primauté de la substance phonique (les sons, les syllabes) et que de ce fait, il faut concevoir un modèle unitaire d’emblée établi sur le couplage entre le système phonologique, caractérisé par la variabilité des sons, et le système grammatical, caractérisé par la stabilité des unités graphiques. On fait donc l’hypothèse méthodologique que ce couplage est représentable dans la partie frontale d’un compilateur via les procédures de gestion de la table des symboles et de gestion des erreurs liées aux niveaux de l’analyse phono-lexicale, de l’analyse syntaxique et de l’analyse sémantique.

Au niveau phonique, la définition des unités lexicales implique de traiter simultanément l'intonation, l'accentuation, les syllabes et les phonèmes, pour segmenter la chaîne en mots phonologiques, représentables par des symboles. Le passage à l'écrit exige ainsi une méthode de construction récursive des unités à différents niveaux d’analyse par la formulation de règles d’inférences qui font correspondre les unités de niveau phonologique et les unités de niveau grammatical : la définition des unités au niveau phonologique est simultanément élaborée et couplée avec celle des unités grammaticales constituant l’énoncé selon une méthode descendante. D’où l’hypothèse de la hiérarchie des unités : une unité grammaticale est une structure relationnelle construite d’attributs atomiques définis par la hiérarchie d’une grammaire formelle.

Chaque unité lexicale peut jouer plusieurs rôles différents, selon le contexte de son apparition, contrairement aux unités lexicales des langages de programmation. Le type qui lui est associé est donc multiple. Par exemple « sort » peu jouer le rôle de verbe ou de nom commun, selon sa place
dans la phrase analysée. Cette place ne peut être identifiée qu’à l’étape d’analyse syntaxique, par confrontation avec les règles de production de la grammaire.

Le processus de compilation doit ensuite servir à extraire l’information de la sémantique du texte analysé, celle-ci devant être exprimée par une syntaxe « élémentaire » d’arbres de syntaxe abstraite étiquetés par des attributs.

Le modèle d'analyse descendante de la phrase, qui permet en effet de contrôler la génération et l'analyse de phrases de complexité croissante, servira de modèle à la constitution d'une base de données relationnelle constituée de tables reliées aux attributs des unités de sens. Les champs des tables représenteront les opérations sur les unités (substitution, déplacement, ajout, réduction).

Ce travail de thèse s'effectuera en collaboration avec l'Université de Strasbourg et l'entreprise Digora à Strasbourg, partenaire Oracle. Côté université, l'étudiant sera encadré par Rudolph Sock (phonéticien), Gérard Reb (linguiste) et Philippe Clauss (informaticien). L'étudiant alternera des périodes de travail en laboratoire (laboratoire LSIIT - Strasbourg) et en entreprise. Le doctorant sera amené à travailler avec un phonéticien post-doctorant. Le travail de thèse pourra débuter dès l'accomplissement de la procédure administrative d'établissement de la convention CIFRE pour une durée de 3 ans. Le salaire minimum est de 23 484 € annuel brut.

Prendre contact avec Philippe Clauss (clauss@unistra.fr)

Liens :
Laboratoire LSIIT : http://www-lsiit.u-strasbg.fr
Digora : http://www.digora.com
Université de Strasbourg : http://www.unistra.fr
Dispositif CIFRE : http://www.anrt.asso.fr/fr/espace_cifre/accueil.jsp 

The Spoken Language Processing Group at the LIMSI/CNRS (http://www.limsi.fr/tlp) is looking for postdocs, non-permanent research engineers, and doctoral students to participate in a number of research projects funded by national and European programs. 
  
The main research areas are: 
  
* Core technology for speech recognition (acoustic modeling, language modeling, ...) 
  
* Speech-to-speech translation 
  
* Speaker recognition and speaker diarization
  
 * Language Identification 
  
* Audio indexing in a multilingual context (English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Greek, ...) 
  
Preference will be given to candidates with experience in one or more of the following areas: speech processing, computational linguistics, signal processing and computer science. 
  
Applicants should be experienced programmers and be familiar with the Unix environment, and be able to speak and write in English. 
  
Contract duration for postdoc and research engineers: 1 to 3 years Location: LIMSI/CNRS Orsay, France (South of Paris) 
  
Projects at LIMSI offer an exceptional opportunity to address challenging research problems with some of the most prestigious academic and industrial partners. Interested candidates should send a CV to Jean-Luc Gauvain (gauvain@limsi.fr)

PhD.  Program Carnegie Mellon-PORTUGAL in the area of Language and Information Technologies The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University offers a dual degree Ph.D. Program in Language and Information Technologies in cooperation with Portuguese Universities. 
  
This Ph.D. program is part of the Portugal-Carnegie Mellon Partnership. The Language Technologies Institute, a world leader in the areas of speech processing, language processing, information retrieval, machine translation, machine learning, and bio-informatics, has been formed 20 years ago. The breadth of language technologies expertise at LTI enables new research in combinations of the core subjects, for example, in speech-to-speech translation, spoken dialog systems, language-based tutoring systems, and question/answering systems. The Portuguese consortium of Universities includes (but is not limited to) the Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) of INESC-ID Lisbon/IST, the University of Lisbon (FLUL), the University of Beira Interior (UBI) and the University of Algarve (UALG). These Universities share expertise in the same language technologies as LTI, although with a strong focus on processing the Portuguese language.
  
 Each Ph.D. student will receive a dual degree from LTI and the selected Portuguese University, being co-supervised by one advisor from each institute, and spending approximately half of the 5-year doctoral program at each institute. The academic part will be done during the first 2 years, including a maximum of 8 courses, with a proper balance of focus areas (Linguistic, Computer Science, Statistical/Learning, Task Orientation). The remaining 3 years of the doctoral program will be dedicated to research. 
  
The thesis topic will be in one of the research areas of the cooperation program, defined by the two advisors. Two multilingual topics have been identified as primary research areas (although other areas of human language technologies may be also contemplated): computer aided language learning (CALL) and speech-to-speech machine translation (S2SMT). The doctoral students will be involved in one of these two projects aimed at building real HLT systems. These projects will involve at least two languages, one of them being Portuguese, the target language for the CALL system to be developed and either the source or target language (or both) for the S2SMT system. These two projects provide a focus for the proposed research; through them the collaboration will explore the main core areas in language technology. 
  
The scholarship will be funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal. How to Apply The application deadline for the LT Ph.D. program in the scope of the CMU-Portugal partnership is December 15, 2009. 
  
Students interested in the dual doctoral program must apply by filling the corresponding form at the LTI webpage. For more information about the joint degree doctoral program in LT, send email to the coordinators of the Portuguese consortium and of the LTI admissions: Isabel.Trancoso at inesc-id dot pt LTI_Portugal_Admissions at cs dot cmu dot edu The applications will be screened by a joint committee formed by representatives of LTI and of the Portuguese Universities. The candidates should indicate their scores in GRE and TOEFL tests. Despite the particular focus on the Portuguese language, applications are not in any way restricted to native or non-native speakers of Portuguese. Post-Doc positions are also available in the scope of the same program. For additional information on these positions, contact Isabel.Trancoso at inesc-id dot pt.

Ircam recruits a Developer W/M under limited-term contract of 18 months and full-time

From March 1st, 2010

Introduction to IRCAM

IRCAM is a leading non-profit organization associated to Centre Pompidou, dedicated to music production, R&D and education in acoustics and music. It hosts composers, researchers and students from many countries cooperating in contemporary music production, scientific and applied research. The main topics addressed in its R&D department include acoustics, audio signal processing, computer music, interaction technologies, musicology. Ircam is located in the centre of Paris near the Centre Pompidou, at 1, Place Igor Stravinsky 75004 Paris.

Introduction to Quaero project

Quaero is a 200 M€ collaborative research and development program focusing on the areas of automatic extraction of information, analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content for professionals and consumers. The research work shall concentrate on managing virtually unlimited quantities of multimedia and multilingual information, including text, speech, music, image and video. Five main application areas have been identified by the partners:

1.       multimedia internet search

2.       enhanced access services to audiovisual content on portals

3.       personalized video selection and distribution

4.       professional audiovisual asset management

5.       digitalization and enrichment of library content, audiovisual cultural heritage and scientific information.

The Quaero consortium was created to meet new multimedia content analysis requirements for consumers and professionals, faced with the explosion of accessible digital information and the proliferation of access means (PC,  TV, handheld devices). More information can be found at www.quaero.org/.

Role of Ircam in Quaero Project

In the Quaero project, Ircam is in charge of the coordination of audio/music indexing research and of development of music-audio indexing technology: music content-description (tempo, rhythm, key, chord, singing-voice, and instrumentation description), automatic indexing (music genre/style, mood), music similarity, music audio summary, chorus detection and audio identification. A specificity of the project is the creation of a large-music-audio corpus in order to train and validate all the algorithms developed during the project.

Position description

The Developer will be in charge of the development and maintenance in C++ of the technologies related to audio indexing for Linux, Mac OS-X and Windows platform starting from Matlab code, including performance optimizations (memory, computation time, file access). The Developer will also collaborate with companies involved in Quaero Use Cases.

Required profile

·         Very high skill in C++ development (including template-based meta-programming)

·         Very good knowledge of Linux, Mac OSX and Windows development environment (gcc, Intel and MSVC, svn)

·         Good knowledge of Matlab programming

·         Good Knowledge of Digital Signal Processing algorithms (spectral analysis, partial tracking, audio coding, audio-feature extraction, parameter estimation)

·         Good knowledge of Pattern Matching algorithms (statistical modelling)

·         Good knowledge of indexing structure algorithms (LSH, Mtree, …)

·         High productivity, methodical work, excellent programming style.

Salary

According to background and experience

Applications

Please send an application letter together with your resume and any suitable information addressing the above issues preferably by email to: peeters_a_t_ircam dot fr with cc to vinet_a_t_ircam dot fr, rod_a_t_ircam_dot_fr, roebel_at_ircam_dot_fr

Postdoctoral position in Paris, France:  Signal Processing and Experimental Technique for a Silent Speech Interface DeadLine: 30/04/2010 denby@ieee.org http://www.neurones.espci.fr/Revoix/  Postdoctoral position in Paris, France  Signal Processing and Experimental Technique for a Silent Speech Interface  The REVOIX project in Paris, France is seeking an excellent candidate for a 12 month postdoctoral position, starting as soon as possible. REVOIX (ANR-09-ETEC-005), a partnership between the Laboratoire d’Electronique ESPCI ParisTech and the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, will design and implement a vocal prosthesis that uses a miniature ultrasound machine and a video camera to restore the original voice of persons who have lost the ability to speak due to laryngectomy or a neurological problem. The technologies developed in the project will have an additional field of application in telecommunications in the context of a “silent telephone† allowing its user to communicate orally but in complete silence (see special issue of Speech Communication, entitled Silent Speech Interfaces, appearing March, 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2009.08.002).  The project will build upon promising results obtained in the Ouisper project (ANR-06-BLAN-0166) which was completed at the end of 2009. The interdisciplinary REVOIX team includes junior and senior university and medical research staff with skills in signal processing, machine learning, speech processing, phonetics, and phonology. The ideal candidate for the postodoctoral position will have solid skills in signal processing, preferably with speech experience, but also in experimental techniques for man-machine interfaces, coupled with a with a strong motivation for working in an interdisciplinary environment to produce a working, portable silent speech interface system for use in medical and telecommunication applications. Salary is competitive for European research positions.   Contact : Professor Bruce DENBY  denby@ieee.org

Modelling human speech perception  Internal advisors: Dr Susan Denham, Dr Jeremy Goslin and Dr Caroline Floccia (1School of Psychology, University of Plymouth) External advisor: Dr Steven Greenberg (Silicon Speech, USA)  Applications are invited for a University-funded studentship to start in April 2010  Although artificial speech recognition systems have improved considerably over the years, their performance still falls far short of human abilities, and their robustness in the face of changing conditions is limited. In contrast, humans and other animals are able to adapt, seemingly effortlessly, to different listening environments, and are able to communicate effectively with one another in many different circumstances. In this project we aim to investigate a novel theoretical model of human speech perception based on cortical oscillators. We take as our starting point the observation that natural communication sounds contain temporal patterns or regularities evident at many different times scales (Winkler, Denham et al. 2009). The proposal is that the speech message can be extracted through adaptation of a hierarchically organised system of neural oscillators to the characteristic multi-scale temporal patterns present in the speech of the target speaker, and that by doing so extraneous interfering sounds can be simultaneously rejected.  This proposal will be tested using electrophysiological measurements of listeners attending to speech in different background sounds, analyzing activity at various pre-lexical and lexical processing levels (e.g. (Goslin, Grainger et al. 2006)), for application in the development of a biologically inspired computational model of human speech perception.  We are looking for a highly qualified and motivated student with a strong interest in auditory perception, sounds and speech perception. You will join a well-established research environment, and work alongside the brain-technology team which is currently funded by a multi-centre European project SCANDLE (http://www.scandle.eu), and a new joint British ESRC/ French ANR project, RECONVO (investigating multi-lingual speech development). Requirement: Knowledge of experimental methods and/or programming experience with a high level language; Desirable: Knowledge of signal processing techniques, models of auditory perception, electrophysiological techniques. Candidates should have a first or upper second class honours degree in an area related to Cognitive Neuroscience (Computer Science, Maths, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience, or Psychology). Applicants with a relevant MSc or MRes are particularly welcome. The studentship will provide a fully funded full-time PhD post for three years, with a stipend of approximately £13,290 per annum. The position is open to UK citizens and EU citizens with appropriate qualification who have been resident or studied in the UK for three years.  For informal queries please contact: Dr Susan Denham (sdenham@plymouth.ac.uk<mailto:sdenham@plymouth.ac.uk>). For an application form and full details on how to apply, please visit www.plymouth.ac.uk/pghowtoapply<http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pghowtoapply> Applicants should send a completed application form along with the following documentation to The University of Plymouth, Postgraduate Admissions Office, Hepworth House, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA – United Kingdom  • Two references in envelopes signed across their seals • Copies of transcripts and certificates • If English is not your first language, evidence that you meet our English Language requirements (www.plymouth.ac.uk/elr<http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/elr> ) • CV • Ethnic and Disability Monitoring Form  Closing Date: 5PM, Monday 15 February 2010.  Interviews will be held at the end of February 2010, with a proposed start date of 1 April 2010.  References Goslin, J., J. Grainger, et al. (2006). "Syllable frequency effects in French visual word recognition: an ERP study." Brain Res 1115(1): 121-34. Winkler, I., S. L. Denham, et al. (2009). "Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects." Trends Cogn Sci 13(12): 532-40.

Aalto University Postdoc (Espoo, Finland)

The Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics will have a postdoctoral research position for the time period of 1 August 2010 - 31 December 2012 related to one of the following fields:

Digital signal processing in wireless communications, sensor array signal processing, speech processing, audio signal processing, spatial sound, or optical radiation measurements

Successful applicants are expected to strengthen and extend the department's current research and teaching in their field of expertise. The applicants are expected to have earned their doctoral degree between between 1 January 2005 - 31 May 2010.

This recruitment is a result of the department's success in the recent Research Assessment Exercise, and we are looking for strong candidates from all over the world.

The postdoc will be expected to participate in the department's teaching. The annual salary starts from 39 500 euros depending on experience.

Applications should include:

• Research Plan
• CV
• List of publications
• Names and contact information of 1-3 referees
• Optional 1-2 letters of recommendation

Please send your applications by email to aalto-postdoc@signal.tkk.fi. Each application
should be in the form of a single pdf file. Name your file as: "surname_application.pdf". Applications are due 15 March 2010.

See also: http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/jobs/postdoc/

0One PhD position at ACLC/NKI-AVL 2010 							 The Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC) focuses on the description and explanations for variation in languages and language use. The ACLC includes both functional and formal approaches to language description and encourages dialogue between these approaches. Studies cover all aspects of speech and languages: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics - in a search for the Language Blueprint. Language typology, including that of Creole and signed languages, plays an important part in the ACLC programme. Language variation in terms of time, space and context is also a specialization. The study of variation in the different types of language user - from the child learning her first language to the adult second language learner including also different types of language pathology - is a clear focus.  Questions of speech and language loss and (re-)acquisition are a focus of the ACLC. The course of speech rehabilitation after serious pathologies of the head and neck area is an example of such loss and re-acquisition. The Department of Head and Neck Oncology and Surgery at The Netherlands Cancer Institute/Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital (NKI-AVL), in collaboration with the Academic Medical Center (AMC), is involved in patient care, education and scientific research in the field of head and neck cancer. The department has a long history of quality of life research, focusing on the functional side effects of head and neck cancer and its treatment. The most common tumours include mouth and tongue, throat, and larynx (voice box) cancer. Voice and speech disorders related to head and neck cancer treatment and the rehabilitation thereof are extensively studied in close collaboration with the ACLC.  The PhD project  Title: Automatic evaluation of voice and speech rehabilitation following treatment of head and neck cancers.  Abstract:The research project will study the use of existing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications to evaluate pathologic speech after treatment of head and neck cancers in a clinical setting. The aim is to obtain therapeutically meaningful measures of the speech quality of individual patients over the course of their treatment. Basic and applied research into the properties and pathologies of Tracheo-Esophageal (TE) speech following laryngectomy has a long history at the ACLC. The current project also includes the effects of other treatment, e.g. radio- and chemotherapy. The project could also contribute to a practical end goal where ASR systems in the future could be used to obtain objective information on speech quality, real-time during treatment and rehabilitation sessions. Such objective information is needed for evidence based medical treatment and is currently lacking. Emphasis will be given to studying the relation between medical history, speech and voice acoustics, and specific ASR results for individual patients. Of special interest are word recognition errors that can be traced to specific phrasing, prosodic, and phoneme errors known to affect TE speakers. The candidate will study how pre-recorded patient materials can be evaluated using existing ASR applications and process the results. The candidate will collaborate with laboratories in Belgium and Germany.  Application and Procedure  You have to apply as a candidate. Please follow the Guidelines for applying for an internal PhD position 2010 (see below under Information).  Tasks  The PhD student needs to carry out the research and write a dissertation within the duration of the project (4 years (80%) or 3.3 years (full time)).  Requirements  Educational background :Logopedic, linguistics, or phonetics with an affinity to speech pathology  Experience : Experience with speech technology and perception experiments is welcome  Information The following documents give precise information about the application procedure:  Project description Automatic evaluation of voice and speech rehabilitation following treatment of head and neck cancers http://www.hum.uva.nl/template/downloadAsset.cfm?objectid=6A975BC9-1321-B0BE-A4AEADEE9606E295  ACLC guidelines for application 2010 http://www.hum.uva.nl/template/downloadAsset.cfm?objectid=6A992ABD-1321-B0BE-A486D0A4B8D373EB  NB Incomplete applications will be automatically rejected so please read the guidelines carefully.  Further information can be obtained from the intended supervisors of this project, Prof. Dr. Frans Hilgers, phone +31.20.512.2550, e-mail: f.hilgers@nki.nl, Dr. Rob van Son, e-mail: R.J.J.H.vanSon@uva.nl, or from the managing director of the ACLC, Dr. Els Verheugd, phone +31.20.525.2543, e-mail: E.A.B.M.Verheugd-Daatzelaar@uva.nl. The original position can be found at the ACLC web site http://www.hum.uva.nl/aclc/object.cfm/DBFA7FA8-14CF-4213-9DC6A7A4E11E9878/6A8B1555-1321-B0BE-A446C998FB2AC9E6  Position The PhD student will be appointed for a period of 4 years (80%) or 3.3 years (full time) at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam under the terms of employment currently valid for the Faculty. A contract will be given in the first instance for one year, with an extension for the following years on the basis of an evaluation of, amongst other things, a written piece of work. The salary (on a full time base) will be # 2042 during the first year (gross per month) and will reach # 2612 during the fourth year, in accordance with the CAO for Dutch universities.  Submissions  Submissions of your application as a candidate should be sent before 22 February, 2010 to aclc-fgw@uva.nl (or, in the case of a paper version, to the director of the ACLC, Prof. Dr P.C Hengeveld, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam). Applications received after this date or those that are incomplete will not be taken into consideration.

La DGA ouvre un poste au sein de l'équipe de traitement du langage.

* Poste et missions :

En lien avec les acteurs scientifiques et industriels du traitement automatique du langage oral et écrit et pour répondre aux besoins des opérationnels de la défense à court comme à long terme, vous serez en charge de concevoir, spécifier, suivre et évaluer des projets technologiques dans le domaine.

De manière à mener à bien efficacement ces projets, vous effectuerez également une veille technologique active, des actions de coordination au niveau national et international, et des travaux d'étude et de développement informatique.

* Profil :

Une expérience dans le domaine du traitement automatique du langage associée à des compétences en gestion de projet est recherchée. La maitrise de l'anglais et des relations internationales sont un plus.

Diplôme grande école ingénieur ou diplôme niveau bac+5 exigé.

* Référence

http://cadres.apec.fr/offres-emploi-cadres/0_0_5_21430248W________offre-d-emploi-expert-traitement-du-langage-h-f.html

Les candidatures peuvent être envoyées soit via l'APEC soit directement. 

ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR POSITION IN MULTIMEDIA AT EURECOM

The Multimedia Communications Department of EURECOM invites applications
for a faculty position at the Assistant/Associate Professor level. The
new faculty is expected to participate in teaching in our Master program
and to develop a new research activity in
                                      Ambient Multimedia.
We are especially interested in research directions which may extend our
existing activities in audio and video analysis towards pioneering new
approaches to interaction between people and their environment, in
everyday life or professional situations, for better productivity,
security, healthcare or entertainment.

Candidates must have a Ph.D. in computer science or electrical
engineering and between 5 and 10 years of research experience after PhD.
The ideal candidate will have an established research track record at
the international level, and a proven record of successful collaboration
with academic and industrial partners in national and European programs
or equivalent. A strong commitment to excellence in research is
mandatory. Exceptional candidates may be considered at the senior level.

Screening of applications will begin in January, 2010, and the search
will continue until the position is filled. Applicants should send, by
email, a letter of motivation, a resume including a list of their
publications, the names of 3 referees and a copy of their three most
important publications, to:
           mm_position@eurecom.fr
with the subject: ASSISTANT PROFESSOR POSITION IN MULTIMEDIA

EURECOM (http://www.eurecom.fr/) is a graduate school in communication
systems founded in 1992 by EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
Lausanne, http://www.epfl.ch/) and Telecom Paris Tech
(http://www.enst.fr/), together with several academic and industrial
partners. EURECOM's activity includes research and graduate teaching in
corporate, multimedia and mobile communications. EURECOM currently has a
faculty of 20 professors, 200 Master students and 60 PhD students.
EURECOM is involved in many European research projects and joint
collaborations with industry. EURECOM is located in Sophia-Antipolis, a
major European technology park for telecommunications research and
development in the French Riviera.

*Poste de Professeur en Informatique n° 232 au LIA (Université d'Avignon)
Intitulé : Informatique, Dialogue, Parole, Texte, Apprentissage Automatique
*
Description courte : le profil recherche de ce poste se situe, dans l’idéal, au confluent de trois
disciplines : la Reconnaissance Automatique de la Parole (RAP), le Traitement Automatique de la
Langue Naturelle (TALN) et l'Apprentissage Automatique (AA). Préférence sera donnée aux
candidat(e)s menant des recherches sur les traitements linguistiques de haut niveau de la langue
orale, en particulier dans le cadre d'applications de compréhension de la langue et de traduction
automatique. Les contextes applicatifs envisagés sont les interfaces de dialogue homme-machine et
le traitement de vastes archives sonores (données diffusées et archives de centres d'appels).

*Pour lire la description longue du profil détaillé :
*/=============================
/http://lia.univ-avignon.fr/fileadmin/documents/Users/Intranet/dossiers/Profil_Poste_Pr_232_2010_LIA_UAPV.pdf

*ATTENTION, il s'agit d'un recrutement au fil de l'eau et non de la campagne
synchronisée. Les candidatures sont à déposer avant le 4 Mars 2010.
* 

« Problématiques informatiques intégrant l’aléatoire » (27 PR 1214)

Profil pédagogique :

Ce professeur rejoindra l’équipe pédagogique de l’IFSIC  et interviendra tant en Licence qu’en Master. La personne recrutée sera de formation informatique et sera à même d’illustrer l’apport des méthodes probabilistes ou statistiques à plusieurs domaines de l’informatique.

Profil de recherche :

 De nombreuses problématiques informatiques, développées au sein du laboratoire, requièrent des approches probabilistes (ou mixtes, déterministes/probabilistes) et/ou impliquant des aspects statistiques. Nous recherchons un professeur dont le profil de recherche aborde ces questions informatiques intégrant l'aléatoire.

Les domaines de recherche incluent la modélisation probabiliste,  les infrastructures (réseaux, qualité des services)  ainsi que le traitement de données numérisées et numériques (fouille de données, apprentissage).  Les applications incluent par exemple l’image et le son.

« Informatique pour la domotique» (27 MCF 1069 - ce poste sera affecté à l'Ecole Supérieure d'Ingénieurs de Rennes (ESIR))

We are pleased to announce the launch of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. This exciting title is the only IEEE journal covering the multidisciplinary research field of HCI, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and signal processing. Topics covered, but are not limited to, include:

• Sensing and analysis (i.e., analysis of text and spoken language for emotion recognition),
• Psychology and behavior relating to affective computing, and
• Behavior generation and user interaction.

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

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 

Call for Papers

SPECIAL ISSUE OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION on

Sensing Emotion and Affect - Facing Realism in Speech Processing

http://www.elsevier.com/framework_products/promis_misc/specomsensingemotion.pdf

_______________________________________________________________________________

Human-machine and human-robot dialogues in the next generation will be dominated by natural speech which is fully spontaneous and thus driven by emotion. Systems will not only be expected to cope with affect throughout actual speech recognition, but at the same time to detect emotional and related patterns such as non-linguistic vocalization, e.g. laughter, and further social signals for appropriate reaction. In most cases, this analysis clearly must be made independently of the speaker and for all speech that "comes in" rather than only for pre-selected and pre-segmented prototypical cases. In addition - as in any speech processing task, noise, coding, and blind speaker separation artefacts, together with transmission errors need to be dealt with. To provide appropriate back-channelling and sociSPECIAL ISSUE of SPEECH COMMUNally competent reaction fitting the speaker's emotional state in time, on-line and incremental processing will be among further concerns. Once affective speech processing is applied in real-life, novel issues as standards, confidences, distributed analysis, speaker adaptation, and emotional profiling are coming up next to appropriate interaction and system design. In this respect, the Interspeech Emotion Challenge 2009, which has been organized by the guest editors, provided the first forum for comparison of results, obtained for exactly the same realistic conditions. In this special issue, on the one hand, we will summarise the findings from this challenge, and on the other hand, provide space for novel original contributions that further the analysis of natural, spontaneous, and thus emotional speech by late-breaking technological advancement, recent experience with realistic data, revealing of black holes for future research endeavours, or giving a broad overview. Original, previously unpublished submissions are encouraged within the following scope of topics:

    * Machine Analysis of Naturalistic Emotion in Speech and Text

    * Sensing Affect in Realistic Environments (Vocal Expression, Nonlinguistic Vocalization)

    * Social Interaction Analysis in Human Conversational Speech

    * Affective and Socially-aware Speech User Interfaces

    * Speaker Adaptation, Clustering, and Emotional Profiling

    * Recognition of Group Emotion and Coping with Blind Speaker Separation Artefacts

    * Novel Research Tools and Platforms for Emotion Recognition

    * Confidence Measures and Out-of-Vocabulary Events in Emotion Recognition

    * Noise, Echo, Coding, and Transmission Robustness in Emotion Recognition

    * Effects of Prototyping on Performance

    * On-line, Incremental, and Real-time Processing

    * Distributed Emotion Recognition and Standardization Issues

    * Corpora and Evaluation Tasks for Future Comparative Challenges

    * Applications (Spoken Dialog Systems, Emotion-tolerant ASR, Call-Centers, Education, Gaming, Human-Robot Communication, Surveillance, etc.)

Composition and Review Procedures

_______________________________________________________________________________

This Special Issue of Speech Communication on Sensing Emotion and Affect - Facing Realism in Speech Processing will consist of papers on data-based evaluations and papers on applications. The balance between these will be adjusted to maximize the issue's impact. Submissions will undergo the normal review process.

Guest Editors

_______________________________________________________________________________

Björn Schuller, Technische Universität München, Germany

Stefan Steidl, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Germany

Anton Batliner, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Germany

Important Dates

_______________________________________________________________________________

Submission Deadline April 1st, 2010

First Notification July 1st, 2010

Revisions Ready September 1st, 2010

Final Papers Ready November 1st, 2010

Tentative Publication Date December 1st, 2010

Submission Procedure

_______________________________________________________________________________

Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Speech Communication Journal for electronic submission (http://ees.elsevier.com/specom/default.asp). During submission authors must select the "Special Issue: Sensing Emotion" when they reach the "Article Type"

 __________________________________________

Dr. Björn Schuller

Senior Researcher and Lecturer

LIMSI-CNRS

BP133 91403 Orsay cedex

France

Technische Universität München

Institute for Human-Machine Communication

D-80333 München

schuller@IEEE.org

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing  Special Issue on Emotion and Mental State Recognition from Speech  Call for Papers  http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/asp/si/emsr.pdf  http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asp/si/emsr.html  _____________________________________________________   As research in speech processing has matured, attention has shifted from linguistic-related applications such as speech recognition towards paralinguistic speech processing problems, in particular the recognition of speaker identity, language, emotion, gender, and age. Determination of emotion or mental state is a particularly challenging problem, in view of the significant variability in its expression posed by linguistic, contextual, and speaker-specific characteristics within speech.  Some of the key research problems addressed to date include isolating emotion-specific information in the speech signal, extracting suitable features, forming reduced-dimension feature sets, developing machine learning methods applicable to the task, reducing feature variability due to speaker and linguistic content, comparing and evaluating diverse methods, robustness, and constructing suitable databases. Automatic detection of other types of mental state, which share some characteristics with emotion, are also now being explored, for example, depression, cognitive load, and "cognitive epistemic" states such as interest or skepticism. Topics of interest in this special issue include, but are not limited to:  + Signal processing methods for acoustic feature extraction in emotion recognition + Robustness issues in emotion classification, including speaker and speaker group normalization and reduction of mismatch due to coding, noise, channel, and transmission effects + Applications of prosodic and temporal feature modeling in emotion recognition + Novel pattern recognition techniques for emotion recognition + Automatic detection of depression or psychiatric disorders from speech + Methods for measuring stress, emotion-related indicators, or cognitive load from speech + Studies relating speech production or perception to emotion and mental state recognition + Recognition of nonprototypical spontaneous and naturalistic emotion in speech + New methods for multimodal emotion recognition, where nonverbal speech content has a central role + Emotional speech synthesis research with clear implications for emotion recognition + Emerging research topics in recognition of emotion and mental state from speech + Novel emotion recognition systems and applications + Applications of emotion modeling to other related areas, for example, emotion tolerant automatic speech recognition and recognition of nonlinguistic vocalizations  Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asp/guidelines.html. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:  _____________________________________________________  Manuscript Due	      August 1, 2010 First Round of Reviews	November 1, 2010 Publication Date	      February 1, 2011 _____________________________________________________    Lead Guest Editor _____________________________________________________  Julien Epps, The University of New South Wales, Australia; National ICT Australia, Australia    Guest Editors _____________________________________________________  Roddy Cowie, Queen's University Belfast, UK  Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California, USA  Björn Schuller, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany  Jianhua Tao, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing
                                 
                                                                      Special Issue on
        
                                     Speech and Language Processing of Children's Speech
                                   for Child-machine Interaction Applications

 

 

                                                                                        Call for Papers

 

The state-of the-art in  automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is suitable  for a broad  range of interactive  applications. Although
children  represent an  important user  segment for  speech processing technologies,  the  acoustic  and  linguistic variability  present  in
children's speech poses additional challenges for designing successful interactive systems for children.

Acoustic  and  linguistic  characteristics  of children's  speech  are widely  different  from  those  of  adults and  voice  interaction  of
children with  computers opens challenging  research issues on  how to develop  effective  acoustic, language  and  pronunciation models  for
reliable recognition  of children's speech.  Furthermore, the behavior of children  interacting with  a computer is  also different  from the
behavior of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding
conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults.

In order to develop reliable voice-interactive systems further studies are  needed to  better  understand the  characteristics of  children's
speech and the different aspects of speech-based interaction including the role of speech in  multimodal interfaces. The development of pilot
systems for a broad range of applications is also important to provide  experimental evidence  of the degree  of progress in  ASR technologies
and  to focus  research on  application-specific problems  emerging by using systems in realistic operating environments.

We invite prospective authors to submit papers describing original and previously  unpublished work  in the  following broad  research areas:
analysis of children's speech, core technologies for ASR of children's speech,    conversational    interfaces,   multimodal    child-machine
interaction and computer  instructional systems for children. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech
• Discourse analysis of spoken language in child-machine interaction
• Intra- and inter-speaker variability in children's speech
• Age-dependent characteristics of spoken language
• Acoustic, language and pronunciation modeling in ASR for children
• Spoken dialogue systems
• Multimodal speech-based child-machine interaction
• Computer assisted language acquisition and language learning
• Tools  for children  with special  needs (speech  disorders, autism,  dyslexia, etc)

Papers  should have  a major  focus  on analysis  and/or acoustic  and linguistic processing of children's speech. Analysis studies should
be clearly  related to technology development  issues and implications should  be extensively discussed  in the  papers. Manuscripts  will be
peer reviewed according to the standard ACM TSLP process.

Submission Procedure
Authors should  follow the ACM TSLP  manuscript preparation guidelines described on  the journal web  site http://tslp.acm.org and  submit an
electronic  copy  of their  complete  manuscript  through the  journal manuscript  submission  site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/acm/tslp.
Authors are required to specify  that their submission is intended for this Special  Issue by including on  the first page  of the manuscript
and in the  field "Author's Cover Letter" the  note "Submitted for the Special Issue  on Speech and Language Processing  of Children's Speech
for Child-machine Interaction  Applications". Without this indication, your submission cannot be considered for this Special Issue.

Schedule
Submission deadline: May 12, 2010
Notification of acceptance: November 1, 2010
Final manuscript due: December 15, 2010

Guest Editors
Alexandros   Potamianos,  Technical   University   of  Crete,   Greece (potam@telecom.tuc.gr)
Diego Giuliani, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy (giuliani@fbk.eu)
Shrikanth   Narayanan,   University   of  Southern   California,   USA (shri@sipi.usc.edu)
Kay  Berkling,   Inline  Internet  Online   GmbH,  Karlsruhe,  Germany (Kay@Berkling.com)

Jeudi 11 février 2010, 13h30 – Séminaire externe **
========================================
*Takeki Kamiyama*
Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (UMR7018), Paris

*Apprentissage phonétique des voyelles du français langue étrangère chez des apprenants japonophones : voyelles arrondies fermées /u y/ et mi-fermée /ø*

* *Ce travail s’intéresse à l’application de la phonétique expérimentale (acoustique et perceptive) à la didactique de la prononciation des langues étrangères. Le propos est illustré par les difficultés d’apprentissage par des japonophones des voyelles du français ; les expériences portent spécifiquement sur les voyelles /u y ø/. Le but est d’élucider les difficultés que présentent ces phones selon que leur statut phonémique et leur réalisation phonétique diffèrent ou non entre la langue maternelle et la langue apprise.
Le /u/ français diffère phonétiquement de son équivalent phonémique, le /u/ japonais. L’étude confirme que le /u/ français, phonémiquement « identique » au /u/ japonais, est plus difficile que la voyelle « nouvelle » /y/, qui n'a pas d'équivalent ni phonémique ni phonétique en japonais. La production du /ø/, qui est « nouveau » phonémiquement mais proche du /u/ japonais au plan acoustique, semble présenter encore moins de difficulté.
La thèse apporte également une réflexion sur la didactique de la prononciation. L’analyse de manuels généralistes de français publiés au Japon suggère que les apprenants et les enseignants sont rarement conscients de la différence de difficultés des /u y ø/. Quelques méthodes d’enseignement de la prononciation – certaines traditionnelles, d’autres innovantes – sont proposées, dans l’idée de favoriser la conscientisation de ces difficultés.
Le but de cette thèse est une contribution à l’éclaircissement des processus d’apprentissage de la prononciation des langues étrangères, et à l’amélioration de son apprentissage et de son enseignement.

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

17 May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valetta, Malta

CALL FOR PAPER

Workshop on

Web Services and Processing Pipelines in HLT: Tool Evaluation, LR Production and Validation

To be held in conjunction with the 7th International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2010)

17-18 May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Center, Valletta, Malta

MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.softconf.com" claiming to be http://workshops.elda.org/wspp2010/

Deadline for submission: 22 February 2010

Workshop Description

With the emergence of large e­infrastructures and the widespread adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm, more and more language technology is being made available through web services. Extending such services to linguistic processing pipelines, tool evaluation or LR production and validation involves considering both the methodologies and technical aspects specific to the application domains.

Distributed architectures such as web services allow communication and data exchange between applications. They are a suitable instrument for automatic, less often semi­automatic, tool evaluation as well as resource production processes both for practical and conceptual reasons. At a practical level, web services support quick results, centralised data storage, remote access etc.; at a conceptual level, they allow for the combination of more than one processing components that may be located on different sites. Such processing pipelines are set up to tackle a particular analysis task. To support these, new techniques have to be developed that organise well­established practices into workflows and support the exchange of data by standards and open tool architectures.

The workshop focuses on current uses and best practices for the deployment of web services and web interfaces in the HLT domain, including processing pipelines, LR production and validation, and evaluation of tools. It highlights relevant aspects for the integration of linguistic or evaluation web services within infrastructures (e.g. authorisation and authentication, service registries) and infrastructural requirements (e.g. interface harmonisation, metadata generation). The workshop also aims at demonstrating different approaches on how to combine linguistic web services into a composite web service.

The expected outcome of the workshop is a comparison of the practices in architectures and processing pipelines that people build and discussion of the issues involved. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

− Technical aspects: approaches, protocols, management of huge amounts of data, data structures and formats, performance, manual components (e.g. annotation or evaluation), composition and configuration, interoperability, security, monitoring and recovery strategies, standardisation of APIs, tools and frameworks supporting HLT services deployment, architectures. 

− Scientific aspects: influence of web services on evaluation or resource production, meta­evaluation / validation of architectures, annotation agreements, needs for tools evaluation and resource production, status of the data produced.

− Commercial aspects: licensing, privacy, advertising, brokering, business possibilities, challenges, exploitation of the resulting data.

Chairing Committee

Núria Bel (Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Olivier Hamon (Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA)
Elke Teich (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

Organising Committee

Peter Fankhauser (L3S Hannover, Germany)
Maria Gavrilidou (Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Greece)
Gerhard Heyer (Department of Natural Language Processing, University of Leipzig,  Germany)
Zdravko Kacic (University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Slovenia)
Mark Kemps­Snijders (MPI, the Netherlands)
Andreas Witt (IDS Mannheim, Germany)

Programme Committee

Sophia Ananiadou (School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, England)
Victoria Arranz (ELDA, France)
Volker Boehlke (University of Leipzig, DE)
Gaël de Chalendar (CEA, France)
Key­Sun Choi (KAIST, Korea)
Dan Cristea (University of Iasis, Romania)
Thierry Declerck (DFKI, Germany)
Christoph Draxler (LMU München, Germany)
Nicola Ferro (University of Padua, Italy)
Riccardo del Grata (ILC, Italy)
Iryna Gurevych (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)
Yoshihiko Hayashi (Osaka University, Japan)
Nicolas Hernandez (Université de Nantes, France)
Radu Ion (Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy, Romania)
Yoshinobu Kano (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Yohei Murakami (NICT, Japan)
Jan Odijk (University of Utrecht, the Netherlands)
Patrick Paroubek (LIMSI, France)
Kay Peterson (NIST, U.S.A.)
Maciej Piasecki (Instytut Informatyki Stosowanej, Poland)
Mark Przybocki (NIST, U.S.A.)
Matej Rojc (University of Maribor, Slovenia)
Felix Sasaki (W3C / FH Potsdam, Germany)
Junichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Dan Tufis (RACAI, Romania)
Karin Verspoor (University of Colorado, U.S.A.)
Graham Wilcock (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Important dates

Deadline for submission: Monday 22 February 2010
Notification of acceptance: Monday 15 March 2010
Final version due: Tuesday 23 March 2010
Workshop : 17­18 May 2010

Submission Format

Full papers up to 8 pages should be formatted according to LREC 2010 guidelines and be submitted through the online submission form MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.softconf.com" claiming to be (https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/WebServices2010/)  on START. For further queries, please contact Olivier Hamon at hamon_at_elda_dot_org. When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.lrec-conf.org" claiming to be http://www.lrec­conf.org/lrec2010/? LREC2010­Map­of­Language­Resources.

 
*** 2nd Call for Papers ***
                          LREC 2010 Workshop on
Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality
                       *** 18 May 2010, Malta ***
http://www.multimodal-corpora.org
+++ EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 19 Feb 2010 +++
A "Multimodal Corpus" involves the recording, annotation and analysis of
several communication modalities such as speech, hand gesture, facial
expression, body posture, etc. As many research areas are moving from
focused but single modality research to fully-fledged multimodality
research, multimodal corpora are becoming a core research asset and an
opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, concepts and data.
This workshop follows similar events held at LREC 00, 02, 04, 06, 08.
There is an increasing interest in multimodal communication and multimodal
corpora as visible by European Networks of Excellence and integrated
projects such as HUMAINE, SIMILAR, CHIL, AMI, CALLAS and SSPNet.
Furthermore, the success of recent conferences and workshops dedicated to
multimodal communication (ICMI-MLMI, IVA, Gesture, PIT, Nordic Symposium
on Multimodal Communication, Embodied Language Processing) and the
creation of the Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces also testify to the
growing interest in this area, and the general need for data on multimodal
behaviours.
The 2010 full-day workshop is planned to result in a significant follow-up
publication, similar to previous post-workshop publications like the 2008
special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation and the
2009 state-of-the-art book published by Springer.

AIMS
In 2010, we are aiming for a wide cross-section of the field, with
contributions on collection efforts, coding, validation and analysis
methods, as well as actual tools and applications of multimodal corpora.
However, we want to put emphasis on the fact that there have been
significant advances in capture technology that make highly accurate data
available to the broader research community. Examples are the tracking of
face, gaze, hands, body and the recording of articulated full-body motion
using motion capture. These data are much more accurate and complete than
simple videos that are traditionally used in the field and therefore, will
have a lasting impact on multimodality research. However, the richness of
the signals and the complexity of the recording process urgently call for
an exchange of state-of-the-art information regarding recording and coding
practices, new visualization and coding tools, advances in automatic
coding and analyzing corpora.

TOPICS
This LREC 2010 workshop on multimodal corpora will feature a special
session on databases of motion capture, trackers, inertial sensors,
biometric devices and image processing. Other topics to be addressed
include, but are not limited to:
* Multimodal corpus collection activities (e.g. direction-giving
dialogues, emotional behaviour, human-avatar interaction, human-robot
interaction, etc.) and descriptions of existing multimodal resources
* Relations between modalities in natural (human) interaction and in
human-computer interaction
* Multimodal interaction in specific scenarios, e.g. group interaction
in meetings
* Coding schemes for the annotation of multimodal corpora
* Evaluation and validation of multimodal annotations
* Methods, tools, and best practices for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution, and use of multimedia and multimodal
corpora
* Interoperability between multimodal annotation tools (exchange
formats, conversion tools, standardization)
* Collaborative coding
* Metadata descriptions of multimodal corpora
* Automatic annotation, based e.g. on motion capture or image
processing, and the integration with manual annotations
* Corpus-based design of multimodal and multimedia systems, in
particular systems that involve human-like modalities either in input
(Virtual Reality, motion capture, etc.) and output (virtual
characters)
* Automated multimodal fusion and/or generation (e.g., coordinated
speech, gaze, gesture, facial expressions)
* Machine learning applied to multimodal data
* Multimodal dialogue modelling

IMPORTANT DATES
* Deadline for paper submission:    19 February 2010
* Notification of acceptance:       10  March
* Final version of accepted paper:  19 March
* Final program:                    21 March
* Final proceedings:                28 March
* Workshop:                         18 May

SUBMISSIONS
The workshop will consist primarily of paper presentations and
discussion/working sessions. Submissions should be 4 pages long, must be
in English, and follow the submission guidelines available under
http://multimodal-corpora.org/mmc10.html
Submit your paper here: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/MMC2010
Demonstrations of multimodal corpora and related tools are encouraged as
well (a demonstration outline of 2 pages can be submitted).

LREC-2010 MAP OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES, TECHNOLOGIES AND EVALUATION
When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly
asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been
used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of
their research. For further information on this new initiative, please
refer to
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Michael Kipp, DFKI, Germany
Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Patrizia Paggio, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on

Language Resources: From Storyboard to Sustainability and LR Lifecycle Management

To be held in conjunction with the 7^th International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2010)

23 May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, Malta

http://workshops.elda.org/lrslm2010/ (under construction)

Deadline for submission: 22 February 2010

Description

The life of a language resource (LR), from its mere conception and drafting to its adult phases of active exploitation by the HLT community, varies considerably. Ensuring that language resources be a part of a sustainable and endurable living process represents a multi-faceted challenge that certainly calls for well-planned anti-neglecting actions to be put into action by the different actors participating in the process. Clearing all IPR issues, exploiting best practices at specification and production time are just a few samples of such actions. Sustainability and lifecycle management issues are thus concepts that should be addressed before endeavouring into any serious LR production.

When thinking of long-term LRs a number of aspects come to our minds which do not always succeed to be taken into account before development. Some of these aspects are usability, accessibility, interoperability and scalability, which inevitably call for a long list of neglected points that would need to be taken into account at a very early stage of development. Looking further into the portability and scalability of a language resource, a number of dimensions should be taken into account to ensure that a language resource reaches its adult life in an active and productive way.

An aspect that is often neglected is the accessibility and thus secured reusability of a language resource. Institutions such as ELRA (European Language resources Association) and LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium), at a European and American level, respectively, as well as BAS (Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals) and TST-Centrale (Flemish-Dutch Human Language Technology Agency), at a language-specific level, have worked on these aspects for a large number of years. Through their different activities, they have successfully implemented a sharing policy which allows different users to gain access to already existing resources. Other emerging programmes such as CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) are also looking into these aspects. Nevertheless, many resources still follow development without a long-term accessibility plan into place which makes impossible to gain access once the resource is finished. This accessibility plan should consider issues such as ownership rights, licensing, types of use, aiming for a wide community from the very beginning. This accessibility plan calls for an optimal co-operation between all actors (LR users, financing bodies, owners, developers and organisations) so that issues related to the life of a LR are well established, roles and actors are clearly identified within the cycle and best practices are defined towards the management of the entire LR lifecycle.

We are aware, though, that these above-presented ideas are but a take-off for discussion. It is at this point that we would like to invite the community to participate in this workshop and share with us their views on these and other relevant issues of concern. A fruitful discussion could lead us to finding new mechanisms to support perpetuating language resources, and may lead us towards a sustainability model that guarantees an appropriate and well-defined LR storyboard and lifecycle management plan in the future.

Among the many issues and topics that may be presented and discussed during this workshop, we would like to already suggest the following:

-         Which fields require LRs and which are their respective needs?

-         What needs to be part of a LR storyboard? What points are we missing in its design?

-         General specifications vs. detailed specifications and design

-         Annotation frameworks and layers: interoperable at all?

-         Should creation and provision of LRs be included in higher education curriculae?

-         How to plan for scalable resources?

-         Language Resource maintenance and improvement: feasible?

-         Sharing language resources: how to bear this in mind and implement it? Logistics of the sharing: online vs. offline

-         Centralised vs. decentralised, and national vs. international management and maintenance of LRs

-         What happens when users create updated or derived LRs?

-         Sharing language resources: legal issues concerned

-         Sharing language resources: pricing issues concerned, commercial vs. non-commercial use

-         Do LR actors work in a synchronised manner?

-         What should be the roles of the different actors?

-         What are the business models and arrangements for IPRs?

-         Self-supporting vs. subsidised LR organisations

-         Other general problems faced by the community

We solicit papers that address these questions and other related issues relevant to the workshop.

Workshop Programme and Audience Addressed

This full-day workshop aims to address all those involved with language resources at some point of their research/work (LR users, producers, ...) and all those with an interest in the different aspects involved, whether universities, companies or funding agencies of some nature. It aims to be a meeting and discussion point for the so many bottlenecks surrounding the life of a resource and which remain to be addressed with a sustainability plan.

The workshop features two invited talks, opening the morning and afternoon sessions, submitted papers, and will conclude with a round table to brainstorm on the issues raised during the presentations and the individual discussions. This round table will be run by a number of experts already experienced in some of the highlighted problems and in open discussion with the workshop participants. In short, this workshop will result in a plan of action towards a sustainability and lifecycle management plan to implement.

Invited Speakers

To be announced on the workshop web site.

Organising Committee

Victoria Arranz (Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) /  European Language resources Association (ELRA), France)

Khalid Choukri (ELDA - Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency / ELRA - European Language resources Association, France)

Christopher Cieri (LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, USA)

Laura van Eerten (Flemish-Dutch HLT Agency, Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, The Netherlands)

Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Stelios Piperidis (ILSP – Institute for Language and Speech Processing / ELRA - European Language resources Association, France)

Remco van Veenendaal (Flemish-Dutch HLT Agency, Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, The Netherlands)

Programme Committee

Núria Bel (Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR (ILC-CNR) – Italy)

Jean Carletta (Human Communication Research Centre, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Catia Cucchiarini (Nederlandse Taalunie, The Netherlands)

Christoph Draxler (Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (BAS), Germany)
Maria Gavrilidou (Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), Greece)

Nancy Ide (Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, USA)

Steven Krauwer (UiL OTS, Utretch University, The Netherlands)

Asunción Moreno (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain)

Dirk Roorda (Data Archiving and Networked Services, The Netherlands)

Ineke Schuurman (Centre for Computational Linguistics, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)

Claudia Soria (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR (ILC-CNR) – Italy)

Stephanie M. Strassel (Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), USA)

Andreas Witt (IDS Mannheim, Germany)

Peter Wittenburg (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands)

Important dates

Deadline for abstracts: Monday 22 February 2010

Notification to Authors: Friday 12 March 2010

Submission of Final Version: Sunday 21 March 2010

Workshop: Sunday 23 May 2010

Submission

Abstracts should be no longer than 1500 words and should be submitted in PDF format through the online submission form on START (https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/Sustainability2010/). For further queries, please contact Victoria Arranz at arranz@elda.org or Laura van Eerten at laura.vaneerten@inl.nl.

When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of their research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.

First Call for Papers Third International Workshop on EMOTION (satellite of LREC): CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/emotion-workshop Sunday, 23rd May 2010 Mediterranean Conference Centre Valletta Malta In Association with 7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION LREC2010 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/ Main Conference 19th-21st May 2010 _______________________________________________________________________________ Recognition of emotion in speech has recently matured to one of the key disciplines in speech analysis serving next generation human-machine and -robot communication and media retrieval systems. However, compared to automatic speech and speaker recognition, where several hours of speech of a multitude of speakers in a great variety of different languages are available, sparseness of resources has accompanied emotion research to the present day: genuine emotion is hard to collect, ambiguous to annotate, and tricky to distribute due to privacy preservation. The few available corpora suffer from a number of issues owing to the peculiarity of this young field: as in no related task, different forms of modelling reaching from discrete over complex to continuous emotions exist, and ground truth is never solid due to the often highly different perception of the mostly very few annotators. Given by the data sparseness - most widely used corpora feature below 30 min of speech - cross-validation without strict test, development, and train partitions, and without strict separation of speakers throughout partitioning are the predominant evaluation strategy, which is obviously sub-optimal. Acting of emotions was often seen as a solution to the desperate need for data, which often resulted in further restrictions such as little variation of spoken content or few speakers. As a result, many interesting potentially progressing ideas cannot be addressed, as clustering of speakers or the influence of languages, cultures, speaker health state, etc.. Previous LREC workshops on Corpora for research on Emotion and Affect (at LREC 2006 and 2008) have helped to consolidate the field, and in particular there is now growing experience of not only building databases but also using them to build systems (for both synthesis and detection). This proposal aims to continue the process, and lays particular emphasis on showing how databases can be or have been used for system building. Papers are invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and affect. Topics include, but are not limited to: + Novel corpora of affective speech in audio and multimodal data - in + particular with high number of speakers and high diversity (language, age, speaking style, health state, etc.) + Case studies of the way databases have been or can be used for system building + Measures for quantitative corpus quality assessment + Standardisation of corpora and labels for cross-corpus experimentation + Mixture of emotions (i.e. complex or blended emotions) + Real-life applications + Long-term recordings for intra-speaker variation assessment + Rich and novel annotations and annotation types + Communications on testing protocols + Evaluations on novel or multiple corpora ORGANISING COMMITEE _______________________________________________________________________________ Laurence Devillers / Björn Schuller LIMSI-CNRS, France Roddy Cowie / Ellen Douglas-Cowie Queen's University, UK Anton Batliner Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Contact: Laurence Devillers and Björn Schuller, lrec-emotion@limsi.fr IMPORTANT DATES _______________________________________________________________________________ Deadline for 1500-2000 words abstract submission 12th February Notification of acceptance 12th March Final version of accepted paper 22nd March Workshop full-day 23rd May SUBMISSIONS _______________________________________________________________________________ The workshop will consist of paper and poster presentations. Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster must consist of about 1500-2000 words. Final submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English, and follow the submission guidelines at LREC2010. Papers need to be submitted via the START page of LREC 2010. When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further information on this new iniative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources Following this initiative, all contributions shall provide an additional corpus description according to a template (with example) provided by the organisers at the time of submission. The information will consist of providing site, domain, classes or dimensions with definition, context, language(s), spoken content, type, status, size, speaker and instance numbers, total duration, recording, encoding and storage details, annotator number, annotation state and format, and partitioning type. In addition they are asked to provide audio examples if possible. As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to lrec-emotion@limsi.fr a brief email indicating their intention to participate, including their contact information and the topic they intend to address in their submissions. Submission site: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/EMOTION2010/ Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC Local Organising Committee. Submitted papers will undergo peer-review. TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE _______________________________________________________________________________ The workshop will consist of a full-day session, and there will be time for collective discussions. For this full-day Workshop, the registration fee will be specified on http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/emotion-workshop

 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

Call for Papers

21st Conference on Electronic Speech Signal Processing (ESSV)

8 - 10 September 2010 in Berlin

Dear friends of our conference series,

Also in the year 2010 the conference Electronic Speech Signal Processing will bring together those interested in speech technology in research and applications. After a long break the event will be once again held in Berlin, at Beuth University of Applied Sciences. Although this has traditionally been a German event, we also invite our colleagues from abroad to contribute. Therefore conference languages will be German and English. The conference will again focus on speech signal processing at large, with the following being potential topics of contributions, but not an exhaustive list:

• Speech recognition and synthesis in embedded systems
• Speech technology in vehicles
• Speech technology and education
• Speech technology for the disabled
• Speech and multimedia
• Applications to non-speech acoustic signals from biological, musical and technological fields

This time is the twenty-first that the ESSV takes place. As always the organizers strive to develop a scientifically sophisticated program reflecting the cutting edge of speech technology. We are relying on your active cooperation and invite you cordially to make a contribution in the form of a talk or a poster. The proceedings will be published as usual in the series "Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation" of TUDpress publishing.

Paper Submission

More info about the proceedings, venue and accommodations will be updated regularly online at the following address:

http://public.beuth-hochschule.de/~mixdorff/essv2010/index_english.html.

You can also contact us by post, fax or E-mail at the following address:

Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin
Fachbereich Informatik und Medien
Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Hansjörg Mixdorff
13353 Berlin
Luxemburger Straße 10

Tel: 030 4504 2364
Fax: 030 4505 2013
E-Mail: essv2010@beuth-hochschule.de

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline (max. 1 page):
  1 May 2010
• Notification of Acceptance:
  15 May 2010
• Deadline for conference papers to be published in the proceedings:
  15 July 2010

Local Organizers

Hansjörg Mixdorff
Sascha Fagel
Lutz Leutelt

 Call for Papers

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~         52nd International Symposium ELMAR-2010 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                   September 15-17, 2010                     Zadar, Croatia         Paper submission deadline: March 15, 2010                http://www.elmar-zadar.org/                       CALL FOR PAPERS                     http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2010/call_for_papers/elmar2010_cfp07.pdf   TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS  IEEE Region 8 IEEE Croatia Section IEEE Croatia Section Chapter of the Signal Processing Society IEEE Croatia Section Joint Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies EURASIP - European Assoc. Signal, Speech and Image Processing   CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS INDEXED BY  IEEE Xplore, INSPEC and SCOPUS   TOPICS  --> Image and Video Processing --> Multimedia Communications --> Speech and Audio Processing --> Wireless Commununications --> Telecommunications --> Antennas and Propagation --> Navigation Systems --> Ship Electronic Systems --> Power Electronics and Automation --> Naval Architecture --> Sea Ecology --> Special Sessions Proposals - A special session consist      of 5-6 papers which should present a unifying theme from      a diversity of viewpoints   KEYNOTE TALKS  * Prof. Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK:   Telepresence, the 'World-Wide Wait' and 'Green' Radios...  * Dr. Michael M. Bronstein, Technion - Israel Institute    of Technology, Haifa, ISRAEL:   Non-rigid, non-rigid, non-rigid world  * Dr. Mikel M. Miller, AFRL Munitions Directorate,    Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, USA:   Got GPS? The Navigation Gap  * Dr. Panos Liatsis, City University London, UK:   3D reconstruction and stenosis quantification    in CT angiograms   SUBMISSION  Papers accepted by two reviewers will be published in  conference proceedings available at the conference and  abstracted/indexed in IEEE Xplore, INSPEC and SCOPUS  databases. More info is available here:  http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2010/paper_submission/   SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES  Deadline for submission of full papers: March 15, 2010 Notification of acceptance mailed out by: May 10, 2010 Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: May 20, 2010 Preliminary program available online by: June 14, 2010 Registration forms and payment deadline: June 21, 2010   GENERAL CO-CHAIRS  Ive Mustac, Tankerska plovidba, Zadar, Croatia Branka Zovko-Cihlar, University of Zagreb, Croatia   PROGRAM CHAIR  Mislav Grgic, University of Zagreb, Croatia  CONTACT INFORMATION  Prof. Mislav Grgic  FER, Unska 3/XII  HR-10000 Zagreb  CROATIA  Telephone: + 385 1 6129 851  Fax: + 385 1 6129 717  E-mail: elmar2010 (at) fer.hr  For further information please visit:  http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

                                      CALL FOR PAPERS
                 INTERSPEECH 2010 Satellite Workshop on
                      "Second Language Studies:
             Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology"
                 Co-organized by AESOP, SLaTE, and LSSRL.
                         September 22-24, 2010,
                    Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
               http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/L2WS2010/

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

Aim of workshop:
  INTERSPEECH 2010 Satellite Workshop on Second Language Studies will be
  held at the International Conference Center of Waseda University in Tokyo,
  immediately before the main conference. The aim of the workshop is for
  people working in speech science & engineering, linguistics, psychology, and
  language education to meet and discuss second language acquisition & learning,
  education, and technology. The workshop theme is interdisciplinary, ranging
  over but not exclusive to spoken and written L2 acquisition & learning,
  designing & constructing corpora for language research, speech science &
  engineering, and their application to education. All theoretical and
  practical topics in these areas will be considered.

Main topics include:
  a) Spoken and written L2 acquisition and learning
  b) Perception and production of L2 speech
  c) Phonetics and phonology of L2
  d) Psycholinguistics
  e) Language education and learning theories
  f) Data collection methods and corpus design
  g) Development of speech recognition and speech synthesis techniques for education
  h) Development of natural language processing techniques for education
  i) Practical and educational applications using speech and language technologies
  j) Intelligent tutoring systems using speech and language technologies
  k) Other topics related to L2 studies

Technical program:
  The workshop program will consist of oral & poster presentations, panel discussions,
  and demonstrations of educational systems using speech and language technologies.

Paper submission:
  Prospective authors are invited to submit 4-page full papers, including figures
  and references. All the papers will be handled and reviewed electronically.
  Detailed instructions on paper submission will be shown on the workshop website
  in April.

Important dates:
  Full paper submission             May 15
  Notification of acceptance        June 15
  Final paper submission            June 30
  Early registration deadline       July 17

Organization:
  This workshop is co-organized by:
  AESOP: Asian English Speech cOrpus Project
  SLaTE: the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language Technology in Education
  http://www.sigslate.org/
  LSSRL: Language and Speech Science Research Laboratories of Waseda University

For further information:
  If you want to receive more information, please email to:
  L2WS-org [AT] list.waseda.jp