Dear ISCA members,   The deadline for ISCA Fellow Nomination was shifted to May 15, this year. This is partly due to the changes in the Fellow Nomination and Reference Forms, which will be found at ISCA web-site. (http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/)  Visit the "Honor page" of the ISCA web-site for the detail.    Sincerely,   Keikichi Hirose (ISCA Board, Fellows)

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 

CALL FOR PAPERS
7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW7)
Kyoto, Japan - September 22-24, 2010
http://www.ssw7.org/

The Seventh ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech
Synthesis will take place at ATR, Kyoto, Japan, September 22-24, 2010.
It is co-sponsored by the International Speech Communication
Association (ISCA), the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech
Synthesis (SynSIG), the National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT), and the Effective Multilingual
Interaction in Mobile Environments (EMIME) project.  The workshop will
be held as a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2010 (Chiba, Japan,
September 26-30, 2010).  This workshop follows on from the previous
workshops, Autrans 1990, Mohonk 1994, Jenolan Caves 1998, Pitlochry
2001, Pittsburgh 2004, Bonn 2007, which aim to promote research and
development of all aspects of speech synthesis.

Workshop topics Papers in all areas of speech synthesis technology are
encouraged to be submitted, with emphasis placed on:

* Spontaneous/expressive speech synthesis
* Speech synthesis in dialog systems
* Voice conversion/speaker adaptation
* Multilingual/crosslingual speech synthesis
* Automated methods for speech synthesis
* TTS for embedded devices
* Talking heads with animated conversational agents
* Applications of synthesis technologies to communication disorders
* Evaluation methods

Submissions for the technical program:

The workshop program will consist of invited lectures, oral and poster
presentations, and panel discussions.  Prospective authors are invited
to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and
references.  All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically.
The SSW7 website http://www.ssw7.org/ will provide you with further
details.

Important dates:

* May 7, 2010: Paper submission deadline
* June 30, 2010: Acceptance/rejection notice
* June 30, 2010: Registration begins
* July 9, 2010: Revised paper due
* September 22-24, 2010: Workshop at ATR in Kyoto 

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

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

Aim of the 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 get together and
  discuss second language acquisition & learning, education, and technology.

Special session:
  We will hold a special session during the workshop, which deals with
  some specific topics related to primary school English education in
  Asia. This session is organized as a panel discussion among leading
  teachers and educators of China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

  We will also hold an open symposium titled as "Primary School English
  Education in Asia" one day before the workshop. See details in the
  following site.
  http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/L2WS2010/symposium.html

Main topics:
  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 (please specify)

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. Submission guidelines are found in the following link.
  http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/L2WS2010/submission.html

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/
    NICT: National Institute of Information and Communication Technology,
    http://www.nict.go.jp/index.html
    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 

IMPORTANT NOTE

 Special Highlight: Contribute to building the LREC2010 Map!

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 Phonetique 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 post-doctoral 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.

Ircam recruits two Researchers under limited-term contract of 18 months and full-time

From April 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

Researchers would be in charge of the development of the technologies related to

·         music-audio content description/ content-extraction: tempo and beat/measure position estimation, key/mode, chord progression, instrument/drum identification, singing voice location, voice description

·         music automatic indexing into music genre, music mood

·         music similarity: especially on large-scale databases

·         music structure discovery, automatic music audio summary generation, chorus location

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, audio-feature extraction, parameter estimation)

·         High skill in audio indexing and data mining (statistical modelling, automatic feature selection algorithm, …)

·         High-skill in large-database search algorithms

·         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, roebel_at_ircam_dot_fr

« 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))

*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.
* 

The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK, is recruiting for 5 'Prize Lectureships': see http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AAP217/prize-lectureships-5-positions/

These posts may be at any grade from Lecturer (junior Faculty) to Reader (close to Professor), and they come with an attractive funding package for studentships and  research start-up.

If you are interested in applying for a prize lectureship to join SPandH, the Speech and Hearing group in Computer Science (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/), please feel free to contact the SPandH academics:  contact details on the web site.

Phil Green, Roger Moore, Guy Brown, Jon Barker, Thomas Hain, Yoshi Gotoh. 

Post doctoral Position in Speech Recognition (Grenoble, France)
Title: Application and Optimization of Speech Detection and Recognition Algorithms in Smart Homes
URLs: http://getalp.imag.fr/ http://sweet-home.imag.fr/
Start Date: October 2010
Duration and salary: 12 months, 1900 euros ¤
Keywords: Speech Recognition, Home Automation, Smart Homes

Description: The GETALP Team of the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble invites applications
for a full-time post-doctoral researcher to work on the SWEET-HOME ("Système
Domotique d’Assistance au Domicile") national French project funded by the
ANR ("Agence Nationale de la Recherche"). This project aims to deliver sufficient
support to people who need support for independent living such as elderly of disabled
persons (e.g., Alzheimer, cognitive deficiency . . . ). This assessment is usually
done through sensing technology (e.g., microphones, infra-red presence sensors,
door-contacts, etc.) which detects critical situations in order to generate the appropriate
action to support the inhabitant (call to an emergency service, call to relatives . . . ).
A few microphones are set in an experimental apartment in order to recognize sounds
and speech in real time. The recognition is challenging given that the speaker may
be far from the microphone and because of additive noise and reverberation. Indeed,
the position requires a significant experience in speech recognition. The project consortium
is composed of the LIG (Joseph Fourier University), the ESIGETEL and the
Theoris, Technosens and Camera-Contact companies. The experimental apartment
DOMUS of the Carnot Institute of Grenoble will be used by the consortium during
this project.
Requirements: The succesful candidate will have been awarded a PhD degree in computer science
or signal processing, involving automatic speech recognition. Expertise in environmental
robustness, independent component analysis (ICA), is a bonus, as any other
experience relevant to signal processing. The candidate will have a strong research
track record with significant publications at leading international conferences or in
journals. She/He will be highly motivated to undertake challenging applied research.
Moderate level in French language is required as the project language will be French.
Applications: Please send to the address below (i) a one page statement of your research interests
and motivation, (ii) yout CV and (iii) references before 1st of July 2010. 

Acoustic to articulatory mapping of fricative sounds

Post-doctoral position

Nancy (France)

Environment

This subject deals with acoustic to articulatory mapping [Maeda et al. 2006], i.e. the recovery of the vocal tract shape from the speech signal possibly supplemented by images of the speaker’s face. This is one of the great challenges in the domain of automatic speech processing which did not receive satisfactory answer yet. The development of efficient algorithms would open new directions of research in the domain of second language learning, language acquisition and automatic speech recognition.

The objective is to develop inversion algorithms for fricative sounds. Indeed, there exist now numerical simulation models for fricatives. Their acoustics and dynamics are better known than those of stops and it will be the first category of sounds to be inverted after vowels for which the Speech group has already developed efficient algorithms.

The production of fricatives differs from that of vowels about two points:

·       The vocal tract is not excited by the vibration of vocal cords located at larynx but by a noise. This noise originates in the turbulent air flow downstream the constriction formed by the tongue and the palate.

·       Only the cavity downstream the constriction is excited by the source.

The approach proposed is analysis-by-synthesis. This means that the signal, or the speech spectrum, is compared to a signal or a spectrum synthesized by means of a speech production model which incorporates two components: an articulatory model intended to approximate the geometry of the vocal tract and an acoustical simulation intended to generate a spectrum or a signal from the vocal tract geometry and the noise source. The articulatory model is geometrically adapted to a speaker from MRI images and is used to build a table made up of couples associating one articulatory vector and the corresponding acoustic image vector. During inversion, all the articulatory shapes whose acoustic parameters are close to those observed in the speech signal are recovered. Inversion is thus an advanced table lookup method which we used successfully for vowels [Ouni & Laprie 2005] [Potard et al. 2008].

Objectives

The success of an analysis by synthesis method relies on the implicit assumption that synthesis can correctly approximate the speech production process of the speaker whose speech is inverted. There exist fairly realistic acoustic simulations of fricative sounds but they strongly depend on the precision of the geometrical approximation of the vocal tract used as an input. There also exist articulatory models of the vocal tract which yield very good results for vowels. On the other hand, these models are inadequate for those consonants which often require a very accurate articulation at the front part of the vocal tract. The first part of the work will be about the elaboration of articulatory models that are adapted to the production of consonants and vowels. The validation will consist of piloting the acoustic simulation from the geometry and of assessing the quality of the synthetic speech signal with respect to the natural one. This work will be carried out for some X-ray films, whose the acoustic signal recorded during the acquisition of them is sufficiently good.

The second part of the work will be about several aspects of the inversion strategy. Firstly, it is now accepted that spectral parameters implying a fairly marked smoothing and frequency integration have to be used, which is the case of MFCC (Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) vectors. However, the most adapted spectral distance to compare natural and synthetic spectra has to be investigated. Another solution consists in modeling the source so as to limit its impact on the computation of the spectral distance.

The second point is about the construction of the articulatory table which has to be revisited for two reasons: (i) only the cavity downstream the constriction plays an acoustic role, (ii) the location of the noise source is an additional parameter but it depends on the other articulatory parameters. The third point concerns the way of taking into account the vocal context. Indeed, the context is likely to provide important information about the vocal tract deformations before and after the fricative sound, and thus constraints for inversion.

A very complete software environment already exists in the Speech group for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, which can be exploited by the post-doctoral student.

References

 [S. Ouni and Y. Laprie 2005] Modeling the articulatory space using a hypercube codebook for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, Journal of the acoustical Society of America, Vol. 118, pp. 444-460

[B. Potard, Y. Laprie and S. Ouni], Incorporation of phonetic constraints in acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, JASA, 123(4), 2008 (pp.2310-2323).

[Maeda et al. 2006] Technology inventory of audiovisual-to-articulatory inversion http://aspi.loria.fr/Save/survey-1.pdf

Skill and profile

Knowledge of speech processing and articulatory modeling.

Supervision and contact:

Yves Laprie (Yves.Laprie@loria.fr)

Duration:

1 year (possibly extendable)

Important  and useful links

The PhD should have been defended no more than a year before the recruitment date.

Workshops

Undergraduate Team Members

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University is seeking outstanding members of the current junior class to participate in a summer workshop on language engineering from June 7th to July 30th, 2010

No limitation is placed on the undergraduate major. Only enthusiasm for research, relevant skills, past academic and employment record, and the strength of letters of recommendation will be considered. Students of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, etc. may apply. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. The workshop is open to both US and international students.

• An opportunity to explore an exciting new area of research.
• A two-week tutorial on speech and language technology.
• Mentoring by an experienced researcher.
• Use of a computer workstation throughout the workshop.
• A $5000 stipend and $2520 towards per diem expenses.
• Private furnished accommodation for the duration of the workshop.
• Travel expenses to and from the workshop venue.
• Participation in project planning activities.

The eight-week workshop provides a vigorously stimulating and enriching intellectual environment and we hope it will encourage students to eventually pursue graduate study in the field of human language technologies.

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The 2010 Workshop Teams

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Selection Criteria

Four to eight undergraduate students will be selected for next summer's workshop. It is expected that they will be members of the current junior class. Applicants must be proficient in computer usage, including either C, C++, Perl or Python programming and have exposure to basic probability or statistics. Knowledge of the following will be considered, but is not a prerequisite: Linguistics, Speech Communication, Natural Language Processing, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Digital Signal Processing, Signals and Systems, Linear Algebra, Data Structures, Foreign Languages, or MatLab or similar software. .


 

Equal Opportunity Policy

The Johns Hopkins University admits students of any race, color, sex, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, disability or veteran status to all of the rights, privileges, programs, benefits and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the University. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, age, disability or veteran status in any student program or activity, including the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other University-administered programs or in employment. Accordingly, the University does not take into consideration personal factors that are irrelevant to the program involved.

Questions regarding access to programs following Title VI, Title IX, and Section 504 should be referred to the Office of Institutional Equity, 205 Garland Hall, (410) 516-8075.

Policy on the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Present Department of Defense policy governing participation in university-based ROTC programs discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Such discrimination is inconsistent with the Johns Hopkins University non-discrimination policy. Because ROTC is a valuable component of the University that provides an opportunity for many students to afford a Hopkins education, to train for a career and to become positive forces in the military, the University, after careful study, has decided to continue the ROTC program and to encourage a change in federal policy that brings it into conformity with the University's policy.

Title : Bayesian networks for modeling and handling variability sources in speech recognition

- Location: INRIA Nancy Grand Est research center --- LORIA Laboratory, NANCY, France

- Project-team: PAROLE

Contact: Denis Jouvet  (denis.jouvet@loria.fr)

                In state-of-art speech recognition systems, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are used to model the acoustic realization of the sounds. The decoding process compares the unknown speech signal to sequences of these acoustic models to find the best matching sequence which determines the recognized words. Lexical and grammatical constraints are taken into account during the decoding process; they limit the amount of model sequences that are considered in the comparisons, which, nevertheless remains very large. Hence precise acoustic models are necessary for achieving good speech recognition performance. To obtain reliable parameters, the HMM-based acoustic models are trained on very large speech corpus. However, speech recognition performance is very dependent on the acoustic environment: good performance is achieved when the acoustic environment matches with that of the training data, and performance degrades when the acoustic environment gets different.

                The acoustic environment depends on many variability sources which impact on the acoustic signal. This includes the speaker gender (male / female), individual speaker characteristics, the speech loudness, the speaking rate, the microphone, the transmission channel, and of course the noise, to name only of few of them [Benzeghiba et al, 2007]. Using a training corpus which exhibits too many different variability sources (for example many different noise levels, too different channel speech coding schemes, ...) makes the acoustic models less discriminative, and thus lowers the speech recognition performance. On the opposite, having many sets of acoustic models, each one of them dedicated to a specific environment condition raises training problems. Indeed, because each training subset is restricted to a specific environment condition, its size gets much smaller, and consequently it might be impossible to train reliably some parameters of the acoustic models associated to this environment condition.

                In recent years, Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) have been applied in speech recognition. In such an approach, certain model parameters are set dependent on some auxiliary features, such as articulatory information [Stephenson et al., 2000], pitch and energy [Stephenson et al. 2004], speaking rate [Shinozaki & Furui, 2003] or some hidden factor related to a clustering of the training speech data [Korkmazsky et al., 2004]. The approach has also been investigated for dealing with multiband speech recognition, non-native speech recognition, as well as for taking estimations of speaker classes into account in continuous speech recognition [Cloarec & Jouvet, 2008]. Although the above experiments were conducted with limited vocabulary tasks, they showed that Dynamics Bayesian Networks provide a way of handling some variability sources in the acoustic modeling.

The objective of the work is to further investigate the application of Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) for continuous speech recognition application using large vocabularies. The aim is to estimate the current acoustic environment condition dynamically, and to constraint the current acoustic space used during decoding accordingly. The underlying idea is to be able to handle various range of acoustic space constraints during decoding. Hence, when the acoustic environment condition estimation is reliable, the corresponding specific condition constraints can be used (leading, for example, to model parameters associated to a class of very similar speakers in a given environment). On the opposite, when the acoustic environment condition estimation is less reliable, more tolerant constraints should be used (leading, for example, to model parameters associated to a broader class of speakers or to several environment conditions).

                Within the formalism of Dynamic Bayesian Networks, the work to be carried out is the following. The first aspect concerns the optimization of the classification of the training data, and associated methods for estimating the classes that best matches unknown test data automatically. The second aspect involves the development of confidence measures associated to the classification process of test sentences, and the integration of these confidence measures in the DBN modeling (in order to constraint more or less the acoustic space for decoding according to the reliability of the environment condition estimation).

Proposition post-doctorale en synthèse vocale  Une offre de recherche post-doctorale dans le domaine de la synthèse vocale est à pourvoir à Orange Labs, Lannion, France. L'étude portera sur la conception et l'implémentation d'un système de synthèse hybride alliant sélection d'unités et HMM. L'objectif du travail est dans un premier temps de développer un ensemble d'outils d'apprentissage des modèles HMM à partir de bases de données acoustiques d'Orange Labs. Il s'agit dans un deuxième temps d'implémenter les fonctionnalités de génération des paramètres acoustiques dans le synthétiseur temps réel d'Orange Labs. Enfin, la troisième partie consistera à concevoir et implémenter un système hybride combinant unités sélectionnées et unités générées à partir de modèles HMM.   Compétences requises : - Doctorat en informatique - Très bonnes connaissances en apprentissage automatique (HMM notamment) - Très bonne maîtrise de la programmation en C/C++ - La maîtrise d'HTK/HTS est un plus  Rémunération : environ 2300 € net par mois selon expérience.  Date de clôture : 30 avril 2010.  Contact:  Cedric BOIDIN Tel: +33 2 96 05 33 53  cedric.boidin@orange-ftgroup.com   ===========================================================================  Proposition post-doctorale en codage de la parole pour la synthèse vocale  Une offre de recherche post-doctorale dans le domaine de la synthèse vocale est à pourvoir à Orange Labs, Lannion, France. L'étude portera sur la conception et l'implémentation de nouvelles méthodes de codage de la parole adaptée à la synthèse vocale. L'objectif du travail est d'une part de proposer de nouveaux algorithmes pour la compression de dictionnaires acoustiques dans le cadre de la synthèse par concaténation. D'autre part, le travail consistera également à implémenter des briques algorithmiques de codage/décodage de la parole dédiées à la synthèse paramétrique (par HMM). Ce contrat post-doctoral d'un an s'inscrit dans le cadre d'une collaboration étroite entre Orange Labs et l'Université de Crète. Des déplacements sont donc à prévoir entre ces deux entités.   Compétences requises : - Excellentes connaissances en traitement du signal et codage de la parole ;  - Très bonnes connaissances de la programmation en C, C++ ;  - Bonne maîtrise des environnements de développements sous Linux et Windows.   Rémunération : environ 2300 € net par mois selon experience.  Date de clôture : 30 juin 2010.  Contacts:   Olivier Rosec  Tel: +33 2 96 05 20 67 olivier.rosec@orange-ftgroup.com  Yannis Stylianou Tel: +30 2810 391713 styliano@ics.forth.gr

PhD Thesis position at INRIA Nancy

Motivations

Through collaboration with a company which sells documentary rushes,
we are interested in indexing these rushes using the automatic recognition
of the rush dialogues.

The speech team has developed a system for automatic transcription
of broadcast news: ANTS.

Automatic transcription systems are now
reliable to transcript read or "prepared" speech such as broadcast
news, but their performance decreases on spontaneously uttered speech[1, 4, 5].
Spontaneous speech is characterized by :
- speech disfluencies (filled pause, repetition, repair, false start and partial word),
- pronunciation variants as word and syllable contractions (/want to/ > /wanna/),
-  speaking rate variations (reducing the articulation of some phonemes and lengthening other phonemes)
- live environment (laughs, applause) and simultaneous speech.
In addition to disfluencies, spontaneous speech is characterized by ungrammatical sentences and a language register which
is difficult to model because of the small amount of available transcribed data. Therefore, processing spontaneous speech is one of
the challenges of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).

Subject
The purpose of the subject is to take into account the specific phenomena
related to spontaneous speech such as hesitations, pauses, false starts, ... to improve the recognition rate[4,6,7].
To do this, it will be necessary to model these specific phenomena.

We have a speech corpus  in which these events were
labeled. This corpus will be used to select parameters, estimate models and evaluate the results.

Scope of Work
The work will be done within the Speech team of Inria-Loria.
The student will use the software ANTS for automatic speech recognition developed by the team.

Profile of candidate
The applicants for this PhD position should be fluent in English or in French. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during training.
Strong software skills are required, especially Unix/linux, C, Java, and a scripting language such as Perl or Python.

Contact:
fohr@loria.fr or illina@loria.fr or mella@loria.fr

[1] S. Galliano, E. Geoffrois, D.Mostefa , K. Choukri, JF. Bonastre and G. Gravier, The ESTER Phase II Evaluation Campaign for Rich Transcription of French broadcast news, EUROSPEECH 2005,
[2] I. Irina, D. Fohr, O. Mella and C.Cerisara, The Automatic News Transcription System: ANTS some realtime experiments, ISCPL2004
[3] D. Fohr, O. Mella, I. Irina and C. Cerisara, Experiments on the accuracy of phone models and liaison processing in a French broadcast news transcription system, ISCPL2004
[4] J.-L Gauvain, G. Adda, L. Lamel, L. F. Lefevre and H. Schwenk, Transcription de la parole conversationnelle Revue TAL vol 45 n3
[5] M. Garnier-Rizet, G. Adda, F. Cailliau, J.-L. Gauvain, S. Guillemin-Lanne, L. Lamel, S. Vanni, C. Waaste-Richard, CallSurf: Automatic transcription, indexing a nd structuration of call center conversational speech for knowledge extraction and query by content. LREC 2008
[6] J.Ogata, M.Goto, The use of acoustically detected filled and silent pauses in spontaneous speech recognition ICASSP 2009
[7] F. Stouten, J. Duchateau, J.-P. Martens and P. Wambacq, Coping with disfluencies in spontaneous speech recognition: Acoustic detection and linguistic context manipulation, Speech Communication vol 48,  2006 

Post-Doctoral Position at EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France

Title:      Adaptable speech activated robot-interface for the elderly
Department: Multimedia Communications
URL:        http://www.eurecom.fr/mm.en.htm

Start date: Early summer 2010
Duration:   18 months

Description: EURECOM’s Multimedia Communications Department invites applications for a full-time, 18-month post-doctoral position related to a project recently awarded from the EU Ambient Assisted Living joint research and development funding programme.  The Adaptable Ambient LIving ASsistant (ALIAS) project aims to develop a mobile robot system that interacts with elderly users, monitors and provides cognitive assistance in daily life, and promotes social inclusion by creating connections to people and events in the wider world.  One of ALIAS’s goals involves the development of an adaptable speech interface and is to be developed through this research position.  It requires the development of speaker diarization, localization and speech recognition systems in order to identify and track users, in addition to speech synthesis and recognition to communicate and recognize spoken commands.  All of these technologies will be integrated into a dedicated dialogue manager.

Requirements: The successful candidate will have been awarded a PhD degree in a relevant field of speech processing prior to their joining Eurecom.  You will have a strong research track record with significant publications at leading international conferences and/or in journals. Experience of collaborative research and development projects at the European level is desirable.  You will be highly motivated to undertake challenging, applied research and have excellent English language speaking and writing skills.   French language skills are a bonus.

Applications: Please send to the address below (i) a one page statement of research interests and motivation, (ii) your CV and (iii) contact details for two referees (preferably one from your PhD or most recent research supervisor) before 31st May 2010.

Contact:        Dr Nicholas Evans
Postal address: 2229 Route des Crêtes BP 193,
                F-06904 Sophia Antipolis cedex, France
Email address:  nicholas.evans@eurecom.fr
Web address:    http://www.eurecom.fr/main/institute/job.en.htm
Phone:          +33/0 4 93 00 81 14
Fax:            +33/0 4 93 00 82 00

EURECOM is located in Sophia Antipolis, a vibrant science park on the French Riviera. It is in close proximity with a large number of research units of leading multi-national corporations in the telecommunications, semiconductor and biotechnology sectors, as well as other outstanding research and teaching institutions. A freethinking, multinational population and the unique geographic location provide a quality of life without equal.

2-year postdoctoral/research position in Audio and Multimedia scene analysis using multiple sensors Post-Doc DeadLine: 30/09/2010 Firstname.Lastname@telecom-paristech.fr http://www.tsi.telecom-paristech.fr/en/open-positions-phd-thesis-internships/ *2-year Post-Doc/Research position in Audio and Multimedia scene analysis using multiple sensors * /Place:/ TELECOM ParisTech (ENST), Paris, France (http://www.telecom-paristech.fr/) /Duration:/ 2 years (1 year renewable for a second year) /Start:/ Any date from September 1st , 2010 /Salary:/ according to background and experience * *****Position description** The position is supported by the European Network of Excellence project “3Dlife” that aims to integrate research conducted within Europe in the field of Media Internet. In this framework, the research conducted encompasses all aspects related to the Analysis/synthesis of 3D audiovisual content for 3D models animation, virtual humans and virtual environments creation. The role of the PostDoc/researcher will consist, on the one hand, in participating to the network collaborative integration activities, and on the other hand in conducting forefront research in the domain of audio and multimedia scene analysis using multiple sensors. For one of the use cases envisaged (multimedia dance scenes analysis), the signals are of different natures (Music, videos and potentially also electrical sensor output signals) and captured by multiple sensors of potential variable quality. A specific interest will be devoted to the development of innovative statistical fusion approaches capable of processing information on multiple semantic levels (from low level features to high level musical or video concepts). Machine learning methods such as Bayesian networks, support vector machines, Markov and semi-Markov models, or boosting are amongst the statistical frameworks of particular interest for this research. *Candidate Profile* As minimum requirements, the candidate will have: · A PhD in audio or multimedia signal processing, speech processing, statistics, machine learning, computer science, electrical engineering, or a related discipline. · Some knowledge in audio signal processing · Programming skills in particular in Matlab (knowledge of Python would be a plus) The ideal candidate would also have: - Solid knowledge of machine learning techniques, in particular classification, temporal sequence segmentation and multi-sensor information fusion; - Ability to take over research project management responsibilities and work in a multi-partner and international collaborative environment; - Strong communication skills in English. *Contacts* Interested applicants may contact Gaël Richard or Slim Essid for more information or directly email a candidacy letter including a Curriculum Vitae, a list of publications and a statement of research interests. - Gaël Richard (firstname.lastname@telecom-Paristech.fr) ; +33 1 45 81 73 65 - Slim Essid (firstname.lastname@Telecom-ParisTech.fr). *More info on 3Dlife at :* http://www.3dlife-noe.eu/

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 (for correspondence) _____________________________________________________  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)

ACM TSLP - Special Issue: call for Papers:
“Machine Learning for Robust and Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems"

* Submission Deadline 1 July 2010 *
http://tslp.acm.org/specialissues.html

During the last decade, research in the field of Spoken Dialogue
Systems (SDS) has experienced increasing growth, and new applications
include interactive search, tutoring and “troubleshooting” systems,
games, and health agents. The design and optimization of such SDS
requires the development of dialogue strategies which can robustly
handle uncertainty, and which can automatically adapt to different
types of users (novice/expert, youth/senior) and noise conditions
(room/street). New statistical learning techniques are also emerging
for training and optimizing speech recognition, parsing / language
understanding, generation, and synthesis for robust and adaptive
spoken dialogue systems.

Automatic learning of adaptive, optimal dialogue strategies is
currently a leading domain of research. Among machine learning
techniques for spoken dialogue strategy optimization, reinforcement
learning using Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially
Observable MDPs (POMDPs) has become a particular focus.
One concern for such approaches is the development of appropriate
dialogue corpora for training and testing. However, the small amount
of data generally available for learning and testing dialogue
strategies does not contain enough information to explore the whole
space of dialogue states (and of strategies). Therefore dialogue
simulation is most often required to expand existing datasets and
man-machine spoken dialogue stochastic modelling and simulation has
become a research field in its own right. User simulations for
different types of user are a particular new focus of interest.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 • Robust and adaptive dialogue strategies
 • User simulation techniques for robust and adaptive strategy
learning and testing
 • Rapid adaptation methods
 • Modelling uncertainty about user goals
 • Modelling user’s goal evolution along time
 • Partially Observable MDPs in dialogue strategy optimization
 • Methods for cross-domain optimization of dialogue strategies
 • Statistical spoken language understanding in dialogue systems
 • Machine learning and context-sensitive speech recognition
 • Learning for adaptive Natural Language Generation in dialogue
 • Machine learning for adaptive speech synthesis (emphasis, prosody, etc.)
 • Corpora and annotation for machine learning approaches to SDS
 • Approaches to generalising limited corpus data to build user models
and user simulations
 • Evaluation of adaptivity and robustness in statistical approaches
to SDS and user simulation.

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 of Speech and Language Processing on Machine Learning
for Robust and Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems”. Without this
indication, your submission cannot be considered for this Special
Issue.

Schedule:
• Submission deadline : 1 July 2010
• Notification of acceptance: 1 October 2010
• Final manuscript due: 15th November 2010

Guest Editors:
Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University, Interaction Lab, School of
Mathematics and Computer Science, Edinburgh, UK.
Olivier Pietquin, Ecole Supérieure d’Électricité (Supelec), Metz, France.

http://tslp.acm.org/cfp/acmtslp-cfp2010-02.pdf

Special Issue on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing CBMI’2010
Second call for submissions


This call is related to the CBMI’2010 workshop but is open to
all contributions on a relevant topic, whether submitted at
CBMI’2010 or not.


The Special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal
will contain selected papers, after resubmission and review
from 8th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia
Indexing CBMI’2010. Following the seven successful previous
events (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005,
Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania 2009), 2010 International
Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) will be
held on June 23-25, 2010 in Grenoble, France. It will be
organized by the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
http://www.liglab.fr/. CBMI 2010 aims at bringing together
the various communities involved in the different aspects of
content-based multimedia indexing, such as image processing
and information retrieval with current industrial trends and
developments. Research in Multimedia Indexing covers a wide
spectrum of topics in content analysis, content description,
content adaptation and content retrieval. Hence, topics of
interest for the Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

- Multimedia indexing and retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
- Matching and similarity search
- Construction of high level indices
- Multimedia content extraction
- Identification and tracking of semantic regions in scenes
- Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
- Content-based search
- Multimedia data mining
- Metadata generation, coding and transformation
- Large scale multimedia database management
- Summarisation, browsing and organization of multimedia content
- Presentation and visualization tools
- User interaction and relevance feedback
- Personalization and content adaptation


Paper Format
Papers must be typed in a font size no smaller than 10 pt,
and presented in single-column format with double line spacing
on one side A4 paper. All pages should be numbered. The
manuscript should be formatted according to the requirements
of the journal. Detailed information about the Journal,
including an author guide and detailed formatting information
is available at:
http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems/journal/11042.

Paper Submission
All papers must be submitted through the journals Editorial
Manager system: http://mtap.edmgr.com. When uploading your paper,
please ensure that your manuscript is marked as being for this
special issue.

Important Dates
Manuscript due:              19th of April 2010
Notification of acceptance:  1st of July 2010
Publication date:            January 2011

Guest Editors
Dr. Georges Quénot
LIG UMR 5217 INPG-INRIA-University Joseph Fourier, UPMF -CNRS
Campus Scientifique, BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
e-mail : Georges.Quenot@imag.fr

Prof. Jenny Benois-Pineau,
University of Bordeaux1, LABRI UMR 5800 Universities Bordeaux-CNRS,
e-mail: jenny.benois@labri.fr

Prof. Régine André-Obrecht
University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, IRIT UMR UPS/CNRS/UT1/UTM, France
e-mail: obrecht@irit.fr

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/CFP-11042-20091003.pdf

New book series:  Mathematics, Computing, Language, and Life: Frontiers in Mathematical Linguistics and Language Theory  to be published by Imperial College Press starting in 2010.  Editor: Carlos Martin-Vide  carlos.martin@urv.cat

Call for papers: Special issue on Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions of Language and Cognitive Processes/ Cognitive Neurosciences of Language

Language and Cognitive Processes, jointly with Cognitive Neuroscience of Language, is launching a call for submissions for a special issue on:

Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions

This special issue is a unique opportunity to promote the development of a unifying thematic framework for understanding the perceptual, cognitive and neuro-physiological mechanisms underpinning speech recognition in adverse conditions. In particular, we seek papers focusing on the recognition of acoustically degraded speech (e.g., speech in noise, “accented” or motor-disordered speech), speech recognition under cognitive load (e.g., divided attention, memory load) and speech recognition by theoretically relevant populations (e.g., children, elderly or non-native listeners). We welcome both cognitive and neuroscientific perspectives on the topic that report strong and original empirical data firmly grounded in theory.

Guest editors: Sven Mattys, Ann Bradlow, Matt Davis, and Sophie Scott.

Submission deadline: 30 November 2010.

Please see URL below for further details:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/PLCPcfp2.pdf

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: May 10, 2010    Website of the workshop: http://www2.unine.ch/speechprosody-prominence

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

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.

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/

Extended deadline for submission: 26 February 2010

Workshop Description

With the emergence of large e-infrastructures 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 semi-automatic, 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 well-established 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, meta-evaluation / 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 Kemps-Snijders (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)

Key-Sun 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

Extended deadline for submission: Friday 26 February 2010

Notification of acceptance: Thursday 18 March 2010

Final version due: Thursday 25 March 2010

Workshop : 17-18 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 (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 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.

 
*** 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

*BASAL GANGLIA SPEECH DISORDERS AND DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION*
***2nd INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM*
**
**
**that will take place on

*2010, June 29th - July 1st*
*Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme*
**
*Aix-en-Provence, France*
**
**
**
***Registration is now open*
**
*Please, register online @*
http://lpl-aix. fr/~speechdbs2010 <http://lpl-aix.%20fr/%7Espeechdbs2010>
__
__
__Symposium organised by Serge PINTO (LPL), François VIALLET (LPL) & Elina TRIPOLITI (London, UK)
*LPL- Laboratoire Parole et Langage*
**(CNRS - Aix-Marseille University)

/Fees/
/Normal: 200 euros/
/Student: 100 euros/
//
//For further any enquiries, please contact us
//speechdbs.org@ lpl-aix.fr
speechdbs.registration@lpl-aix. fr

*Who should attend*
*//*ENTs, ENT surgeons, Neurologists Neurophysiologists, Neuropsychologists, Neuroscientists, Neurosurgeons, Physiotherapists,
Speech & Language Therapists, Specialist Nurses and any other health/scientific professionals with a special interest on speech
in movement disorders


*We look forward seing you in Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne's place and other...*
**(_http://www.aixenprovencetourism.com/_) 

eNTERFACE’10 - the 6th Intl. Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces

Amsterdam, the Netherlands,

July 12th – August 6th, 2010

-----------------------------

Call for Participation - apologies for cross-posting

-----------------------------

The eNTERFACE workshops aim at establishing a tradition of

collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering,

in a single place, a team of leading professionals in multimodal

man-machine interfaces together with students (both graduate and

undergraduate), to work on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4

complete weeks. In this respect, it is an innovative and intensive

collaboration scheme, designed to allow researchers to integrate their

software tools, deploy demonstrators, collect novel databases, and

work side by side with a great number of experts.

Outcomes of synergy and success stories of past eNTERFACE Workshops

held in Mons (2005), Dubrovnik (2006), Istanbul (2007), Paris (2008),

and Genova (2009) can be seen at www.enterface.net. Intelligent

Systems Lab Amsterdam of the University of Amsterdam is organizing the

2010 edition of the Workshop.

Senior researchers, PhD, MS, or undergraduate students interested in

participating at the Workshop should send their application by

emailing the Organizing Committee at a.a.salah@uva.nl on or before

March 1, 2010 (extended). The application should contain:

-       A short CV.

-       A list of three preferred projects to work on.

-       A list of interests/skills to offer for these projects.

-       Possible dates of participation (full/partial).

The workshop is FREE for all participants, but participants must

procure their own travel and accommodation expenses. Information about

the venue and accommodation are provided on the eNTERFACE’10 website:

http://enterface10.science.uva.nl

eNTERFACE'10 will welcome students, researchers, and seniors, working

in teams on the following projects:

#01 CoMediAnnotate: a usable multimodal annotation framework

#02 Looking around in a virtual world

#03 Parameterized user modelling of people with disabilities and

simulation of their behaviour in a virtual environment

#04 Continuous interaction for ECAs

#05 Multimodal Speaker Verification in NonStationary Noise Environments

#06 Vision based Hand Puppet

#07 Audio-visual speech recognition

#08 Affect-responsive interactive photo-frame

#09 Automatic Fingersign to Speech Translator

Full descriptions of the projects are available at:

http://enterface10.science.uva.nl/projectsTeams.php

eNTERFACE'10 Scientific Committee:

Lale Akarun, Boğaziçi University, Turkey

Antonio Camurri, University of Genova, Italy

Cristophe d'Alessandro, CNRS-LIMSI, Orsay, France

Thierry Dutoit, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium

Theo Gevers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ben Kröse, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Maurizio Mancini, University of Genova, Italy

Panos Markopoulos, Technical University Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Ferran Marques, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain

Ramon Morros, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain

Anton Nijholt, Twente University, The Netherlands

Igor Pandzic, Zagreb University, Croatia

Catherine Pelachaud, TELECOM Paris-Tech, France

Albert Ali Salah, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Bülent Sankur, Bogazici University, Turkey

Ben Schouten, FONTYS, The Netherlands

Bjorn Schuller, Technical University of  Munich, Germany

Nicu Sebe, University of Trento, Italy

Alessandro Vinciarelli, IDIAP, Switzerland

Gualtiero Volpe, University of Genova, Italy

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

            ACL 2010 Workshop on Domain Adaptation
          for Natural Language Processing (DANLP 2010)
            http://sites.google.com/site/danlp2010/

              July 15, 2010, Uppsala, Sweden

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

Most modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are subject to
the well known problem of lack of portability to new domains/genres:
there is a substantial drop in their performance when tested on data
from a new domain, i.e., their test data is drawn from a related but
different distribution as their training data. This problem is
inherent in the assumption of independent and identically distributed
(i.i.d.) variables for machine learning systems, but has started to
get attention only in recent years. The need for domain adaptation
arises in almost all NLP tasks: part-of-speech tagging, semantic role
labeling, statistical parsing and statistical machine translation, to
name but a few.

Studies on supervised domain adaptation (where there are limited
amounts of annotated resources in the new domain) have shown that
baselines comprising of very simple models (e.g. models based only on
source-domain data, only target-domain data, or the union of the two)
achieve relatively high performance and are "surprisingly difficult to
beat" (Daume III, 2007). Thus, one conclusion from that line of work
is that as long as there is a reasonable (often even small) amount of
labeled target data, it is often more fruitful to just use that.

In contrast, semi-supervised adaptation (i.e., no annotated resources
in the new domain) is a much more realistic situation but is clearly
also considerably more difficult.  Current studies on semi-supervised
approaches show very mixed results. For example, Structural
Correspondence Learning (Blitzer et al., 2006) was applied
successfully to classification tasks, while only modest gains could be
obtained for structured output tasks like parsing. Many questions thus
remain open.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a meeting-point for research
that approaches the problem of adaptation from the varied perspectives
of machine-learning and a variety of NLP tasks such as parsing,
machine-translation, word sense disambiguation, etc.  We believe there
is much to gain by treating domain-adaptation as a general learning
strategy that utilizes prior knowledge of a specific or a general
domain in learning about a new domain; here the notion of a 'domain'
could be as varied as child language versus adult-language, or the
source-side re-ordering of words to target-side word-order in a
statistical machine translation system.

Sharing insights, methodologies and successes across tasks will thus
contribute towards a better understanding of this problem. For
instance, self-training the Charniak parser alone was not effective
for adaptation (it has been common wisdom that self-training is
generally not effective), but self-training with a reranker was
surprisingly highly effective (McClosky et al., 2006). Is this an
insight into adaptation that can be used elsewhere?  We believe that
the key to future success will be to exploit large collections of
unlabeled data in addition to labeled data. Not only because unlabeled
data is easier to obtain, but existing labeled resources are often not
even close to the envisioned target application domain. Directly
related is the question of how to measure closeness (or differences)
among domains.

===============
Workshop Topics
===============

We especially encourage submissions on semi-supervised approaches of
domain adaptation with a deep analysis of models, data and results,
although we do not exclude papers on supervised adaptation. In
particular, we welcome submissions that address any of the following
topics or other relevant issues:

* Algorithms for semi-supervised DA
* Active learning for DA
* Integration of expert/prior knowledge about new domains
* DA in specific applications (e.g., Parsing, MT, IE, QA, IR, WSD)
* Automatic domain identification and model adjustment
* Porting algorithms developed for one type of problem structure to
another (e.g.
from binary classification to structured-prediction problems)
* Analysis and negative results: in-depth analysis of results, i.e.
which model
parts/parameters are responsible for successful adaptation; what can we
learn
from negative results (impact of negative experimental results on
learning strategies/
parameters)
* A complementary perspective: (Better) generalization of ML models,
i.e. to
make NLP models more broad-coverage and domain-independent, rather than
domain-specific
* Learning from multiple domains

==========
Submission
==========

Papers should be submitted via the ACL submission system:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/DANLP/

All submissions are limited to 6 pages (including references) and
should be formatted using the ACL 2010 style file that can be found at:

http://acl2010.org/authors.html.

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include the authors'
names and affiliations.  Submissions should be in English and should
not have been published previously. If essentially identical papers
are submitted to other conferences or workshops as well, this fact
must be indicated at submission time.

The submission deadline is 23:59 CET on April 5, 2010.

===============
Important Dates
===============

April 5, 2010: Submission deadline
May 6, 2010: Notification of acceptance
May 16, 2010: Camera-ready papers due
July 15, 2010: Workshop

===============
Invited speaker
===============

John Blitzer, University of California, United States

============
Organization
============

Hal Daumé III, University of Utah, USA
Tejaswini Deoskar, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
David McClosky, Stanford University, USA
Barbara Plank, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Jörg Tiedemann, Uppsala University, Sweden

=================
Program Committee
=================

Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country, Spain
John Blitzer, University of California, United States
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Kevin Duh, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan (formerly
University of Washington, Seattle)
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Jing Jiang, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Oier Lopez de Lacalle, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Robert Malouf, San Diego State University, United States
Ray Mooney, University Texas, United States
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Khalil Sima'an, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Michel Simard, National Research Council of Canada, Canada
Jun'ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Josef van Genabith, Dublin City University, Ireland
Yi Zhang, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)
and Saarland University, Germany

=======
Sponsor
=======

This workshop is kindly supported by the Stevin project PaCo-MT (Parse
and Corpus-based Machine Translation) .

=======
Contact
=======

Email: danlp.acl2010@gmail.com
Website: http://sites.google.com/site/danlp2010/

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
7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW7)
Kyoto, Japan - September 22-24, 2010
http://www.ssw7.org/

The Seventh ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech
Synthesis will take place at ATR, Kyoto, Japan, September 22-24, 2010.
It is co-sponsored by the International Speech Communication
Association (ISCA), the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech
Synthesis (SynSIG), the National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT), and the Effective Multilingual
Interaction in Mobile Environments (EMIME) project.  The workshop will
be held as a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2010 (Chiba, Japan,
September 26-30, 2010).  This workshop follows on from the previous
workshops, Autrans 1990, Mohonk 1994, Jenolan Caves 1998, Pitlochry
2001, Pittsburgh 2004, Bonn 2007, which aim to promote research and
development of all aspects of speech synthesis.

Workshop topics Papers in all areas of speech synthesis technology are
encouraged to be submitted, with emphasis placed on:

* Spontaneous/expressive speech synthesis
* Speech synthesis in dialog systems
* Voice conversion/speaker adaptation
* Multilingual/crosslingual speech synthesis
* Automated methods for speech synthesis
* TTS for embedded devices
* Talking heads with animated conversational agents
* Applications of synthesis technologies to communication disorders
* Evaluation methods

Submissions for the technical program:

The workshop program will consist of invited lectures, oral and poster
presentations, and panel discussions.  Prospective authors are invited
to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and
references.  All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically.
The SSW7 website http://www.ssw7.org/ will provide you with further
details.

Important dates:

* May 7, 2010: Paper submission deadline
* June 30, 2010: Acceptance/rejection notice
* June 30, 2010: Registration begins
* July 9, 2010: Revised paper due
* September 22-24, 2010: Workshop at ATR in Kyoto

We look forward to seeing you in Kyoto.
Sincerely,
Yoshinori Sagisaka
Keiichi Tokuda
Co-chairs of SSW7 organizing committee

 LVA/ICA 2010
       September 27-30, 2010 - Saint-Malo, France
           9th International Conference on
     Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation

        formerly the International Conference on
  Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation

                http://lva2010.inria.fr/

    ----------------------------------------------

Ten years after the first workshop on Independent Component Analysis in
Aussois, the series of ICA conferences has shown the liveliness of the
community of theoreticians and practitioners working in this field.
While ICA and blind signal separation have become mainstream topics, new
approaches have emerged to solve problems involving signal mixtures or
various other types of latent variables: semi-blind models, matrix
factorization using Sparse Component Analysis (SCA), Non-negative Matrix
Factorization (NMF), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI), but
also tensor decompositions, Independent Vector Analysis (IVA),
Independent Subspace Analysis (ISA), ...

The 9th edition of the conference, renamed LVA/ICA to reflect this
evolution towards more general Latent Variable Analysis problems in
signal processing, will offer an interdisciplinary forum for scientists
and engineers to experience renewed theoretical surprises and face
real-world problems.

In addition to contributed papers (oral and poster presentations), the
meeting will feature keynote talks by leading researchers:

    Pierre Comon, University of Nice, France
    Stephane Mallat, Ecole Polytechnique, France
    Mark Girolami, University of Glasgow, UK
    Arie Yeredor, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

as well as a community-based evaluation campaign (SiSEC 2010), a panel
discussion session, and a special late-breaking / demo session.

    ----------------------------------------------

VENUE

Saint Malo (http://www.saint-malo-tourisme.com/index.jsp?lang=en), the
corsair city, is an ancient city and pitoresque sea resort located in
Brittany, in the north-west of France.
Chateaubriand, Surcouf, Jacques Cartier... from writers to privateers
and sailors, many were the good men who hailed from Saint-Malo. As if in
honour of their pride and independence, the forts and ramparts of the
corsair city face the sea, adding to the city's charm and its
exceptional setting. To visitors and event-goers, the city offers the
beauty of its maritime views and the wealth of its historical heritage.
A city of 52,000 inhabitants that is lively all year round, Saint-Malo's
heart beats to the rhythm of the major event it hosts, festivals as the
Etonnants Voyageurs or Internationally renowned regattas such as the
Route du Rhum.

    ----------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT DATES

• April 7, 2010: Paper submission deadline
• June 15, 2010: Notification of acceptance
• June 30, 2010: Final paper due
• July 31, 2010: Late-breaking / demo / SiSEC abstract submission deadline

Detailed submission instructions will shortly be made available on the
conference website http://lva2010.inria.fr/.

    ----------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in all areas of latent
variable analysis and signal separation, including but not limited to:
• Theoretical frameworks: probabilistic, geometric &
biologically-inspired modeling; flat, hierarchical & dynamic structures;
sparse coding; kernel methods; neural networks
• Models: linear & nonlinear models; continuous & discrete latent
variables; convolutive & noisy mixtures; linear & quadratic
time-frequency representations
• Algorithms: blind & semi-blind estimation; identification &
convergence conditions; local & evolutionary optimization; computational
complexity; adaptation & modularity
• Speech and audio data: source separation; denoising & dereverberation;
Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA); Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR)
• Images: segmentation; fusion; texture analysis; color imaging; coding;
scene analysis
• Biomedical data: functional imaging; BCI; genomic data analysis;
systems biology
• Unsolved and emerging problems: causality detection; feature
selection; data mining; control; psychology; social networks; finance;
artificial intelligence; real-time applications
• Resources: software; databases; objective & subjective evaluation
procedures

Papers must be original and must not be already published nor under
review elsewhere. Papers linked to a submission to SiSEC 2010 are highly
welcome. The proceedings will be published in Springer-Verlag’s Lecture
Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series.

    ----------------------------------------------

SPECIAL ISSUE AND BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD

Extended versions of selected papers will be considered for a special
issue of a journal.

The Best Student Paper Award will distinguish the work of a PhD student
with original scientific contributions and the quality of his/her
presentation at LVA/ICA 2010. Eligible papers must be first-authored and
presented by the PhD student during the Conference. Candidates will be
asked to notify their participation on the submission form. A prize of
400 € offered by the Fondation Metivier will be awarded to the winner.

    ----------------------------------------------

LATE-BREAKING / DEMO / SiSEC SESSION

A special session will be dedicated to the presentation of:
• early results and ideas that are not yet fully formalized and evaluated
• software and data of interest to the community, with focus on open
source resources
• signal separation systems evaluated in SiSEC 2010 but not associated
with a full paper

Presenters are invited to submit a non-reviewed abstract, which will be
included in the conference program but not published in the proceedings.


We look forward to receiving your technical contribution and meeting you
in Saint-Malo!


Remi Gribonval and Emmanuel Vincent
General Chairs

Vincent Vigneron and Eric Moreau
Technical Chairs


   

We invite papers from linguists, as well as from scholars from related
disciplines, who are concerned with phonetic universals.

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/10-PhoneticUniversals/index.html

CALL FOR PAPERS

The ACM Workshop on Multimedia in Forensics, Security and Intelligence (MiFor 2010), http://madm.dfki.de/mifor2010/MiFor2010.html

in conjunction with the 2010 ACM Multimedia (ACM-MM), http://www.acmmm10.org/

Firenze, Italy

October 29, 2010

With the proliferation of multimedia data on the web, surveillance cameras in cities, and mobile phones in everyday life we see an enormous growth in multimedia data that needs to be secured to prevent illegal use, to be analyzed by forensic investigators to detect and reconstruct illegal activities, or be used as source of intelligence. The sheer volume of such datasets makes manual inspection of all data impossible. In recent years the multimedia community has developed new exciting solutions for management of large collections of video footage, images, audio and other multimedia content, knowledge extraction and categorization, pattern recognition, indexing and retrieval, searching, browsing and visualization, and modeling and simulation in various domains. Due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of the data appearing in criminal cases applying those techniques are not straightforward. The time is ripe, however, to tailor these results for forensics, security and intelligence.

The workshop topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Forensics

• Forgery detection and identification, detection of stenography
• Device characterization and identification
• Media forensic applications and attack analysis
• Crime scene reconstruction and annotation
• Forensic investigation of surveillance data, video analytics
• Multimodal analysis of surveillance data
• Multimodal analysis of biometric traces
• Authenticity of multimedia data

Security

• Digital/encrypted domain watermarking for multimedia
• Signal processing in the encrypted domain
• Multimedia content protection and violation detection
• Digital rights management
• Robust hashing and content fingerprinting
• Cryptography for content protection

Intelligence

• Searching for illicit content in multimedia data
• Image, video, and text linking
• Multimedia near duplicate detection and retrieval
• Multimedia interfaces, visual analytics
• Identity detection
• Scalable multimedia search

Important Dates (tentative)

• Paper Submission: June 10, 2010
• Notification of Acceptance: July 10, 2010
• Camera-ready Version: July 20, 2010
• Workshop Date: October 29, 2010

 Paper Submissions and Author Guidelines

Papers submissions for MiFor 2010 should follow the submission format and guidelines for regular ACM Multimedia 2010 papers, and be up to 6 pages in length. Guidelines for preparing submissions can be found at: http://www.acmmm10.org/authors/submission/full-and-short-papers/.

Submitted papers will undergo a peer review process by at least two reviewers.

Accepted papers for oral and poster presentations at the workshop will be included in the workshop's proceedings, which will be published together with the proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010. In addition, we plan to realize a special issue or an edited volume by asking the authors of the best papers to submit a substantially extended version of their workshop papers.

Additional information is available at the workshop website:

http://madm.dfki.de/mifor2010/MiFor2010.html

Workshop Chairs:

Sebastiano Battiato (University of Catania, Italy)

Sabu Emmanuel (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Adrian Ulges (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany)

Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam, The Netherland)

SST2010: Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology
Melbourne, Australia, 14-16 December 2010
http://www.assta.org/sst/2010/

Second Call for Papers
Call Deadline: 18 June 2010

ASSTA and La Trobe University are pleased to announce the Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2010). The conference will be held at the La Trobe University City Campus, Melbourne.

*Paper submission guidelines and templates are now available from http://www.assta.org/sst/2010/

Conference Themes
Submissions are invited for oral presentations. Submissions should describe original contributions to spoken language, speech science and/or technology that will be of interest to an audience including scientists, engineers, linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, audiologists and other professionals.

Submissions are invited in all areas of speech science and technology, but particularly in the following areas:
•       Speech production
•       Acoustic phonetics
•       Acoustics of accent change
•       Phonetics and phonology of Australasian languages (OzPhon)
•       Phonetics and Phonology of Australian and New Zealand English (PANZE)
•       Speech prosody, emotional speech, voice
•       Music and speech processing
•       Applications of speech science and technology
•       Speech processing for forensic applications
•       Speech recognition and understanding
•       Speaker recognition and classification
•       Speech enhancement and noise cancellation
•       Pedagogical technologies for speech and singing
•       Corpus management and speech tools
•       Contributions of speech science and technology to audiology and speech language therapy

Plenary Speakers:

Professor  D.R. Ladd
Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

Professor Hugh McDermott
Bionic Ear Institute and University of Melbourne

Professor Michael Robb        
Department of Communication Disorders, University of Canterbury

Key dates:

Paper submissions due           Friday 18 June 2010
Notification of acceptance      Friday 27 August 2010
Early-bird registration due     Friday 1 October 2010 

Les Quatrièmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique (IVèmes JPC) auront lieu du 19 au 21 mai 2011 à Strasbourg. Ces journées s'inscrivent dans la lignée des premières, deuxièmes et troisièmes journées d'études de phonétique clinique, qui s'étaient tenues respectivement à Paris en 2005, à Grenoble en 2007 et à Aix-en-Provence en 2009.

Elles seront organisées par l'Institut de Phonétique de Strasbourg (IPS) & l'U.R. 1339 Linguistique, Langues et Parole (LiLPa)  - Equipe Parole et Cognition et la Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l'Homme Alsace (MISHA).

Le  calendrier, ainsi que les  modalités de  soumission  et d'inscription  suivront sous peu.

--  Rudolph Sock Institut de Phonétique de Strasbourg (IPS)  &  Composante Parole et Cognition (PC)   E.A. 1339 - Linguistique, Langues et Parole (LiLPa) Université de Strasbourg 22, rue René Descartes 67084 Strasbourg cedex  Téléphone : +33 3 68 85 65 68 Fax : +33 3 68 85 65 69  http://misha1.u-strasbg.fr/IPS --------------------------------