Subject: ESCApad #18 (ISCApad) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 16:14:45 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ESCApad number 18 October 26, 1999 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ESCApad #18 (the first ISCApad). Index of the current issue: - Message from the President - ISCA webpages - Best student paper awards at EUROSPEECH'99 - EUROSPEECH'2001 - new dates and website - ITRW announcemnt - ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech and Emotion - New ISCA SIG: SALTMIL - Speech And Language Technology for MInority Languages - Conference announcement: Language Technology Joint Conference ISCA greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================ Message from the President: Dear Colleague, Those of you who were not able to be present at Eurospeech'99 will be interested to hear that the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to "internationalise" the Association. This means that we all now belong to the "International Speech Communication Association" - ISCA. Please check-out our updated website - http://www.isca-speech.org/ - and bookmark the changes from esca to isca. The discussions which took place prior to the vote were positive and far-reaching, and of particular interest was the committment to be given to regional issues, especially in less advantaged areas of the world. It was agreed by all that the procedural changes invoked at the General Assembly represent only the first small step along the road to a fully international organisation. The current ISCA Board have since met to initiate actions to implement these exciting changes including the next most important step - elections for the five vacant posts on the enlarged ISCA Board. In the next couple of weeks, we shall be issuing an invitation for nominations - with a strong recommendation that, in the spirit of internationalisation, non-European candidates should be encouraged. The aim is to complete this process by the end of the year. Roger Moore President ============================================================================ ISCA webpages (http://www.isca-speech.org/) The new ISCA's webpages include some new sections (archive, awards, regions, jobs and resources) and all the others have now been updated. Browse through the new website and send us your suggestions to help us make it really useful to the ISCA community. In this ISCApad #1, we welcome our webpage assistant manager for jobs and resources: Gael Richard. Any announcements you have on these subjects should be mailed to him at: jobs@isca-speech.org or resources@isca-speech.org. Any other requests for advertising should be mailed to: publicity@isca-speech.org Please keep announcements very short for inclusion in our monthly ESCApad. ============================================================================ BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARDS AT EUROSPEECH'99 The ELRA, ELSNET and ESCA awards for the best Eurospeech'99 student papers have been announced in Budapest, during the Conference. The ELRA prize, for the "best student paper addressing issues related to speech and natural language ressources" was awarded to : Multi-level decision trees for static and dynamic pronunciation models, by Eric FOSLER-LUSSIER (ICSI / Berkeley), Vol. 1, pp. 463-466 The ELSNET prize, for the "best student paper addressing integration of language and speech" was awarded to : Combining nonlocal, syntactic and N-gram dependencies in language modelling, by Jun WU and Sanjeev KHUNDANPUR (CLSP, John Hopkins Univ.), Vol. 5, pp. 2179-2182 Before selecting the "winner" of the "best student paper adressing original speech communication topics", ESCA nominated three papers, for their excellent quality : Modeling the masking of formant transitions in noise, by James HANT and Abeer ALWAN (UCLA), Vol. 4, pp. 1895-1898 Unsupervised training of a speech recognizer : recent experiments, by Thomas KEMP and Alex WAIBEL (ILKD, Univ. Karlsruhe), Vol. 6, pp. 2725-2728 Adaptation to environment and speaker using maximum likelihood neural networks, by Dong Suk YUK, James FLANAGAN, et al. (CAIP, Rutgers Univ.), Vol. 6, pp. 2531-2534 And the winner is ... : Unsupervised training of a speech recognizer : recent experiments, by Thomas KEMP and Alex WAIBEL (ILKD, Univ. Karlsruhe). ============================================================================ EUROSPEECH'2001 - new dates and website September 3 - 6 (7), 2001 Home page: http://www.cpk.auc.dk/eusp2001 Info-update-list: eusp2001@cpk.auc.dk Many of you already know that the next ISCA Conference 'Eurospeech 2001' will take place in Aalborg, Denmark during the first week of September 2001. Unfortunately we have given you wrong information about the dates. As usual the conference begins on a Monday, and this means that the OPENING DATE is SEPTEMBER 3, 2001 while we have not decided whether CLOSING DATE is SEPTEMBER 6 or SEPTEMBER 7, 2001. You may recall that at the closing ceremony in Budapest I announced that we - the Scandinavian organisers - are considering the possibility of restructuring the conference planning and running. We are presently discussing to merge pre- and post-conference workshops and e.g. SIG meetings into the mainstream running of Eurospeech. This new way will allow attendees to follow special (workshop) sessions where more time is allotted to the individual oral presentations (ideally 30 minutes), 'regular' conference oral presentations (ideally more than 15 minutes) or special meetings activities. Presentations of special sessions, 'regular' conference sessions and meetings will include poster presentations. I have already received a number of proposals and comments from individuals. I would like to thank those who care about this essential item of our biennial Eurospeech conference. The organising committee will read and discuss them all, and take proper action where possible. Your are welcome to send your comments to pd@cpk.auc.dk or to eusp2001@cpk.auc.dk. If you would like to be updated on the latest news from the planning of Eurospeech 2001 you should send a mail to: eusp2001@cpk.auc.dk This will bring the latest news to your door step. We will also keep you updated via future ISCApad's. Sorry again for the mistake in dates for Eurospeech 2001. Kind regards Paul Dalsgaard Chair of Eurospeech 2001 ============================================================================ ADVANCE NOTICE ISCA WORKSHOP ON SPEECH AND EMOTION: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR RESEARCH CALL FOR PAPERS An ISCA workshop on vocal expression of emotion is to be held September 5-7, 2000 in Northern Ireland. It aims to promote the development of a coherent research community with shared awareness of core issues, agreed terminology, and connections with cognate areas of research. There will be sessions on key themes led by review papers from invited speakers, and submitted papers describing ongoing work at particular centres. Abstracts of submitted papers are invited by 15th December 1999. For further information see the workshop website http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/isca/index.htm ============================================================================ Announcing a new ISCA SIG: SALTMIL SALTMIL: "Speech And Language Technology for MInority Languages" The start of the new academic year sees the start of the SALTMIL Special Interest Group within ESCA (now ISCA). The group's initial activities are as follows: more activities will ensue later. 1) Email discussion list The first activity is an email discussion list. As a preliminary measure, a new list has been created at the US website www.onelist.com. There are two possible ways to subscribe to the SALTMIL list: a) Point your web browser to http://www.onelist.com/community/saltmil and follow the link to subscribe; or b) Send a blank email to saltmil-subscribe@onelist.com A message with further details will be automatically sent to you. This list is free, but carries commercial advertising in a brief section at the end of each message. However, until we can migrate to a non-commercial server this will be adequate. The discussions can be followed through email, and also through a Web browser at the Onelist site. 2) SALTMIL web page The provisional SALTMIL website is currently at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/SALTMIL Please send any material you would like to add to the web pages to: briony@cstr.ed.ac.uk This could include details of your work, or a link to your web pages. We hope very much that many colleagues will join in the discussions and share their knowledge and experience with others who are also working in the field of speech and language technology for minority languages. Briony Williams University of Edinburgh, UK Climent Nadeu Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Donncha O'Croinin Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Ireland ============================================================================ Language Technology Joint Conference ANLP-NAACL2000 Applied Natural Language Processing and the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics April 29 to May 3, 2000 Seattle, Washington www.gte.com/ANLP-NAACL2000/ ============================================================================= All additional information at the ISCA web-site: http://www.isca-speech.org The ISCA secretariat can be contacted at: info@isca-speech.org Requests concerning membership, Speech Communication and ordering Proceedings should be forwarded to the Secretariat. For message distribution at isca_list contact: publicity@isca-speech.org =============================================================================