Subject: ISCApad #19 Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 14:04:45 GMT From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 19 December 2, 1999 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #19. The current issue includes some significant announcements about our association, but a major announcement, concerning the elections to the extended ISCA Board, will be distributed very soon as a separate message. Don't forget to vote! Index of the current issue: - Monthly membership scheme - Speech Communication - Organisation of EUROSPEECH'2003 - CALL FOR PROPOSALS - New SIGs: SpLC and INSTIL - Conference announcement: TSD'2000 - Summer School announcement: TeSTIA - Workshop announcement: COST249 - request for information ISCA greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================ ISCA MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP SCHEME In 1998 ISCA changed its membership scheme. Membership is no longer synchronized to a calendar year as it used to be in former years. The reason for this decision is that ISCA gets many members via participation in workshops and conferences which may take place in any month of the year. It is ISCA's policy that the difference between the member and nonmember registration fees equals the ISCA one-year membership fee, and we offer a free one-year membership to nonmember participants of such an event. If the event takes place late in the year, it would be unfair to make the participants members of ISCA for a year which is going to end few months later. For this reason the ISCA Board has made the following decisions: 1) Persons entering ISCA for the first time via regular application (i.e., not via a workshop or conference), will be members of ISCA for a period of 12 months starting with the month in which the application is received and processed by the ISCA Secretariat. For instance, persons whose application has been received during November 1999 will be members from November 1999 through October 2000. 2) The same holds for former ISCA members whose membership has ended more than six months before the new application. 3) If an ISCA member renews her/his membership by paying the membership fee, the new membership period is attached to the actual one. This also applies when the member renews late, but not more than six months after membership has expired. For instance, those members whose membership period ends on 31 December 1999 (who were asked to renew at the beginning of November) will enter a new membership period from January through December 2000 when they renew before June 2000 [nonetheless, please renew now if you received the renewal invoice!]. If they renew later than June 2000, they will be treated as given in 2). 4) A person registering for an ISCA conference (Eurospeech) or an ISCA Workshop (ITRW) must be an ISCA member AT THE TIME OF THE EVENT in order to get the member's registration fee. 5) All others registering for an ISCA event (conference, ITRW) must pay the nonmember registration fee and will become members of ISCA. The membership period starts in the month of registration to the event and lasts for 12 months [exception: special package at Eurospeech which gives a 24-month membership]. If the membership period runs out between registration and the event, the participant has to pay the nonmember fee, but then rule 3) applies. Let me illustrate that with some examples. Researcher A (nonmember) wants to participate in Eurospeech-2001 (September) and registers in April 2001. Her membership will then start in April 2001 and run through March 2002. She will pay the nonmember registration fee. Researcher B (nonmember as well) wants to participate in Eurospeech-2001 and registers in March 2001, pays the nonmember registration fee and becomes an ISCA member from March 2001 through February 2002. In addition B wants to participate in an ITRW which takes place in July 2001. For this event he registers in April 2001. As he is already a member in July 2001, he can register for that ITRW paying the member's registration fee. Researcher C is a member of ISCA whose membership period runs out in June 2001 and who also wants to participate in Eurospeech-2001 in September. He registers in March. As he is a member in March but not in September he has to pay the nonmember registration fee, and his new 12-month membership period starts in July 2001. Researcher D is a member, and her membership period ends in October 2001. She registers for Eurospeech in April. She will pay the member's registration fee and remain a member until October unless she renews independently from her participation in Eurospeech. This last rule was decided by the ISCA Board during Eurospeech-99. For this reason we offer each conference participant who became a member via Eurospeech-99 a membership until August 2000 (and August 2001 for the special package). Rule 5 will apply to all nonmembers who register for future ISCA events. If there is a question with respect to this scheme, the ISCA Secretariat will be happy to answer it. Wolfgang Hess Secretary, ISCA ============================================================================ SPEECH COMMUNICATION Dear ISCA member, as a member you are entitled to a subscription to the journal Speech Communication at a reduced subscription price. The price is 195 NLG (Dutch guilders) per year for individual members and 130 NLG for students, plus tax. In the EU the tax is VAT which depends on the country where the subscriber lives. In former years ESCA collected these subscription fees and transferred them to the Elsevier (Amsterdam), the publisher of Speech Communication. From 2000 on, Elsevier proposed, and ISCA accepted that Elsevier bills each subscriber individually. Subscribers to Speech Communication will thus have to pay two bills: one to ISCA for renewal, and one to Elsevier for the journal. This procedure is much easier for ISCA because our secretariat is no longer involved in passing the money on to Elsevier, and it will be a little cheaper for you because bank transfer fees have to be paid only once. So, what do you have to do if you want to subscribe to SpeechCom - - If your membership period runs out in December 1999, and you have been asked to renew: if you want to subscribe to SpeechCom, please check the appropriate box in your membership renewal form and send your renewal to ISCA as soon as possible. Do not pay more than the membership fee to ISCA and wait for the bill from Elsevier. If you don't have the bill one month after you mailed the registration form, please notify the ISCA Secretariat. - All other ISCA members: if you want to subscribe to SpeechCom for 2000 [you are entitled to do so], please send us an e-mail indicating the exact mailing address where you want the journal to be shipped. Important: subscription to SpeechCom for 1999 is still possible. In contrast to ISCA membership, a subscription to SpeechCom always extends over a calendar year (i.e., from January to December). All members who entered ISCA in 1999 later than in January and want to subscribe to SpeechCom are per default set to a subscription period from January to December 2000. If you want to get SpeechCom for 1999, regardless whether you already subscribed or not: we can still enter your subscription with Elsevier if you notify us as soon as possible. We know that there were some irregularities with the subscriptions to SpeechCom earlier this year. Let me once more apologize for these inconveniences; I hope this has been settled by now, and all of you have received the journal. If not, please check with the ISCA Secretariat. Wolfgang Hess Secretary, ISCA ============================================================================ ORGANISATION OF EUROSPEECH'2003 - CALL FOR PROPOSALS Individuals or organisations interested in organising Eurospeech 2003 should submit by 31 January 2000 a brief preliminary proposal including: - The name and position of the proposed general chairman - The city in Europe and information on the venue - The proposed period in September - The commercial conference organiser - A preliminary budget Guidelines for the preparation of the proposal are available at http://www.isca-speech.org under the title "Conferences". Additional information is provided by George Kokkinakis (gkokkin@wcl.ee.upatras.gr) Proposals should be submitted by email at the above address. Candidates fulfilling basic requirements will be asked to submit a detailed proposal by 31 May 2000. ============================================================================ NEW SIG: SpLC - SPeaker and Language Characterization Special Interest Group A new ISCA Special Interest Group is starting !!! Aims The SPLC ISCA SIG is centered on Speaker and Language Characterization and Recognition. The aims of SPLC SIG are to help the collaboration between the various researchers (from different laboratories, country and disciplinary), to promote exchanges between scientific people, industrials, lawyers (...) and to propose a main directory for all the SPLC resources. How to do (all) that ? The SPLC SIG will: - Propose a set of Electronic Communication Tools (a web site, different email lists, news, thematic forums ...) - Group (and realize) different resources (tutorials, white papers, SPLC relative papers and books, program and application examples ...) - Organize Working Commissions centered on different subjects (evaluation, needed resources, commercial application characteristics, ...) - Organize different Meetings, Workshops and Exhibitions The SIG internal structure The SPLC SIG is composed of three main subgroups: - Academic research (speaker characterization, speaker identification/verification, speaker tracking and indexation, language characterization, language recognition) - Commercial applications (main characteristics, scientific glossary, performance level, commercial actors) - Forensic problems Different transversal common works are planned, like the evaluation thematic. The starting board of the SPLC SIG is composed of: Chairpersonn (and liaison representative) : Jean-Francois Bonastre, LIA University of Avignon, FR e-mail : jean-francois.bonastre@lia.univ-avignon.fr Secretary : Javier Ortega-Garcia, EUIT T University of Madrid, E e-mail : jortega@diac.upm.es Members : Regine Andre-Obrecht, IRIT, FR e-mail : obrecht@irit.fr A.P.A. Broeders, NFSL, NL email : t.broeders@gl.minjus.nl Bimbot Frederic, IRISA, FR e-mail : bimbot@irisa.fr Stephane Euler, Robert Bosch GmbH, D e-mail : stephan.euler@fli.sh.bosch.de John Mason, University of Swansea, UK e-mail : J.S.D.Mason@swansea.ac.uk How to join the SPLC SIG ? Send an email to: jean-francois.bonastre@lia.univ-avignon.fr ============================================================================ NEW SIG: InSTIL ISCA has a new SIG interested in the Integration of Speech Technology in (Language) Learning: InSTIL. Full details of this SIG can be found on its web site at http://dbs.tay.ac.uk/instil/ This also includes details of how to join. Membership of the SIG is free. InSTIL started life as CAPITAL and was officially set up at the CALICO Conference in the US in 1996. It has, up to now, been a joint SIG of the two major Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) organisations, its aims were always to "bridge" the gaps and parallel paths of the CALL and Speech Communities. By becoming a joint SIG of ISCA, this laudable aim can truly be achieved. We hope that ISCA members currently involved in relevant research including in Speech Therapy, the Education of the Deaf, etc... will wish to acquaint themselves with the work of the SIG, which currently focuses mainly in language learning. Once we have more ISCA members (some existing group members already belong to ISCA but also either to CALICO or EUROCALL), the ISCA part of the membership will elect two Officers to join the InSTIL Executive. Nominations will be needed. There is to be an exact executive parity between all 3 parent organisations (2 Officers each). The new InSTIL Constitution is NOT yet on the Web Site but will be soon. It is worth noting the following: 1. InSTIL has organised successful one-day seminars for the past two years. 2. The group is organising its first major two-day Symposium InSTIL 2000 on 29th and 30th August 2000 as a satellite event of EUROCALL 2000 (See Web Site at http://dbs.tay.ac.uk/eurocall2000/ This event is organised with the support of all 3 parents. The Call for Papers will be issued shortly. 3. InSTIL will organise a single-day event at EUROSPEECH 2001. 4. Before the end of 2000, the InSTIL Refereed Web Journal will produce its first issue. 5. InSTIL has a mailbase discussion list (open only to members): Instil@mailbase.ac.uk. If you have any informal questions about InSTIL, please contact Philippe Delcloque on p.delcloque@tay.ac.uk. ============================================================================ Sponsored by ISCA: The Third International Workshop on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE TSD 2000 http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2000/ Brno, Czech Republic, 13-16 September 2000 TSD SERIES TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Being held in Czech Republic, the cost of attending is very reasonable. TOPICS Topics of the TSD 2000 workshop include all aspect of spoken and written language processing and their interactions in dialogue systems. Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Jelinek Frederick, USA (general chair) Hermansky Hynek, USA (executive chair) Baudoin Genevieve, France Cermak Frantisek, Czech Rep. Ferencz Attila, Romania Hajicova Eva, Czech Rep. Hanks Patrick, GB Kilgariff Adam, GB Kopecek Ivan, Czech Rep. Kucera Pavel, Czech Rep. Matousek Vaclav, Czech Rep. Moon Rosamund, GB Noeth Elmar, Germany Norling-Christensen Ole, Denmark Pala Karel, Czech Rep. Pavesic Nikola, Slovenia Petkevic Vladimir, Czech Rep. Psutka Josef, Czech Rep. Schukat-Talamazzini E.G., Germany Skrelin Pavel, Russia Vintsiuk Taras, Ukraine Wilks Yorick, GB ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Mostly from the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Brno, CO-CHAIRS Karel Pala (pala@informatics.muni.cz) Kopecek (kopecek@informatics.muni.cz) FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP A limited number of participants, priority given to active participants. The workshop program will include oral presentations and a poster/demonstration sessions with time for discussions of the issues raised. The contributions to the workshop will be published in proceedings, available at the time of the workshop. The proceedings of the last TSD workshop were published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and the same format is anticipated for TSD 2000. IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for submission of extended abstracts (not exceeding 1000 words) by March 10, 2000 by e-mail to tsd2000@fi.muni.cz Final papers (camera ready, 4-8 pages) and registration: May 30, 2000 ============================================================================ 8th European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication "Text and Speech Triggered Information Access (TeSTIA)" Chios Island, Greece, 15-30 July 2000 The 2000 ELSNET Summer School will be organized by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) in Athens, Greece. The event will be sponsored by ELSNET, IHP and ILSP, and receive further support from ISCA and EACL. Years of speech and billions of characters are stored in various media including the Internet. How can we ever find useful information in such vast archives? Automatic procedures that can recognize speech accurately and linguistic tools that automatically take out essential information components may do the job. The 2000 Summer School will present the current state of the art. For details of the programme, which will consist of plenary sessions, parallel courses and workshops, please check the summer school homepage: http://www.ilsp.gr/testia/testia2000.html ============================================================================ FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS On May 11-12, 2000, a workshop entitled VOICE OPERATED TELECOM SERVICES: DO THEY HAVE A BRIGHT FUTURE? is organized in Gent (Belgium). The workshop is initiated by COST action COST249, and is intended to be THE event of the year 2000 where speech technology providers, telecom service providers, telecom operators and academic speech scientists meet to discuss the important issues related to the deployment of voice operated telecom services. The workshop is sponsored by - L&H: Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products - The Flemish Ministry of Science and supported by - COST249: Continuous speech recognition over the telephone. - ISCA: the International Speech Communication Association - ELIS: the Electronics & Information Dept. of the University Gent Keynote addresses will be given by the following renowned scientists - Roger Moore (DERA, UK) - Sadaoki Furui (Titech, Japan) - Denis Johnston (BT, UK) - Fred Lundin (Telia, Sweden) - Petri Haavisto (Nokia, Finland) - Volker Steinbiss (Philips, Germany) - Christian Dugast (Nuance, France) - Hugh Cameron (L&H, Canada) Everybody in the domain of speech recognition and understanding is invited to consult the detailed information on aims and objectives, call for paper, registration fee, hotel accommodations, etc. on the web page of the workshop. The www-address is: http://www.elis.rug.ac.be/cost249/workshop We are looking forward to your contribution, and we hope to wellcome you at the workshop. On behalf of the organizing committee, Jean-Pierre MARTENS (chairman of COST249) ============================================================================ Reply-To: Brenda Clark Hello, I am a teacher, searching for a listing the most high frequency words in the French and Spanish languages. For ESL instruction, Collins Co-Build publishes a list of the 7,000 most common words in the English language. Could you please tell me if you are aware of any such source for the highest frequency words in Spanish and French? Thank you, Brenda Clark ============================================================================ 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 Short messages will be forwarded on a monthly scheme basis to all ISCA members. =============================================================================