Subject: ISCApad #22 Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 14:48:03 GMT From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 22 February 29, 2000 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #22. The main emphasis of this issue is on education. Here is the table of contents: - 1st meeting of the extended ISCA Board - new Special Interest Group - EduSIG - JEWELS project: towards a Joint European Website for Education in Language and Speech - European Masters in Language and Speech endorsed by ISCA and EACL - European Masters school at CHIOS (Greece) Future conferences and workshops: - RIAO 2000 6th Conference on "Content-Based Multimedia Information Access" College de France Paris, France April 12-14, 2000 Advance Program now available at http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO - LREC 2000 2nd international Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 29 May - 2 June 2000 Athens, Greece Call for Participation available at http://www.elda.fr/lrec2000.html - ITRW ASR 2000 International Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition: Challenges for the Next Millennium, Paris, France September 18-20 CAll for papers available at http://www-tlp.limsi.fr/asr2000 DEADLINE for submission: May 1, 2000 - COMLEX 2000 Workshop on "Computational Lexicography and Multimedia Dictionaries" 22-23 September 2000 Patras, Greece Call for papers available at www.wcl2.ee.upatras/comlex2000.htm DEADLINE for submission: June 15, 2000 - SPECOM 2000 International Workshop Speech and Computer 25-28 September 2000 St.-Petersburg, Russia http://www.spiiras.nw.ru/speech - UKROBRAZ-2000 Fifth All-Ukrainian International Conference on Signal/Image Processing and Pattern Recognition November 27th - December 1st, 2000 NAS Cybernetics Centre, Ukraine. First announcement available at http://www.kar.net/~uasoiro/ Book announcement: - Traitement de la parole by René Boite, Hervé Bourlard, Thierry Dutoit, Joël Hancq, Henri Leich Please keep requests for posting at this monthly bulletin short enough (ASCII format only). More information can always be found at the websites of the scientific events listed here. ISCA Greetings Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================= ISCA Board Meeting The first meeting of the extended ISCA Board will take place in Bonn, April 7-9, hosted by our Secretary Wolfgang Hess. As usual, ISCA members are invited to bring points to the attention of the Board. ============================================================================ New Special Interest Group - EduSIG The Board of ISCA has just announced the setting up a new Special Interest Group - EduSIG - to cover education matters in the field of speech communication. The Group's first Steering Committee will comprise: Rodolfo Delmonte (Italy), Andrzej Drygajlo (Switzerland), Klaus Fellbaum (Germany), Jean-Paul Haton (France), Mark Huckvale (UK), Phil Green (UK), Mike McTear (UK), Bojan Petek (Slovenia), Denis Ramasse (France), Mark Tatham (UK) The following officers have been appointed pro tem: · Chairman: Mark Tatham · Secretary: Bojan Petek · Publications Officer and Website: Klaus Fellbaum · Meetings Officer: Mike McTear · Educational Materials Officer: Andrzej Drygajlo EduSIG has the following terms of reference: a. identifying and furthering student and professional needs in speech and language communication; b. encouraging and promoting research into educational policies and practice wherever the Association has representation; c. dissemination of information and research findings; d. continuing the Socrates tradition of encouraging and promoting student and teacher exchange; e. to act as a clearing house for the exchange of educational ideas throughout the Association - and to bring the Membership into contact with related organisations; f. to encourage and promote meetings and events (e.g. conferences) to further the above aims; g. to encourage and promote events (e.g. 'summer schools' and shorter 'tutorials') to ensure the spread of speech and language communication education; h. to encourage and promote the development and exchange of 'open learning' materials, and to assist in their dissemination. i. to establish the means of publishing information and other materials using electronic mailing lists and a website. And EduSIG will be accountable to the Association in the following ways: 1. The Steering Committee will have one Annual Meeting and other interim meetings (which may be electronic, depending on funding). It will agree and put forward an Annual Report to the Board of the Association. 2. The Committee will seek and encourage constant feedback from the Group with a view to developing the areas covered by the Group. This is an exciting expansion of ISCA's educational activities and we look forward to developments during the next few years. All ISCA members will be contacted shortly with a view to signing up. For more information contact: Mark Tatham mark.tatham@essex.ac.uk http://speech.essex.ac.uk/speech/ ============================================================================ The JEWELS project: towards a Joint European Website for Education in Language and Speech. In a common effort of European Union supported projects for higher education (Socrates), ELSNET, the Education SIG of ISCA, and EACL, we aim to create a comprehensive website with: - recommendations on all aspects of education in Language and Speech Communication - commented lists of, and links to educational materials and tools (including tutorials) - advice on existing support programmes Though this is a European initiative, we welcome co-operation with all interested parties world-wide. You can find information on the project, and on the kick-off meeting (Prague, 17-19 March) at: Coordinators are Gerrit Bloothooft and Koenraad de Smedt ============================================================================ European Masters in Language and Speech endorsed by ISCA and EACL ISCA and EACL have endorsed the project on an European Masters in Language and Speech. Students who fulfill all requirements at one of the approved implementations receive a certificate signed by the presidents of both ISCA and EACL (European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). ISCA and EACL each have a representative at the EMasters Board. Participating universities are: Aalborg, Athens, UPC Barcelona, Bonn, Brno, Edinburgh, Erlangen, Lausanne, Leuven, Patras, Saarbruecken, Sheffield, Stuttgart, Utrecht. Any other university can join if requirements are fulfilled. More details at: ============================================================================ European Masters in Language and Speech: school at CHIOS (Greece) Preceeding the 8th European Summer School on Speech and Language communication, a two-days EMasters school will be organised in Chios (Greece) on 13-14 July, 2000. Programme and registration form at . Information on the subsequent summer school (on Text and Speech Triggered Information Access) - good grant options for Europeans! - at . ============================================================================= RIAO 2000 - Advance Program 6th Conference on "Content-Based Multimedia Information Access" College de France, Paris, France, April 12-14, 2000 http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO Organized by: Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire (C.I.D., France) & Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems, Inc (C.A.S.I.S., USA) Under the sponsorship of : the European Commission, the French Ministry of Education, Research and Technology, the DGA, the CEA, ELRA and ELSNET With the collaboration of: AII, ASIS, AUF/Francil, I3 and ISCA. The theme of the conference is "Content-Based Multimedia Information Access". The conference scope will range from the traditional processing of text documents to the rapidly growing field of automatic indexing and retrieval of images and speech and, more generally, to all processing of audio-visual and multimedia information on various distribution venues, including the Net. The conference is of interest for several scientific communities, including Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Spoken Language Processing, Computer Vision, Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Libraries. RIAO 2000 will, thereby, serve as a forum for cross-discipline initiatives and innovative applications. RIAO 2000 will present recent scientific progress, demonstrations of prototypes resulting from this research as well as the most innovative products now appearing on the market. The RIAO (Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur = Computer- Assisted Information Retrieval) International Conference is held every 3 years. Sites for the conference have been Grenoble, France (1985), M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass. USA (1988), Barcelona, Spain (1991), Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y., USA (1994) and McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (1997). The Conference Advance Program is highlighted by contributions of authors from 26 countries. The program includes 2 invited speakers, 3 panel sessions, 3 plenary sessions, 8 poster sessions and 16 oral sessions. Among all sessions are 146 papers (73 oral and 73 poster presentations), providing a unique opportunity to present and discuss in depth the state-of-the-art in this rapidly growing scientific and technological field. There will also be many innovative application demonstrations presented by companies from different countries. The application committee has already selected 19 of them covering various applications such as crosslingual English-Arabic Internet search, recognition of printed and handwritten texts, television archives retrieval, sign language indexing, machine translation, etc. For more information on the program, conference location and registration, please visit our Web site: http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO or contact us at: - For all scientific matters: riao2000@limsi.fr - For all organizational, technical and practical matters: cidcol@club-internet.fr ============================================================================ LREC 2000 Call for Participation - 2nd international Language Resources and Evaluation Conference Year 2000 marks the beginning of a new era for Human Language Technology and Language Engineering. The European Commission and the US National Science Foundation have announced Multilinguality as one of their main action points. The 2nd international Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2000), the second of a series of leading biennial events representing cross-sectoral research and development in speech, text, multi-media, and multi-modal processing, is committed to promoting the language engineering initiatives of these and similar organizations. LREC2000, scheduled to take place 29 May - 2 June 2000 in Athens, Greece, has accepted nearly 300 papers for presentation at the main conference. About 10 pre- and post-conference satellite workshops will also take place. Many commercial and research systems for speech and natural language processing will be demonstrated at the LREC2000 Exhibition in parallel with the conference sessions. From 500 to 700 conference delegates are expected to attend this conference, with half coming from the corporate and industrial sectors and half coming from the academic field. For more information with regard to LREC2000, please contact: LREC2000 Conference Secretariat Institute for Language and Speech Processing 6, Artemidos & Epidavrou Str. 15125 Marousi Athens, Greece Tel: (+301) 6800959 Fax: (+301) 6856794 E-mail: LREC2000@ilsp.gr LREC2000 Web site: http://www.elda.fr/lrec2000.html For more information about the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), please contact: Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO 55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 PARIS, FRANCE Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30 E-mail: choukri@elda.fr ELRA Web site: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ============================================================================ ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop ASR2000 Automatic Speech Recognition: Challenges for the new Millenium September 18-20, 2000 Paris, France The ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop ASR2000 will focus on core speech recognition technology and in particular on recent advances and prospective work. Some of the challenges for speech recognition research are to develop robust generic technology, low-cost development strategies, portability to new tasks and languages, and adaptability. For more information visit the workshop website at: http://www-tlp.limsi.fr/asr2000/ Important dates: Electronic submission of papers for review May 1 Final papers due August 1 ============================================================================ COMLEX 2000 Workshop on "Computational Lexicography and Multimedia Dictionaries" Organized by WCL, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Patras, Greece. Supported by ISCA and ELSNET AIMS The aim of this workshop is to present the state of the art in corpus based monolingual and multilingual lexicography (corpora creation, methods and tools for lexical knowledge extraction, knowledge representation, etc.) and the integration of various modalities (textual, spoken, visual) in electronic dictionaries. In particular the workshop aims at the presentation of current work and results of national and international projects related to the workshop's subject. The scientific program will include several invited lectures as well as submitted paper presentations. Submitted papers will be published in a volume of Proceedings available at the workshop. TOPICS Electronic corpora for lexicography Methods and tools for corpus based lexicography Acquisition and reusability of lexicography resources Annotation of lexicography resources Evaluation and validation of lexicography resources Lexical knowledge representation Treatment of morphology and polysemy Recognition of lexical units in text Monolingual and multilingual lexicography Integration of various modalities in electronic dictionaries Multimedia information retrieval Speech synthesis/recognition for multimedia dictionaries Encyclopedic dictionaries Specialized dictionaries (language teaching, NLP-applications, etc) Internet based dictionaries Other subjects related to the workshop VENUE The workshop will be held at the conference center of the University of Patras, Greece. Patras is located on the west coast of Greece, 200 km from Athens. It is the principal seaport linking the country with Italy and the commercial and cultural center of Western Greece. Apart from its beautiful landscape, Patras is close to the famous archeological sites of Olympia, Delphi and Corinth. INVITED SPEAKERS Cristos Faloutsos, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University. "Multimedia Information Retrieval" Dafydd Gibbon Fakultat fur Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Universitat Bielefeld. "Progress in Computational Lexicography" Jean Veronis, Universite de Provence. "Building dictionaries from knowledge bases" Antonio Zampolli Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa. "Electronic corpora for lexicography" SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS Abstracts of original not elsewhere published papers may be submitted either by post (three copies) or preferably by e-mail in ASCII format only. Submissions should be typed or printed on one side of the paper only, with ample margins. They should not exceed two A4 pages (including figures and references). All abstracts will be refereed by the Scientific Committee. Submission of an abstract implies a commitment to present the paper if accepted. All submissions should begin with the following information: Title: title of paper Author(s): names of author(s) Affiliation: of author(s) Contact address: full postal address E-mail: electronic mail address of main author (for contact), followed by other authors (if any) Fax number: of main author Phone number: of main author Electronic submissions should be sent to: dermatas@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr with the subject line " Submission for COMLEX2000" Submissions by post should be addressed to: George Kokkinakis, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Patras 26500, Patras, Greece IMPORTANT DATES Submission of abstracts: June 15, 2000 Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2000 Camera-ready paper due: August 1, 2000 Advance registration: July 10, 2000 Late registration: September 1, 2000 Workshop: September 22, 2000 LANGUAGE The official language of the workshop will be English. ACCOMMODATION Several hotels are situated on the beach of Rion near the venue. Accommodation service will be provided. REGISTRATION FEES Registration fees will be around 150 EURO with special prices for students and a 10% early registration discount. Fees include welcome reception, two meals, banquet, and coffee breaks. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE George Kokkinakis (chair), Nikos Fakotakis (vice chair), Evangelos Dermatas(secretary),WCL, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Patras. More information, including Scientific Committee available on: www.wcl2.ee.upatras/comlex2000.htm ============================================================================ SPECOM'2000 International Workshop SPEECH AND COMPUTER 25-28 September 2000, St.-Petersburg, Russia Organized by St-Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS) The workshop is aimed to discuss the most important topics of man-computer interaction by voice and more perspective applied areas of speech dialogue. GENERAL CHAIR: Rafael M. Yusupov, SPIIRAS, St-Petersburg, Russia ORGANIZING COMMITTEE CHAIR: Yuri Kosarev SPIIRAS, Russia DEADLINE for abstract submission 15 May 2000 CONTACTS: Dr.Y.Kosarev E-mail: specom@mail.iias.spb.su http://www.spiiras.nw.ru/speech ============================================================================ UKROBRAZ 2000 The Fifth All-Ukrainian International Conference on Signal/Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (UKROBRAZ-2000) will be held from the 27th of November to the 1st of December 2000 in NAS Cybernetics Centre. Papers are invited in the following topics: - Methodological Problems of Pattern Recognition; - Theoretical Basis of Signal and Image Processing and Recognition; - Computer and Discrete Geometry Problems; - Training and Selftraining Problems in Pattern Recognition; - Automatic Recognition, Understanding and Synthesis of Speech Signals; - Natural Language and Speech Resources and Technologies; - Technical Diagnostics of Objects and Machines on its Signals and Fields; - Printed and Hand-Written Texts, Drawing and Graphic Picture Processing and Recognition; - Photopictures Processing and Recognition; - Scene Processing, Recognition and Understanding; - Simulating and Research Systems; - Processors Architecture for Signal/Image Processing and Recognition; - Signal/Image Input/Output Tools and Multimedia Systems; - Signal/Image Filtering, Compression, Reconstruction and Synthesis; - Audiovisual Data and Knowledge Bases: Retrievial and Summarisation; - Multimodal Means for Man-Machine Communication; - Advanced Information Technologies and Systems Based on Signal/Image Processing. Deadline for submission of the materials is 1st September 2000. All correspondence and inquiry regarding the conference should be addressed to: Taras Vintsiuk, NAS Cybernetics Centre, 40 Academician Hlushkov Avenue, Kyjiv 03680, Ukraine. URL: http://www.kar.net/~uasoiro/ E-mail: ukrobraz@uasoiro.freenet.kiev.ua Tel.: +380 44 266-4356 Fax: +380 44 266-1570 ============================================================================ Book announcement: Traitement de la parole, by René Boite, Hervé Bourlard, Thierry Dutoit, Joël Hancq, Henri Leich 2000, 504 pages, 16x24 cm, softbound, ISBN 2-88074-388-5 57.50 Euro, (ie around 56 USD) Providing a comprehensive, and technically detailed overview of this important field, this book (probably the only one of its kind in French) covers all aspects of speech analysis, coding, synthesis and recognition. Autoregressive modeling and spectral analysis techniques, on which all speech products are based, are comprehensively described. Then, a detailed description of quantization and coding techniques, as well as an introduction to noise suppression techniques, are provided. Text-to-speech technologies are also analyzed, both from a signal processing and language processing point of view. Special attention is then given to the area of speech and speaker recognition, based on advanced pattern recognition techniques, such as hidden Markov models, and neural networks. Finally, implementation problems are briefly addressed, with a view to porting the resulting algorithms on microprocessors, ASICs and FPGAs. Contents: Introduction (acoustic, phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels) - Speech signal modeling - Spectral properties of speech signal - Speech coding - Speech and speaker recogniton - Introduction to natural language processing - Text-to-speech synthesis - Algorithm implementation. For more information and orders: http://ppur.epfl.ch/livres/2-88074-388-5.html ============================================================================ 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. =============================================================================