Subject: ISCApad #29 Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 17:37:18 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 29 October 6th, 2000 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #29. Here's the table of contents for this month's very long bulletin: ISCA news: - EUROSPEECH'2003 will take place in Geneve, Switzerland, September 1 to 4, 2003, chaired by Herve Bourlard. - Membership Cards and Pins ISCA is issuing membership cards to all new members. Existing members can send email to the Secretariat if they want to receive a card. Alternatively they can be picked up at events such as ICSLP'2000 at the ISCA booth. New "ISCA" pins can also be picked up at such events. - Institutional membership ISCA institutional members pay 4 times the individual member fee. They are entitled to up to 5 reduced inscriptions fees at any event organized by ISCA (EUROSPEECH, Tutorial & Research Workshops, etc.). In addition, they can also benefit from one reduced annual subscription to the Journal Speech Communication, and receive one ISCA directory once a year. Please contact the Secretariat for more information on how to apply for institutional membership. - Participation reports from two ISCA granted participants available on the ISCA webpage for grants: Natalia Zharkova (VIIIth Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Assotiation, Edinburg, UK, August 2000), and V. Potapov (COMLEX'2000, Patras, Greece, September 2000). Happening this month: - ISCA supported event: ICSLP'2000 (INTERSPEECH'2000) 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing Beijing, China, October 16-20, 2000 http://www.icslp2000.org - COCOSDA Workshop 2000 (see full program below) Beijing, China, Oct 21, 2000 - COMPCORP - Workshop on Comparing Corpora in conjunction with ACL 2000 Hong Kong, 7th October 2000 http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/events/compcorp/programme.html - Patterns of speech sounds in unscripted communication Production - Perception - Phonology Akademie Sankelmark, Germany, October 8-11, 2000 http://www.ipds.uni-kiel.de/symposium/index.html Small number of places left, contact: Adrian Simpson IPDS, Universitaet Kiel, D-24098 Kiel e-mail: as@ipds.uni-kiel.de fax: +49 431 880 1578 Future events (see summaries below): - ICASSP'2001 IEEE International Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Salt Lake City, Utah, May 7-11, 2001 http://www.icassp2001.org Deadline for submission of papers: Nov. 10, 2000 - IMAGINATION'2001 Special event at EUROSPEECH'2001, organized by ELSNET Aalborg, Denmark, September 3-7, 2001 http://www.elsnet.org/imagination2001 See also: - COST-G6 Conference on Digital Audio Effects Verona, Italy, December 7-9, 2000 http://www.sci.univr.it/~dafx/ - NSIP'2001: IEEE-EURASIP 5th Workshop on Nonlinear signal and image processing Hyatt Regency Baltimore, Maryland USA, June 3-6, 2001 http://www.ece.udel.edu/nsip Paper proposals due November 1, 2000 Notification of paper acceptance January 26, 2001 Camera-ready papers due March 16, 2001 - BI-DIALOG 2001 5th Workshop on the Semantics and pragmatics of dialogue Bielefeld University, Germany, June 14-16 2001 http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/BIDIALOG/ Papers due: February 15th Acceptance notice: April 15th Final version due: May 22 - ICA'2001 - 17th International Congress on Acoustics Rome, Italy, 2-7 September 2001 http://www.ica2001.it The conference unfortunately overlaps with EUROSPEECH'2001. The International Commission for Acoustics and ISCA will do their best to coordinate efforts and avoid such overlaps in the future. - ECMCS'2001 - EURASIP Conference on Digital Signal Processing for Multimedia Communications and Services Budapest, Hungary, 11-13 September 2001 http://cyberspace.mht.bme.hu/ecmcs/ Journals: - New Speech Comm special issue: "Accessing Information in Spoken Audio", Volume 32 Nos 1-2. The special issue arose from the ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on this subject in Cambridge, 1999, organized by Tony Robinson and Steve Renals. - Acoustics Research Letters Online (see below) http://ojps.aip.org/ARLO - Marges Linguistiques (see below) http://www.marges-linguistiques.com Courses: (see below) - MSc in Speech and Language Processing, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia Job offers (see below): - Position at CSELT Others: (see below) - HTK V3.0 Available for Download - SPEECHGURU website: Speech, language, hearing, communication, and swallowing disorders for all ages http://WWW.SPEECHGURU.ORG - COMMUNICATE website: A Resource for Speech Professionals working with Individuals with Developmental Disabilities http://communicative.homestead.com/ Looking forward to meeting many of you at ICSLP'2000, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================ COCOSDA Workshop 2000 Oct 21, Sat, Beijing, China Final Program 9:00-9:10 Opening Advisors of COCOSDA 9:10-9:20 Recent Development of COCOSDA---- A Progress Report Lin-shan Lee 9:20-10:40 Overview on Recent Activities in Speech Understanding and Dialogue Systems Evaluation Wolfgang Minker, Germany Overview on Recent Activities in Corpus Annotation Tools Steven Bird, USA (represented by Bruce Millar, Australia) Towards Corpus Annotation Standards - The MATE Workbench Laila Dybkjaer, Niels Ole Bernsen, Denmark Collecting and Transcribing Chinese Spontaneous Telephone Speech Corpus Limin Du, China 10:40-11:00 Coffee Break 11:00-12:20 Language Resources and Technology Developments in Africa Justus Roux, South Africa Overview on Recent Activities in Multi-Modal Corpora Satoshi Nakamura, Japan Overview of Recent Activities in Europe Joseph Mariani, France SLA Validation: Procedures and Prospects Eric Sanders, Henk van den Heuvel, The Netherlands 12:30-2:00 Lunch 2:00-3:40 Overview on Recent Activities in Local Languages Dafydd Gibbon, Germany Assessment and Application of Mongolian Multi-Dialectual Speech Database I. Dawa, S. Okawa, K. Shirai, T. Kobayashi, Japan Survey of Current Activities in Oceania Bruce Millar, Australia Overview of Current Activities in Latin America Elsa Mora and Manuel Rodriguez, Venezuela Overview of Recent Activities in East Asia: Speech Corpora and Assessment Shuichi Itahashi, Hisao Kuwabara, Idomuso Dawa, Japan; Yong-Ju Lee, Korea; Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Thailand; Hsiao-Chuan Wang, Taiwan; Ren-Hua Wang, China 3:40-4:00 Break 4:00-4:20 Report of ELSNET/ACL Workshop on Infrastructures for Global Collaboration Julia Hirschberg, USA 4:20-5:00 General Discussions - Ways Ahead All ============================================================================ ICASSP'2001 Dear Colleague: The 2001 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2001) will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, during May 7-11. The deadline for submission of papers for regular sessions as well as sessions in the Industry Technology Track is Nov. 10, 2000. All relevant information about the conference are available at our web site http://www.icassp2001.org We have chosen "DSP Everywhere" as the theme for this year's conference, signifying the penetration of signal processing technology into virtually all facets of our everyday life. The plenary talks, special invited sessions and the technical program in general will reflect this theme. In addition, we plan to have a student forum, a job fair and possibly several vendor tutorials in this year's ICASSP. The details will be published on our web site as they are finalized. Salt Lake City and Utah offer an incredible array of scenic and touristic activities for the visitor. The city is seated in the majestic Wasatch mountain range with world famous ski resorts. From magnificent mountains to the east, the gorgeous red-rock deserts to the south, and the Great Salt Lake and ghostly salt flats to the west, there is something for everyone. The downtown area is clean, safe, and home to many excellent restaurants and shopping centers, all within easy walking distance of the conference venue and hotels. Salt Lake City is the proud host of the 2002 Winter Olympic games. Please join us in Salt Lake City for what promises to be an outstanding conference. Thank you. Sincerely, Tamal Bose Publicity Chair, ICASSP 2001 Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering Utah State University Logan, UT 84321 Phone: (435) 797-7227 Fax: (435) 797-3054 ============================================================================ ELSNET announces IMAGINATION2001, a Eurospeech Special Event with 5000 Euro to win ELSNET announces a challenging Eurospeech Special Event: ***** IMAGINATION2001, a contest for young innovative researchers ****** Come to Eurospeech2001 - Scandinavia, Aalborg, Danmark, September 3-7, 2001, and demonstrate or simulate your NEW, imaginative, creative application using speech and language technology. We welcome submissions in every area of communication, all modalities included, as long as speech and language play a significant role. You might think of imaginative applications in the fields of aids for handicapped, games, education, wireless communication systems, performing arts, internet, agents and avatars, ambient intelligence, etc. An international jury will choose a winner who will receive a prize of 5000 Euro, contributed by Hewlett-Packard European Research Labs. Visit for detailed information. General information on Eurospeech2001 - Scandinavia can be found at . IMAGINATION2001 summary schedule: March 30, 2001 Message of intent July 1, 2001 Submission of abstract September 4, 2001 Demonstrations in the IMAGINATION2001 hall September 7, 2001 Announcement of winner during the Conference Closing Ceremony Organisers: Gerrit Bloothooft Els den Os ============================================================================ ARLO On August 28 The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) launched its second archival journal, Acoustics Research Letters Online (ARLO). We would like to tell you a little about this new initiative, with the hope that you will communicate this information to the members of your organization, who can benefit from this new, rapid publication capability. ARLO is an international electronic letters journal. The submission and review process are handled with ASA's new online Manuscript Management System, which enables publication in as little time as one month. The abstracts of all articles will also appear in print in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), and full articles will appear on the JASA CD-ROM. ARLO accepts color and multimedia content (for example, audio, video, and computer animations). These are part of the reviewed manuscript. ARLO is published and archived by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) on behalf of ASA. AIP also provides searching and linking functions to titles, authors, abstracts, key words, and references through its Online Journal Publishing Service. ARLO is free to all individual readers with an internet browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer). There is no subscription fee. ARLO is financed by authors who pay a $350 publication fee for accepted manuscripts, and by libraries and institutions that are charged a modest annual fee ($150) to support the archiving and the migrating of multimedia material to new formats. Clearly, our goal with ARLO is to increase and diffuse knowledge of acoustics worldwide. The contributions of your members, as authors, reviewers, and readers, will help to assure that the latest and best acoustical research, appropriate for letter-sized articles, receives the maximum dissemination. Information can be found online at . Robert E. Apfel, Editor of ARLO Allan Pierce, Editor-in-Chief of the Acoustical Society of America Katherine Harris, President of the Acoustical Society of America Acoustical Society of America E: asa@aip.org WWW: asa.aip.org ============================================================================ Marges Linguistiques I have the pleasure to announce the official opening of the website and of the online journal "Marges Linguistiques" dedicated to linguistic issues http://www.marges-linguistiques.com Marges Linguistiques, a bi-yearly journal in Linguistics, only available online on the Web, wishes to reconcile traditional fields in Linguistics, such as syntax, phonology and semantics with the less unified domains of pragmatics, conversational analysis, interactional analysis or social communication. Please find below the first call for Marges Linguistiques Thematic issue n° 1 (May 2001) : Linguistic facts: Data, processes and models What is a linguistic fact ? Deadline for the submission of contributions: 31 st of december 2000 mailto:contributions.ML@wanadoo.fr Languages: french and english This web site and the journal (enterely free) are targeted towards researchers, practioners, students interested in the various subareas of Linguistics, and for a more general public. We would be extremely grateful if you could pass on this information to interested persons who could circulate the information in turn. Thanks to your help, we hope to reach a wider public. We thank you beforehand. Enjoy the web site seeing ! Thank you for your comments and for passing on this announcement Editor : Michel Santacroce - Cnrs, University of Provence (France) dirpubl@marges-linguistiques.com ============================================================================ MSc in Speech and Language Processing Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre Department of Linguistics Macquarie University Sydney, Australia This Masters program at Macquarie University, Sydney, has been designed to take advantage of a strong research and development base to provide a grounding in speech and language technology for graduates who want to be part of this exciting field. This is a coursework degree and can be taken over one year full time or two years part time. The degree is offered either on campus or in distance mode (by correspondence). Distance mode students would normally study part time over a minimum of two years. The program includes a set of compulsory units introducing speech and language processing and a range of elective units which explore topics in detail. Students complete a one-paper research/development project in thier final semester. The course is designed for graduates in related disciplines, for example, Computer Science, Linguistics, or Electrical Engineering, who wish to gain sufficient expertise in this inherently cross-disciplinary area to effectively participate in speech and language projects in industry and academia. This is a booming area of computing research and development, prospective employers include Nuance, Phillips, Lernout & Houspie, Speechworks, IBM, Microsoft etc. Further details on the course can be found at our web site: http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/masters or by sending mail to masters@shlrc.mq.edu.au Steve Cassidy, Course Convenor ============================================================================ POSITION AT CSELT The Speech Department of CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni, Torino, Italy), of TELECOM ITALIA Group, is looking for an English student, preferably near to graduate, willing to spend about 4 months for a stage at the Department. He should have a background of phonetics and possibly something of computer science as well. The intended job will consist in contributing to the development of a Text-To-Speech synthesizer for British English. The person would be, of course, regularly contracted. Interested people will be given all details about the job and the salary. They should please refer to: Dr. Pier Luigi Salza Speech Dept. CSELT S.p.A. Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274 10148 Torino Italy Tel.: +39 11 2286231 Fax: +39 11 2286207 E-mai: pierluigi.salza@cselt.it ============================================================================ HTK V3.0 Available for Download We are pleased to announce that HTK V3.0 can now be downloaded free of charge from http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk. What is HTK? HTK is a portable toolkit for building and manipulating hidden Markov models (HMMs). HTK is primarily used for speech recognition research although it has been used for numerous other applications including research into speech synthesis, handwriting recognition and DNA sequencing. HTK is in use at hundreds of sites worldwide. HTK consists of a set of library modules and tools available in C source form. The tools provide sophisticated facilities for speech analysis, HMM training, testing and results analysis. The software supports HMMs using both continuous density mixture Gaussians and discrete distributions and can be used to build complex HMM systems. The HTK release contains extensive documentation and examples. HTK was originally developed at the Speech Vision and Robotics Group of the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED) where it has been used to build CUED's large vocabulary speech recognition systems. In 1993 Entropic Research Laboratory Inc. acquired the rights to sell HTK and the development of HTK was fully transferred to Entropic in 1995 when the Entropic Cambridge Research Laboratory Ltd was established. HTK was sold by Entropic until 1999 when Microsoft bought Entropic. Microsoft has now licensed HTK back to CUED and is providing support so that CUED can redistribute HTK and provide development support via the HTK web site. License HTK is available for free download subject to agreeing to the license conditions. Informally, it can be used for any purpose within a site, but cannot be re-distributed in part or in whole. It has no warranty of any type. See http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk for more details. The HTK Web Site The C source to HTK is available from http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk in the form of a complete distribution as well as access to the current sources from a CVS repository. Several different types of documentation are also available including the HTK Book, and recipes for building speech recognition systems. There are also a number of mailing lists (with archives) that are available where support requests, bug fixes, ideas for the future etc can be discussed. Source Status & Further Development The HTK 3.0 source is closely based on the Entropic HTK 2.2_ref distribution. There has been some minor reformatting, minor bug fixes and some changes to ensure computability with C++ compilers. In future we are intending to include features in HTK3 that have been used at CUED in speech recognition research systems. We also hope to provide more speech recognition infrastructure that in a form that can be used with HTK. This will include for example word lattices for standard speech recognition tasks along with some lattice manipulation facilities. In the medium term we also hope to make available a capable large vocabulary decoder that provides an efficient route to generate and re-score word lattices with cross-word context-dependent HMMs and long-span N-grams. We strongly encourage contributions to HTK3 and welcome suggestions and additions from all interested. ============================================================================ SPEECHGURU WEBSITE Hi all, I am Sam Gopalan, an SLP working at present in the US.I have come up with this idea of bringing up a new web site, http://WWW.SPEECHGURU.ORG to integrate all the therapeutic solutions each one of us have acquired during our life journey to achieve the objective HEALTHY COMMUNICATION FOR ALL. This web site equally regards views from patients and family. Your support and assistance to make this a successful endeavor will be highly appreciated at my end. This site mainly deals with chat where you can discuss various issues pertaining to speech,language,hearing, swallowing,communication and technology. You also can post your research work,queries and share your professional experiences for innovative clinical management. please feel free to forward this message to all your friends and colleagues. Sincerely, Sowmya Narayanan Gopalan (sam) ============================================================================ COMMUNICATE WEBSITE Would you like to join over 330 Speech-Language Professionals from around the world discussing therapy and intervention issues for children and adults with developmental disabilities? Visit our website at: http://communicative.homestead.com/ To subscribe to the discussion list and/or to view the list's archives go to the following website: http://communicative.listbot.com/ Topics have included: the picture exchange communication system, FastForward, Makaton, oral-motor concerns, adapted books. . .and more! Members to date live and work in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Spain, the Middle East and Britain! Welcome! Sara Bingham ============================================================================ 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: public@isca-speech.org Short messages will be forwarded on a monthly scheme basis to all ISCA members. =============================================================================