Subject: ISCApad #34 Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 15:32:13 GMT From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 34 March 8th, 2001 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #34. Here's the table of contents of this issue: ISCA news: - EUROSPEECH'2001 - Approaching deadline for paper submission: March 30 - Subscription to Speech Communication Journals: - Computer Speech and language Special Issue on Spoken Language Generation Future events: - 9TH ELSNET European Summer School on language and Speech Communication Text and Speech Corpora Prague, Czech Republic, 16-27 July 2001 http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001/ - 2nd Workshop on Attitude, Personality and Emotions in User-Adapted Interaction Sonthofen, Germany, July 13-17, 2001 http://aos2.uniba.it:8080/ws-um01.html - HSC 2001 - ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication Kyoto Japan, April 9-11, 2001 http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/hsc2001/ - HLT 2001, Human Language Technology Confererence San Diego, California, March 18-21, 2001 http://hlt2001.org Job offers: - Postdoctoral Fellowship Position, University of Western Ontario, Canada ISCA Greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================= Eurospeech 2001 - Scandinavia: All wishing to submit a paper(s) to the conference are reminded that the DEADLINE for FULL AND FINAL papers is March 30. Details for preparing your submission (using prepared templates) and for submitting your paper are available at the web server at http://eurospeech2001.org. NOTE: The web server has been updated since the last ISCApad on the following items: "Grants and Awards", "Travel Information", "Hotels", "Scientific Committee" and "Exhibition". For those who wish to apply for a grant and participate in the award competition, please check "Grants and Awards" information and note that 1 students and young reseachers may apply for a grant. Priority in the selection process will be given to applicants who have submitted a paper, whether it is accepted or not. The request for a grant must be sent to the ISCA grant coordinator together with a copy of the paper submitted. The application form and instructions for this are available at the ISCA homepage. 2 Participation in the award competition must be indicated in the submission form along with the paper submission. Kind regards Paul Dalsgaard ============================================================================ Speech Communication Dear ISCA Members: May I remind you that your membership in ISCA entitles you to receive a copy of the journal Speech Communication at a reduced individual subscription rate. In 2000 Speech Communication's publisher, Elsevier, and ISCA changed the subscription modalities so that the payment for such a subscription is no longer transferred via ISCA but handled directly by Elsevier. The subscription goes always from January through December regardless of the month in which your ISCA membership starts and ends. All those members having subscribed to Speech Communication in 2001 should have received their bills from Elsevier in the meantime. If you have subscribed to SpeechCom or renewed your subscription and haven't received your bill yet, it is highly likely that your subscription has not arrived; in this case please check with the ISCA Secretariat. The subscription prices are: 195 NLG (Dutch guilders) plus tax for individual members, 130 NLG plus tax for student members. Kind regards, Wolfgang Hess Secretary, ISCA ============================================================================ COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE Special Issue on Spoken Language Generation There are long traditions of research in both natural language generation and speech synthesis. However recently, as applications have emerged requiring spoken language output, such as spoken dialog systems, speech-to-speech translation systems, automated sports commentators, and directions systems, there has been an increase in research that relates these two strands of work. This research is motivated by the goal of producing higher quality spoken output by using knowledge that the system has about the purpose, meaning and linguistic form of the communication. Research challenges include: the generation of utterances in interactive dialogue that are sensitive to listeners' working memory constraints, the generation of speech acts whose purpose is other than to describe or inform, determining the appropriate prosody for spoken output, and incorporating corpus-based or statistical knowledge into the generation and synthesis processes. In the past there has not been much contact between the generation and synthesis communities. The purpose of this special issue is to collect papers of interest to both communities. We encourage the submission of papers in both generation and synthesis oriented towards use in spoken language systems, and we especially welcome those describing work at the intersection of these two fields. Submissions should meet the following criteria: * Describe completed and original work not published elsewhere. (Extensions of workshop or conference publications are acceptable.) * Make clear how the research described contributes to generating spoken language. * Include an empirical component, in the form of a corpus-based or machine-learning methodology, and/or in the form of an empirical evaluation. Important Deadlines: * Submissions due: July 31st, 2001. * Notification of acceptance: September 28th, 2001. Manuscript Submission: The Computer Speech and Language home page is at: http://www.academicpress.com/csl where you can find instructions for authors, latex templates, electronic submission, and other information under the "information" box. Please note that the journal encourages electronic submission and that your submission may include audio files where relevant. Manuscripts should be sent in triplicate to: Academic Press Editorial Services Office Block A2, Westbrook Centre Milton Road Cambridge CB4 1YG, U.K. Authors should clearly mark their submission for the CSL Special Issue on Spoken Language Generation. Please send email with any questions to walker@research.att.com. Editors of the Special Issue Marilyn Walker & Owen Rambow AT&T Labs Research Room E103 180 Park Ave. Florham Park, New Jersey 07932 ============================================================================= !! OPEN FOR REGISTRATION !! 9TH ELSNET EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL ON LANGUAGE AND SPEECH COMMUNICATION TEXT AND SPEECH CORPORA Prague, Czech Republic, 16-27 July 2001 Homepage: http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001/ Organized by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics and Center for Computational Linguistics at Charles University in Prague The ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication has become one of the most successful annual training courses in Europe. For the year 2001 the topic of Text and Speech Corpora has been selected. The school will provide courses on the collection of data (text, speech, dialogue, multimodal), validation, annotation, and use. State of the art techniques and tools (hands-on experience included) will be presented by eminent teachers. The target audience of the Summer School are advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, postdocs and academic and industrial researchers and developers. GRANTS will be available from the EU Improving Human Potential programme and will cover a substantial part of total costs for young European researchers. The ISCA grant scheme is open for applications related to this summer school. PROGRAMME ========= * Steven Bird - Annotation graphs in theory and practice * Lou Burnard - Text encoding initiative * Henk van den Heuvel (+ Eric Sanders) - Validation of speech databases (including transcription) * Ole Bernsen (and/or Laila Dybklaer) - Dialogue corpora (MATE) + practical * Jan Odijk - Speech resources & industrial applications * Chalapathy Neti - Multimodal resources (including speech etc.) + practical * Geoffrey Sampson - Annotation at the grammatical level * Esther Grabe - Prosodic annotation - IVIE extensions to ToBI + practical] * Jan Hajic - Linguistic annotation of a large corpus: from morphology to syntax IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for pre-registration & grant application: April 15, 2001 Notification of registration and grants: May 1, 2001 Payment deadline: June 1, 2001 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, DE) Christoph Draxler (Munich University, DE) Gerrit Bloothooft (Utrecht University, NL) Koenraad de Smedt (University of Bergen, NO) Eva Hajicova (Charles University, Prague, CZ, local organiser) FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistic (UFAL) Charles University 118 00 Praha 1, Malostranske nam. 25, Czech Republic Phone: +420 - 2 - 2191 4278 Fax: +420 - 2 - 2191 4309 E-mail: ess2001@ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz Homepage: http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001 ============================================================================= CALL FOR PAPERS 2nd Workshop on ATTITUDE, PERSONALITY AND EMOTIONS IN USER-ADAPTED INTERACTION in conjunction with User Modeling 2001 Sonthofen, Germany, July 13-17, 2001 *********DEADLINE: MARCH 8TH********* http://aos2.uniba.it:8080/ws-um01.html This Workshop is the successor of the 1rst Workshop on Attitude, Personality and Emotions that was held in conjunction with the UM'99 Conference in Banff, Canada. Different schools of thought, such as psychology, cognitive science, sociology and philosophy, developed theories about personality and emotions. The goal of this Workshop is to promote these theories in the UM community, to investigate how they influence adaptation in HCI, which solutions have been proposed and implemented, which problems are still open and what are the major challenges. The Workshop will be effective if it succeeds in integrating ideas and results from different approaches and traditions of research, through a lively discussion among people with different backgrounds, while keeping the 'User Modeling and Adaptation' topic in focus. In particular, we would like to: i) discuss the meaning of attitude, personality and emotion and how they can be formalized in a working model for HCI; discuss the difference between (stable) personality traits and (short-lived) affective and mood states, the way they influence each other and evolve during interaction, how they interact with the user's cognitive processes and representations; discuss how social and cultural factors affect the perception and interpretation of emotional stimuli and subsequent behavior; (ii) examine existing interfaces and interface agents, to assess which personalities, emotions and attitudes are (implicitly or explicitly) embedded in them and to what extent they adapt to the user characteristics; (iii) discuss whether and how methods, techniques and programming concepts, which have been employed successfully in recognizing and modeling 'cognitive' aspects of the user's mental state (stereotypes, neural networks, belief networks, fuzzy logic and others) might be employed in modeling their 'affective state'; discuss the strengths and drawbacks of these methods; (iv) investigate whether methods and techniques that have been employed successfully in adapting the interface appearance and behaviour in conversational and multimodal environments should be enhanced, to include affective and personality factors; (v) discuss how these new interfaces can be evaluated; (vi) examine specific application domains (such as tutoring, health care, flight control, military, arts) in which the reasoning and communication processes are particularly influenced by the emotional state of the User; discuss which application domain would benefit from an affect expression interface; (vii) discuss ethical issues involved in monitoring increasingly ́personal' user traits and states. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Cristoph Bartneck, Philips Research Labs, The Netherlands Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA Cristina Conati, University of British Columbia, Canada Fiorella de Rosis, Intelligent Interfaces, University of Bari, Italy Eva Hudlicka, Psychometrix Associates, USA Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK Christine Lisetti, University of South Florida, USA Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, Germany Sylvie Mozziconacci, Leiden University, The Netherlands Ana Paiva, INESC and IST, Portugal SUGGESTED TOPICS The above list provides guidelines for assessing whether a topic might be of interest to the Workshop. Some examples of specific topics are listed below: 1. Which personality traits, emotions and attitudes may be relevant in HCI and how does this vary as a function of the task domain? (theoretical foundations and results of empirical studies) 2. What is the difference between personality, attitude, mood and emotion? 3. How can attitudinal, emotional, and personality factors be recognized in the User? 4. How can an affect model, of both the Agent and the User, be described and implement? 5. How can the interface display an attitude, express a personality, or demonstrate emotions and when is it appropriate to do so? (for example: in the graphics, in the behavior, in the level of help provided, in the verbal and nonverbal communication language). 6. How can the interface be dynamically adapted to changes in the user's affective state? 7. Which projects are currently being pursued, about adaptation of HCI to these factors (in graphical or speech-based interfaces, in Embodied Animated Agents or others) and which problems are being encountered in developing them? IMPORTANT DATES march 8 deadline for submissions april 2, 2001 notification of acceptance may 15, 2001 deadline for final copy WORKSHOP FORMAT The goal of this meeting is to show results of ongoing research and to collect, at the same time, ideas, problems and difficulties by those who entered more recently in the field. The Workshop will be organised according to submitted contributions: in principle, it will include a few medium-length talks and will allocate a large space to position statements, key-note talks and discussion. If enough time will be available, a Panel will be organised to facilitate discussion around specific topics. All contributions will be made available in a Web site before the UM'01 Conference, so that people can read them in advance. In addition, the Proceedings will be published as an informal Annex to the main Conference Proceedings. PAPER FORMAT Papers should not exceed 4000 words; they should be sent electronically, in postscript and (possibly) in HTML, to the address mentioned below, so that they can be made downloadable on the Workshop site before the Conference. WORKSHOP COORDINATION Fiorella de Rosis, Intelligent Interfaces, University of Bari, Italy: derosis@di.uniba.it ============================================================================ ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication April 9-11, 2001 Kyoto Japan [http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/hsc2001/] Sponsored by ATR in cooperation with the IEEE SP Society. The workshop on hands-free speech communication, organized in cooperation with the IEEE Signal Processing Society and ATR Spo- ken Language Translation Laboratories will be held April 9-11, 2001, in Kyoto Japan. This workshop is planned to allow researchers and system developers to discuss technologies and applications on hands-free speech communication. It will provide a valuable means sharing knowledge and experiences in hands-free speech processing in order to cope with the increasing interest and demand in speech communication technologies. The workshop will cover all scientific and engineering topics in hands-free speech communication technology. We would highly appreciate the attendance of researchers and developers in various fields to encourage flexible thinking about new approaches to current prob- lems and new applications for global and individual communica- tion. [Workshop Themes] The workshop focuses on technologies in hands-free speech com- munication as follows. * Distant-talking speech signal retrieval * Removal of noise and reverberation in real environments * Echo canceling for hands-free speech communication * Robust distant-speech recognition * Model adaptation for distant-talking speech recognition * Robust auditory features for distant-talking speech recognition * A microphone array for hands-free speech communication * Bimodal, multi-modal speech recognition * Bimodal, multi-modal speech synthesis * Acoustic environment database and tools [Workshop Organization] Chairman: Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) Vice Chairman: Satoshi Nakamura (ATR, Japan) Organizers: Biing-Hwang Juang (Lucent, USA), Maurizio Omologo (IRST, Italy), Kazuya Takeda (Nagoya University) Scientific Advisory Committee: Fumitada Itakura (Nagoya University) International Scientific Committee: Kiyoaki Aikawa (NTT, Japan), Futoshi Asano (ETL, Japan) J-C. Junqua (STL, USA), Qiang Huo (University of Hong Kong, China) Chin-Hui Lee (Lucent, USA), Kiyohiro Shikano (NAIST, Japan) Yunxin Zhao (University of Missouri, USA) =================================================================== CALL FOR ATTENDANCE Apply to Attend See technical program below HLT 2001, Human Language Technology Confererence March 18-21, 2001 San Diego, California http://hlt2001.org Human Language Technology brings together researchers in a broad spectrum of fields, all of which are working toward enabling computers to better process and use with natural language. The HLT Conference is a forum for researchers in those fields to present high-quality, cutting-edge work, and to exchange ideas and explore directions for further research. The Conference will also foster opportunities for international collaboration within language technology. The Conference and Program Chairs have selected 25 papers, 30 posters, and 18 demonstrations from over 175 submissions from researchers in computer science, linguistics, engineering, psychology, etc., who are exploring methods for enabling better use of language technology. Further information is available at the Conference web site, http://hlt2001.org. **> Space at the Conference is restricted. Prospective attendees must **> fill out a very simple application (it takes 30 seconds) at the **> Conference web site. Acceptances will be made within a day or two **> of application. The Conference will span four days, running from Sunday afternoon through mid-day Wednesday. It will include peer-reviewed research presentations, posters, demonstrations, panel sessions, and time for discussion. Sessions will cover not only research, but also developments in related government funding programs. CONFERENCE COMMITTEES General chair: James Allan, University of Massachusetts (USA) Co-chair: Mitch Marcus, University of Pennsylvania (USA) Executive Program Committee: Rob Gaizauskas, Sheffield University (UK) Jean-Luc Gauvain, LIMSI-CNRS (France) Marti Hearst, University of California, Berkeley (USA) Eduard Hovy, ISI (USA) David D. Lewis, Independent consultant (USA) Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University (USA) Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington (USA) Junichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo (Japan) and UMIST (UK) Alex Waibel, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) Ross Wilkinson, CSIRO (Australia) Demonstration Co-chairs: Clifford Weinstein, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (USA) Bob Younger, SPAWAR Systems Center (USA) CONFERENCE VENUE The HLT Conference will be held at the Catamaran Resort Hotel in San Diego, California. The famous San Diego Zoo is the home of Hua Mei, the only baby giant panda to be born in the US (she will be 18 months old at HLT). Sea World is one of the area's better known attractions, where you can see the killer whale Shamu. San Diego also houses Balboa Park, the largest urban cultural park. You can stroll through the Gaslamp Quarter or through Old Town. Nearby La Jolla houses the Birch Aquarium, and Carlsbad houses Legoland. Heading south gets you to Tijuana, Mexico. FURTHER INFORMATION Up-to-date information about the Conference can be found at http://hlt2001.org ============================================================================= Postdoctoral Fellowship Position University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada We are seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to work on projects focussing on spoken language understanding/processing. There are opportunities to participate in a range of funded projects, including large-scale projects relating to the normal development of speech understanding abilities through the preschool and early school years, and atypical development associated with auditory processing and related disorders. These projects make use of world-class facilities at the University of Western Ontario, including the acoustic signal processing, speech research, and human testing facilities at the National Center for Audiology (see and the brain imaging and neural modelling facilities at our affiliated centres and core facilities. Candidates should hold a PhD (with expectation that the degree will be in hand by the appointment date) in developmental psychology, experimental psychology, speech-language pathology, audiology, neuroscience, acoustic phonetics, computational linguistics or a related field, and demonstrate a clear interest in understanding the development of spoken language skills. Experience in speech science research and/or experimental work with brain imaging techniques ( preferably with EEG and fMRI) and a good knowledge of acoustic/biological signal analysis is also useful. The initial appointment will be for one or two years, and may be renewed. Salary will be commensurate with experience and skills, within the applicable guidelines of Canada's NSERC granting council. The position is available immediately and will remain open until a suitable candidate has been appointed. Applications, including CV, copies of relevant publications, and the names of three persons who can comment on the applicant's suitability for the position, should be directed to: Dr. Donald G. Jamieson, Director National Center for Audiology Faculty of Health Sciences University of Western Ontario London, ON N6G 2B0 CANADA fax: 519-661-3805 e-mail: jamieson@nca.uwo.ca ============================================================================ 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. ============================================================================