Subject: ISCApad $36 Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 09:53:25 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 36 May 7th, 2001 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #36. Here's the table of contents of this issue: ISCA news: - ISCA Board meeting The next ISCA Board Meeting will be hosted by Paul Dalsgaard in in Aalborg, Denmark. The meeting will take place on May 17-18, before the Eurospeech'2001 Review Comittee Meeting. As usual, ISCA members are invited to bring points to the attention of the Board. Journals: - Computer Speech and Language Networked to some of the world's poorest nations under the terms of the IDEAL Charter (see below) http://www.academicpress.com/www/ideal/charter.htm. News from SIGs: - SpLC (see below) http://www.lia.univ-avignon.fr/heberges/SPLC - AVSP The 5th AVSP (Auditory-Visual Speech Processing ) meeting will be held as a satellite of Eurospeech Auditory-Visual Speech Processing conference from September 7-9, 2001 in Scheelsminde, Denmark. http://mambo.ucsc.edu/avsp2001/ Future events: Satellites of EUROSPEECH'2001: - COCOSDA Workshop 2001 Aalborg, Denmark, September 2nd, 2001 http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/cocosda/ - Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing Aalborg, Denmark, September 8th, 2001 http://www.nrc.ca/~swail/welcome.html See also: - 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 - Information Retrieval Techniques for Speech Applications New Orleans, Louisiana, September 13, 2001 http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~sigir01 - SPECOM'2001 - International Workshop Speech and Computer Moscow, Russia, October 29-31, 2001 Preliminary announcement: - ICPhS'2003 XV International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Barcelona, August 3-9, 2003. http://shylock.uab.es/icphs/ ISCA Greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================= CSL: I thought you might like to know that Computer Speech and Language is now being networked to some of the world's poorest nations under the terms of the IDEAL Charter. The IDEAL Charter is a new license agreement, which offers Low Income Countries access to all IDEAL journals at drastically reduced rates. Eligibility for the scheme is based on World Bank classifications, while prices are adjusted in accordance with the annual economic performance of the participating states. Our aim is to reduce the "digital divide" by making quality online journals affordable to universities, research centres and teaching hospitals in these hard-pressed territories. The success of the Charter is largely dependent on its visibility. While we welcome positive publicity, both for your journal and IDEAL, exposure is also crucial to the prestige of this initiative and the likelihood of establishing a precedent for other publishers. We are currently focusing our efforts on three important areas: * Raising awareness in eligible countries. Our first priority is to make the Charter known to researchers and librarians working in the eligible countries, a complete list of which appears at: http://www.academicpress.com/www/ideal/charter.htm. * Sponsorships. While Charter discounts are subsidised by the IDEAL publishers, Academic Press and Harcourt, we are also targeting philanthropic organisations interested in underwriting access for specific countries. * Endorsements. We are actively seeking endorsements from research and library organisations willing to provide public declarations of support for the Charter initiative. We would warmly welcome any assistance you may be able to give us towards the achievement of these goals, whether this consists in passing on information to colleagues based in the eligible territories, suggesting possible sponsors, or providing more general feedback on the Charter idea. Please feel free to contact Keith Silver, our Online Marketing Manager, at: keith_silver@harcourt.com Finally, I would like to express our ongoing appreciation for your contribution to the success of IDEAL. We are keenly aware that even the most dynamic online functionality is useless without first rate research content to sustain it. The same might be said of our licensing programme, now enhanced by the inclusion of the IDEAL Charter. I very much hope that you can support us in the development of this exciting and thoroughly worthwhile project. Yours faithfully, Abdul Lafene Assistant to Cordelia Sealy Editor, Academic Press, London. PS. More detailed information on the IDEAL Charter can be found on the dedicated web page at: http://www.academicpress.com/www/ideal/charter.htm. ============================================================================= SpLC: SPeaker and Language Characterization 1.SpLC Goals People interested in speaker and language characterization have various origins: computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, speech science, phonetics, linguistics, etc. SpLC proposes to academic researchers, industrials and forensic experts a place for exhanges. The aims of SpLC are: - to facilitate exchanges between members; - to provide information on the area; - to promote SpLC activities; - to provide members of ISCA with a special interest in SpLC with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in SpLC; - to sponsor meetings and workshops in SpLC that appear to be timely and worthwhile, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; - to provide and make available resources relevant to SpLC, including text and speech corpora, analysis tools, analysis and generation software, research papers and generated data. 2.SPLC Internal Organization SpLC organizes its activities around four main areas: - Academic research on Speaker Characterization and Recognition; - Forensic aspects of Speaker Characterization and Recognition; - Language Characterization and Recognition; - Commercial Applications for Speaker and Language Recognition. In addition, several transversal activities will be proposed. For the moment, three are already defined: - Evaluation group: this group will work on the evaluation paradigm, for all the various axes of the SpLC domains. Particularly, the group will highlight evaluation tasks for commercial applications, for speaker tracking and indexing, and for language identification. - Meetings and Workshops group: this group concerns the organization of SpLC events, like workshops, meetings, summer schools, exhibitions, etc. - Speaker Indexing group: this group proposes to work on algorithms to do speaker indexing, which is a recent task in the speaker recognition communauty. 3.SpLC Web Site A new web site has been designed in order to facilitate the circulation of information between SpLC members. The web site is composed of several pages. The Home page lists the four main areas of SpLC, the various specialized groups, and the recent news of SpLC. The other pages of the site include a list of events organized by SpLC, the list of the board members, a page to subscribe automatically to SpLC, the constitution of SpLC, a way to contact the SpLC board, a few interesting links including some links to related workshops and conferences or to laboratories working on speaker and language characterization, and a bibliography of the domain with the possibility to add new references. The web site is currently hosted by the Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon at http://www.lia.univ-avignon.fr/heberges/SPLC. The site can also be reached from the web page of ISCA dedicated to the SIGs at http://www.isca-speech.org/sig.html. Questions and suggestions on the web site are very welcomed and can be sent directly to the webmaster of the site. Contributions from the specialized groups and from all the members of SpLC are also very welcomed. ============================================================================ COCOSDA Workshop 2001 Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:30 p.m., Aalborg, Denmark Call for Participation/Presentations COCOSDA is an international organization for coordinating the globalized efforts in language resource developments and speech technology evaluation. The annual workshops of COCOSDA have been held as satellite events of ICSLP on even years and Eurospeech on odd years. This year the workshop will be on Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:30 p.m., right before Eurospeech 2001 at Aalborg, Denmark. COCOSDA is organized with a structure which reflects the two dimensions of its functionalities: "Topic Domains" and "Regional Programs". The former considers the dynamic technology environments, while the latter addresses the regional efforts and differences. Four topic domains have been established: Evaluation of Speech Understanding/Dialogue Systems, Multi-Modal Corpora, Corpus Annotation Tools and Local Languages. Six regional programs are currently present: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and Africa. The COCOSDA Workshop 2001 will be organized to address all issues relevant to COCOSDA. You are invited to participate and submit proposals for presentations at the workshop. The preliminary program draft of the workshop is given below as a reference. It includes pre-organized reports for all the topic domains and regional programs mentioned above and other relevant reports/discussions, but also reserves time for presentations from the open-call submissions. This program draft will be re-organized after the submissions are received and reviewed. If there are more good presentations submitted from the open-call, the pre-organized reports may be condensed. The open-call presentations may be accompanied by related topic domain/regional reports and distributed throughout the program, and there may be other relevant invited reports/discussions arranged later on, as was done at Beijing Workshop, Oct 2000. A "Workshop Notes" will be published including written materials for the reports/presentations. More information about the reports and presentation at the Beijing workshop, Oct 2000, as well as about COCOSDA can be found at: http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/cocosda/ . The proposals for presentation including a title, a summary of 200-500 words, names of speaker/authors, affiliation and contact, should be sent electronically to: Lin-shan Lee, Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Convenor, COCOSDA lsl@iis.sinica.edu.tw on or before July 10 2001, indicated as a "COCOSDA submission". The proposals will be reviewed and the final Workshop program distributed by July 25. COCOSDA Workshop 2001 Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:30 p.m., Aalborg, Denmark Preliminary Program Draft (Subject to Modifications) 1:00-1:10 Opening 1:10-2:10 Regional Reports 1. Asia (20 min) S. Itahashi (Japan) 2. Latin America (20 min) E. Mora (Venezuela) 3. Oceania (20 min) B. Millar (Australia) 2:10-2:50 Topic Domain Reports 1. Local Languages (20 min) D. Gibbon (Germany) 2. Multi-modal Corpora (20 min) S. Nakamura (Japan) 2:50-4:10 Presentations for Open-call Submissions 4:10-4:40 Break/Discussions 4:40-5:20 Regional Reports 4. Europe (20 min) K. Choukri (France) 5. Africa (20 min) J. Roux (South Africa) 5:20-6:00 Topic Domain Reports 3. Corpus Annotation Tools (20 min) S. Bird (USA) 4. Evaluation of Speech Understanding/Dialogue Systems (20 min) W. Minker (Germany) 6:00-6:30 General Discussions ¡V Ways Ahead All ============================================================================= Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing Aalborg, Denmark, 8 September 2001 A One-Day Workshop Immediately Following EuroSpeech 2001 Workshop Announcement The NATO Research Study Group on Speech and Language Technology (IST-011/TG-001) is pleased to announce a one-day workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing to be held 8 September 2001 in Aalborg, Denmark. The workshop immediately follows EuroSpeech 2001 and will be held in the Musiksalen Room of the Aalborg Kongres & Kultur Center, the site of EuroSpeech 2001. Workshop Theme and Topics The workshop will focus on the scientific and engineering aspects of speech and language processing for and despite multiple languages, dialects, non-native speech, and/or regional accents. The following is a nonexhaustive list of sample topics; papers on other topics related to the general theme of the workshop are welcome. - Speech recognition for multiple languages and/or dialects - Speech recognition despite non-native speech and/or regional accents - Speech synthesis for multiple languages, dialects, and/or accents - Prosody modeling for multiple languages, dialects, and/or accents - Speaker recognition despite multiple languages, dialects, non-native speech, and/or regional accents - Language, dialect, and/or accent identification - Human perception of non-native speech and/or regional accents - Cross-language issues and applications such as loan words, names, and speech-to-speech translation This workshop is a follow-on to the Workshop on Multi-lingual Interoperability in Speech Technology (MIST) held in Leusden, The Netherlands on 13-14 September 1999. As in the MIST Workshop, a database will be made available to researchers for studies in their own disciplines. Researchers are encouraged to present results of studies using the database. Send email to the address given below to receive information about obtaining the database. Paper Submissions and Format of the Workshop Prospective authors are invited to submit abstracts of up to 500 words for review. Abstracts should be sent by email with a subject line of "MSLP abstract". Accepted papers of up to six pages in length will be published in the workshop proceedings in both paper and CDROM formats. The workshop will consist of oral presentations by authors of accepted papers as well as one or more directed discussion sessions. All sessions will be plenary. Workshop Attendance and Registration Attendance at this workshop is open to all interested parties, regardless of NATO affiliation. However, due to space limitations, the number of participants will be limited. One author (or a surrogate speaker) will be required to register for each accepted paper. Applications from those not presenting a paper will be dealt with on a first-come, first-served basis. See the workshop web site for more information. Important Dates 25 May 2001 Deadline for submission of 500 word abstract 29 June 2001 Notification of acceptance 10 August 2001 Deadline for receipt of final paper 8 Sept. 2001 Workshop Technical Committee Herman Steeneken, TNO, The Netherlands Marc Zissman, MIT-LL, USA Timothy Anderson, AFRL, USA Raymond Slyh, AFRL, USA For More Information Web Site: http://www.nrc.ca/~swail/welcome.html Email: mslp@wpafb.af.mil Email Distribution List: Send email to mslp@wpafb.af.mil with a subject line of "subscribe" ============================================================================= 9th ELSNET EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL ON LANGUAGE AND SPEECH COMMUNICATION **** TEXT AND SPEECH CORPORA ***** Prague, Czech Republic, 16-27 July 2001 In the beautiful town of Prague, the 9th ELSNET European Summer School offers an exciting two-weeks programme with lots of practicals on the topic of text and speech corpora. Pre-registration and grant application is still possible until May 15. Here is the programme: * Steven Bird (UPENN)- Annotation graphs in theory and practice * Lou Burnard (Oxford) - Text encoding initiative * Henk van den Heuvel & Eric Sanders (Nijmegen) - Validation of speech databases + practical * Amy Isard (Edinburgh) & Ole Bernsen (Odense) - Dialogue corpora (MATE) + practical * Jan Odijk (Lernout & Hauspie) - Speech resources & industrial applications * Uli Türk (Munich) - Speech tools for database processing * Chalapathy Neti (IBM) - Multimodal resources + practical * Geoffrey Sampson (Sussex) - Annotation at the grammatical level + practical * Esther Grabe (Oxford) - Prosodic annotation - IVIE extensions to ToBI + practical * Jan Hajic (Prague) - Linguistic annotation of a large corpus: from morphology to syntax For more information contact the organisers at: 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 ============================================================================= Information Retrieval Techniques for Speech Applications New Orleans, Louisiana, September 13, 2001 CALL FOR PAPERS Background In the last few years automatic speech recognition has left the confines of the basic research lab and become a viable commercial application. Speech recognition technology has now matured to the point where speech can be used to interact with automated phone systems, control computer programs, and even create memos and documents. Moving beyond computer control and dictation, speech recognition has the potential to dramatically change the way we create, capture, and store knowledge. Advances in speech recognition technology combined with ever decreasing storage costs and processors that double in power every eighteen months have set the stage for a whole new era of applications that treat speech in the same way that we currently treat text. The goal of this workshop is to explore the technical issues involved in applying information retrieval and text analysis technologies in the new application domains enabled by automatic speech recognition. These possibilities bring with them a number of issues, questions, and problems. Speech-based user interfaces create different expectations for the end user, which in turn places different demands on the back-end systems that must interact with the user and interpret the user's commands. Speech recognition will never be perfect, so analyses applied to the resulting transcripts must be robust in the face of recognition errors. The ability to capture speech and apply speech recognition on smaller, more powerful, pervasive devices suggests that text analysis and mining technologies can be applied in new domains never before considered. About the Workshop In this workshop we would like to explore techniques in information retrieval and text analysis that meet the challenges in the new application domains enabled by automatic speech recognition. Specifically, we would like to focus on: 1. What new IR related applications, problems, or opportunities are created by effective, real-time speech recognition? 2. To what extent are information retrieval methods that work on perfect text applicable to imperfect speech transcript? 3. What additional data representations from a speech engine may be exploited by applications? 4. Does domain knowledge (context/voice-id) help and can it be automatically deduced? 5. Can some of the techniques explored be beneficial in a standard IR application? 6. What constraints are imposed by real time speech applications? 7. Case studies of specific speech applications - either successful or not. The workshop will include a keynote address by James Allen (UMass, Amherst), presentations of accepted papers, and demos of working prototypes. The accepted papers will be published on the WWW and bound in a workshop proceedings distributed to the workshop attendees. Workshop Chairs Anni Coden, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Almaden Research Center Eric Brown, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Program Committee John Garofolo, NIST Alex Hauptmann, CMU Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University Justin Zobel, RMIT Australia Keynote Speaker James Allen, UMass at Amherst Participation Please submit a 3-5 page paper and, if appropriate, a one page description of a working prototype to be shown. Email submissions in PostScript or PDF to Anni Coden, anni@us.ibm.com. We are looking for papers describing recent or preliminary work. Correspondence Anni Coden IBM T.J. Watson Research Center P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 Phone: +1-914-784-7073, Fax: +1-914-784-6307 anni@us.ibm.com Important dates Submission deadline: June 18, 2001 Acceptance: July 16, 2001 Final Versions: July 30, 2001 Further Information Further Information can be found on the SIGIR 2001 Web pages (http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~sigir01). ============================================================================= 2001 International Workshop SPEECH AND COMPUTER (SPECOM-2001) 29-31 October 2001, Moscow, Russia Organized by Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU) FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS The International workshop 'Speech and Computer' - SPECOM-2001 is aimed to discuss the most important topics of man-computer interaction by speech and language and more perspective applied areas of speech- computer interaction. TOPICS to be covered include, but are not limited to: - Modern speech communication technologies; - Multilingual, multimodal and multimedial systems; - Automatic speech recognition and understanding systems; - New technologies in linguadidactics; - Speech discourse analysis and modeling; - Speech under stress; - Forensic phonetics systems; - Linguistic and paralinguistic communication strategies; - TTS-systems; - Automatic speech translation systems; - Language and Speech systems in industry; - Conceptual models for natural spoken language; - Telephone natural language response generation; - Spontaneous speech perception modeling; - Speech signal databasis; - Perspectives of evolution of speech technologies. GENERAL CHAIR: Irina Khaleeva, MSLU, President Co-Chairs: George Kokkinakis WCL, University of Patras, Greece Hynek Hermansky, Center for Information Technology, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, USA SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: H.Fujisaki Science University of Tokyo, Japan V.Galunov AudiTech, Russia A.Gorin AT&T Laboratories, USA S.Krauwer University of Utrecht, The Netherlands B.Millar Australian National University, Australia H.Niemann University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany R.Potapova MSLU, Russia G.Rigoll Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg, Germany V.Taubkin AudiTech, Russia E.Vidal Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain A.Waibel Carnegie Mellon University, USA SURVEY LECTURES: Some survey lectures will be presented by leading scientists at especial sessions. LANGUAGE: English is the official language of the workshop. Presentation in Russian will be also allowed. Simultaneous translation will be served. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Prospective authors should submit 3 copies of 1-page abstracts in English of no more than 400 words by E-mail (in ASCII format). Submissions should include a title, author's names, affiliations, address, telephone and fax numbers and e-mail address if any. Abstracts must be received by May 15, 2001. All abstracts will be reviewed by the International Scientific Committee. Submission of an abstract implies, that if the paper is accepted a 4-page version (both in camera-ready printed and electronic form) of the paper will be submitted by the deadline June 15, 2001. Camera-ready full papers in English will be published in the proceedings distributed at the workshop. The text must be sent to the Organizing Committee by regular mail with floppy-disks and by e-mail. Instructions about the form of camera-ready papers will be distributed later. EXHIBITS: If you have a product (working model, demo program, electronic devices, commercial products, etc.), that you would like to demonstrate, please contact the workshop secretariat by e-mail (see below). Also people from other interested communities, such as industry, business, science, defence, education, will be invited for this exhibition. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Chair: Rodmonga Potapova, MSLU, Russia Co-Chair: Mikhail Abovyan, MSLU, Russia Members: Irina Groucho, MSLU, Russia Igor Kirillov, MSLU, Russia Galina Strelkova, MSLU, Russia Vladimir Mikhailenko, MSLU, Russia Yurij Nikolaev, MSLU, Russia Helene Shigina, MSLU, Russia REGISTRATION: Registration fees are arranged as following: Western participants - $ 250; Western students - $ 100; Central Europe participants - $ 120; Central Europe students - $ 50; Russian and former SU states participants - $ 15; Russian students (without workshop Proceedings) - free of charge. This fee must be paid on-site at the workshop. The fees include the Reception, a copy of the workshop proceedings, all workshop material, admission to all sessions and to the exhibition, banquet, and coffee break refreshments. Additional Proceedings copy is $ 10. ACCOMMODATION: All the participants will be provided with reduced accommodation in comfortable university hotel (about $ 20 a day for a single room) situated in the historical cultural City center. SOCIAL PROGRAMS: Sightseeing tour in Moscow; Visiting the world famous Kremlin; Visiting the Bolshoy Theatre. The indicated cost of each activity requires extra payment and is not included in the Registration fee. SCHEDULE: Submission of abstracts: May 15, 2001 Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2001 Submission of camera-ready papers: August 1, 2001 Conference date: October, 29-31 2001 INFORMATION: Rodmonga Potapova 2001 International Workshop SPEECH and COMPUTER (SPECOM-2001) Moscow State Linguistic University Ostozenca, 38, 119992, Moscow, Russia tel. (095)2015697 (095)2462807 fax (095)2462807 e-mail: specom2001@linguanet.ru ============================================================================= 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. ============================================================================