============================================================================ ISCApad number 58 March 10th, 2003 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, The regular date of issue is the first week of each month. Do not forget to send the information you want to display for the members in time to be included (last week of each month). Next issue will appear in end of March/early April (before ICASSP 2003). TABLE OF CONTENTS ================= *ISCA News *COurses, internships, data bases, softwares *Job openings *Journals and Books *Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW) *Future ISCA supported events *Future Speech Science and technology events ============================================================================= ISCA NEWS ========= -New Membership Scheme in 2003. See in ISCAPad 57 or on ISCA Web.(http://www.isca-speech.org) - ISCApad publishes now a list of accepted papers for publication in Speech Communication. These papers can be also viewed on the website of ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) if your institution has subscribed to Speech Communication. -ISCA Grants are available for students attending meetings. Even if no information on the grants is advertised on the conference announcement,students may apply. For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org ============================================================================== COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES ============================= -Information on on-going theses could be very useful for thesis supervizors, researchers as well as PhD students. A list of speech theses is available at http://HLTheses.elsnet.org -Victor Zue and Jim Glass are offering a 3 day spectrogram reading course this summer at MIT. The URL for the course is http://web.mit.edu/professional/summer/courses/engineering/6.67s.html - We are pleased to announce the release of EUSTACE, the Edinburgh University Speech Timing Archive and Corpus of English, available at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/eustace (see attached files) -The Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam offers a new MA programme for talented students who are interested in conducting research in one of the many areas of linguistics that are studied in its research institutes. This Research MA in Linguistics offers the opportunity to specialize in a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines and pays serious attention to methodological issues. All courses are taught in English or, in the case of language-specific courses, in the target language. The programme takes two years for selected students with a relevant BA or equivalent, and one year for selected students with a relevant MA or equivalent. Since the University of Amsterdam is interested in attracting talented researchers, tuition rates are competitive. Further information about the programmes may be found at http://www.hum.uva.nl/graduateschool or requested from graduateschool@hum.uva.nl. - The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University is offering a unique summer internship opportunity, which we would like you to bring to the attention of your best students in the current junior class. Preliminary applications for these internships are due at the end of this week. This internship is unique in the sense that the selected students will participate in cutting edge research as full members alongside leading scientists from industry, academia, and the government. The exciting nature of the internship is the exposure of the undergraduate students to the emerging fields of language engineering, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT). We are specifically looking to attract new talent into the field and, as such, do not require the students to have prior knowledge of language engineering technology. Please take a few moments to nominate suitable bright students for this internship. On-line applications for the program can be found at http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ along with additional information regarding plans for the 2003 Workshop and information on past workshops. The application deadline is February 15, 2003. If you have questions, please contact us by phone (410-516-4237), e-mail (sec@clsp.jhu.edu) or via the Internet http://www.clsp.jhu.edu Sincerely, Frederick Jelinek J.S. Smith Professor and Director (see Team Project Descriptions in attached files) ============================================================================= JOB OPENINGS ============= THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SCHOOL OF INFORMATICS CHAIR IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY The University invites applications for a Chair of Speech Technology, to be held within the School of Informatics. We seek a candidate who will further develop the strengths of the School, and in particular the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), operated jointly with the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences (PPLS). Example areas of interest are: Speech Recognition; Speech Signal Processing; Speech Synthesis; Statistical Models for Speech and Language Processing; Spoken Information Extraction and Retrieval. In addition to outstanding strength in research and scholarship, the successful candidate should provide leadership and inspiration for fundamental research in CSTR and the School, encourage the integration of his/her own research with that of others, and play an active role in teaching and administration. The appointment is full-time and the salary will be within the normal professorial salary range. Edinburgh was the only university in the UK to have achieved a 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 RAE. With 87 research-active staff submitted for assessment, it has the UK's biggest research group in this area. With over 1000 research active staff in 5 or 5* units, Edinburgh was also 5*-rated in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (29) and 5-rated in Linguistics (22). For informal inquiries, contact Professor Mark Steedman (by telephone: +44 (0)131 650 4631, or e-mail to steedman @ informatics.ed.ac.uk). Further particulars including details of the application procedure can be obtained from the World Wide Web at http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/events/vacancies/ or from: Human Resources The University of Edinburgh 9 - 16 Chambers Street Edinburgh EH1 1HT e-mail: jobs@ed.ac.uk telephone: +44 (0) 131 650 9601 Please quote Ref: 312143 Mark Steedman School of Informatics University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place EDINBURGH, EH8 9LW Scotland, United Kingdom email: steedman@informatics.ed.ac.uk tel: (0)131 650 4631 Fax: (0)131 650 6626 www: http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~steedman/home.html http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~steedman/home.html home: 12 Hermitage Place, Leith Links, Edinburgh EH6 8AF, Scotland, UK ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Postdoc opportunities at LORIA, Nancy, France Anne Bonneau, Yves Laprie http://www.loria.fr/equipes/parole This proposal concerns the improvement of the oral component of language learning by the enhancement of consonant acoustic cues. Acoustic cues are based upon the spectral or temporal characteristics of speech signals and enable the identification of speech sounds. Our team has shown that some cues have a key role for stop perception (/p,t,k,b,d,g/). Such cues, strong cues as we call them, are both highly discriminant and very well marked from an acoustical point of view. They have been developed for an automatic speech recognition system that exploits phonetic knowledge and a set of detectors (such as pitch and stop burst detections). The aim of the work is to enhance strong cues, in order to improve stop perception. The work can be divided into three parts. * Acoustic cues enhancement. This enhancement, which is an exaggeration of spectral characteristics, is of great interest in language learning since it gives the learner some beacons he/she can use to decode the sentence more easily. It can also be used for the discrimination of sounds which dont exist in the speaker own language. * Strategy. The applicant should verify that learners benefit from the modifications, with perceptual tests. He/she also should precise the nature of the enhancement (simple filtering, overlap and add method) and its scale with respect to the phoneme class. Furthermore, the strategy must take into account the robustness of the tools used for phoneme detection (automatic speech recognition). * The implementation of the acoustical modifications. These speech signal transformations will be applied thanks to speech signal processing tools and to a synthesis method "Overlap-and-Add". This project is clearly pluri-disciplinary since it involves studies in speech perception, speech signal processing and language learning. The research topics investigated by the speech team in LORIA are the perception, the processing and the automatic recognition of speech. Moreover, this proposal comes within the framework of a project about an advanced assistance for language learning, supported by the Lorraine Region, which will offer the opportunity of working with teachers of foreign languages. References Anne Bonneau, Sylvie Coste, Yves Laprie Strong cues to identify features with certainty, International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm. Web pages: http://www.loria.fr/equipes/parole To know more about this position, contact : Anne Bonneau, LORIA, Nancy, France (Anne.Bonneau@loria.fr). To apply: The closing date for applications April, 1st 2003. The starting date is between july and september 2003. Applicants should send a full CV and supporting publications and arrange for two letters of reference to be sent to Anne.Bonneau@loria.fr: Anne Bonneau LORIA 615 rue du jardin botanique 54602 Villers-les-Nancy FRANCE Tel : +33 3 83 59 20 80 Duration : one year Gross wage (before-tax): 21000 EUR/year Scientific requirement: The candidate must have a strong experience in Speech processing. =========================================================================== JOURNALS and BOOKS =================== -Papers accepted for future publication in Speech Communication. Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Click on Publications, then on Speech Communication and on Articles in press. The list of papers in press appear and a .pdf file for each paper is available. 1. Cepstrum derived from differentiated power spectrum for robust speech recognition, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 6 March 2003 Jingdong Chen, Kuldip K. Paliwal and Satoshi Nakamura 2. Modeling lexical stress in continuous speech recognition for Dutch, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 4 March 2003 Henk van den Heuvel, David van Kuijk and Lou Boves 3. Assessing text-to-phoneme mapping strategies in speaker independent isolated word recognition, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 22 February 2003 Juha Häkkinen, Janne Suontausta, S—ren Riis and Kąre Jean Jensen 4. Mora F0 representation for accent type identification in continuous speech and considerations on its relation with perceived pitch values, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 21 February 2003 Carlos Toshinori Ishi, Keikichi Hirose and Nobuaki Minematsu 5. The intelligibility of consonants in noisy vowel-consonant-vowel sequences when the vowels are selectively enhanced, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 21 February 2003 Georg Meyer and Robert Morse 6. ???, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 13 February 2003 A. Alwan 7. Enhancement of single channel speech based on masking property and wavelet transform, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 11 February 2003 Ching-Ta Lu and Hsiao-Chuan Wang 8. Some coding properties of speech, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 February 2003 V. N. Sorokin ============================================================================== FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES ================================ -Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland, PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE MARCH 28th 2003 Sept 1-4, 2003, http://www.eurospeech2003.org (see ISCApad55) -ICSLP-2004 , Jeju, KOREA, OCTOBER 5-9, 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKHOPS (ITRW) ================================================== Publication policy: Hereunder, you will find very short announcements of future events. The full call for participation appears in attached files ext#.doc or ext#.pdf only once and later referred to a previous issue of ISCApad. See also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops. -ITRW on Multilingual Spoken Document Retrieval Macau, prior to ICASSP 2003 in Hong Kong. April 4-5, 2003 (see ISCApad49) http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/MSDR -ISCA and IEEE Workshop on Spontaneous Speech Processing and Recognition, Tokyo, April 14th-16th ,2003 (after ICASSP 2003 in Hong Kong). http://www.crl.go.jp/pub/orc-speech/sspr03.html (see ISCApad49 and attached files to ISCApad 54;updated in attached documents) - First ITRW on AUDITORY QUALITY OF SYSTEMS Akademie Mont-Cenis, Germany, 23-25 April 2003 Contact person: Ute Jekosch Institute of Communication Acoustics Ruhr-University Bochum D-44780 Bochum, Germany Email: jekosch@ika.ruhr-uni-bochum.de Phone: +49 234 322 2495 Fax: +49 234 321 4165 Web: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ika/ - ITRW NOLISP 03, Le Croisic, France, May 20-23rd , 2003 Non Linear Speech Processing Contact: nolisp03@irisa.fr (see ISCApad 53) http://www.irisa.fr/nolisp03 - ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on VOICE QUALITY: FUNCTIONS, ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS University of Geneva, 27-29 August 2003 (week before EUROSPEECH03) Organizer: Christophe d'Alessandro LIMSI-CNRS Christophe.D'Alessandro@limsi.fr http://www.limsi.fr (see attached files) -ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems, August 28-31, 2003 Location: Hotel Roc et Neige http://www.cm.be/images/intersoc/Chateau/chateaug.htm Chateau-d'Oex-Vaud, Switzerland http://www.skiswitzerland.com/chateau/chateau.htm Workshop website: http://www.speech.kth.se/error/ (see ISCApad52) - ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Audio Visual Speech Processing September 4-7, 2003, St Jorioz France. http://www.icp.inpg.fr/AVSP03/ - DiSS03 Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech, Gotenburg University, September 2003 (to be convenient for participants to Eurospeech 2003 in Geneva). (see ISCApad52) - 2004: A Speaker Odyssey, http://www.odyssey04.org/ UPMadrid 31May/4June 2004 =========================================================================== FUTURE ISCA SUPPORTED EVENTS ============================ - HLT-NAACL 2003 (Human Language Technology/North American Association for Computational Linguistics) CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS and WORKSHOPS:deadline December 30, 2002 http://www.hlt-naacl03.org May 27-June 1, 2003 Edmonton, Canada (see ISCApad52) - 4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Sapporo, July 5 and 6, 2003 (immediately preceding the 41st annual meeting of the ACL) Workshop website: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2003/ Sigdial website: http://www.sigdial.org/ ACL website: http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/ (see ISCApad 56) - TSD 2003 International Conference on Text Speech and Dialogue, September 8 - 11, 2003 (right after Eurospeech 2003) Hotel Gomel, ½esk‹ Budˇjovice,Czech Republic http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/events/tsd2003/ Contact person: Ms. Helena Benesova University of West Bohemia in Pilsen Faculty of Applied Sciences Department of Computer Science Univerzitni 8 CZ - 306 14 PLZEN Czech Republic Tel: (+420 19) 7491 212, 27 62 50 Fax: (+420 19) 7491 213 (see ISCApad55) - MAVEBA 2003, 3rd International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications December 10-12, 2003, Firenze, Italy http://www.maveba.org (see attached files to ISCApad54) - Multimodal User Authentication, Santa Barbara, California, USA. December 11-12, 03 http://mmua.cs.ucsb.edu/ - Speech Prosody 2004, the second International Conference on Prosody Date: March 23 (Tuesday) to 26 (Friday), 2004 Venue: Nara New Convention Center, Nara, Japan Contact person: Keikichi HIROSE e-mail: pro-office@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp Web: http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sp2004/ (see ISCApad 56)) ============================================================================= FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS =========================================== - Call for papers for Workshop on DSP in Mobile and Vehicular Systems April 3-4, 2003 Nagoya, Japan http://dspincars.sdsu.edu (corrected URL) - EACL 2003 in Budapest, April 12-17, 2003 Main conference: http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/ Workshops: http://www.elsnet.org/workshops (see attached files ISCApad 54) - UK Speech Meeting Announcement and Call for Abstracts One Day Meeting for Young Speech Researchers Thursday 24th April 2003 University College London www.sys.uea.ac.uk/people/sjc/one-day-meeting/ (see ISCApad57) - The Speech Technology for Linguistics/Linguistics for Speech Technology (STL 03) conference May 17-18, 2003 at the University of Joensuu (Finland). Contact: Stefan Werner stl03@joensuu.fi (see ISCApad 56) - HLT/NAACL 2003 Student Workshop Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Note: The exact dates of the Workshop have not been firmly established yet. It may take place any time between May 27 and June 1, 2003. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ebreck/hlt-naacl03-student (see attached documents) - Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia (PAPI 2003) June 11-12, 2003 Faculdade de Letras University of Lisbon Contact: PAPI2003@mail.telepac.pt http://fl.ul.pt/eventos/PAPI (see ISCApad57) - PROPOR'2003 6th Workshop on Computacional Processing of the Portuguese Language - Written and Spoken Universidade do Algarve-FCHS, Faro, Portugal June 26-27, 2003 http://www.ualg.pt/propor - SPEECH DYNAMICS BY EAR, EYE, MOUTH AND MACHINE An Interdisciplinary Workshop Kyoto, Japan June 27, 2003 For further information: IEICE Workshop Secretariat Professor Takayuki Arai Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Sophia University arai@hoffman.cc.sophia.ac.jp Workshop Web Site: http://www.ieice.or.jp/iss/sp/jpn/sp-200306workshop.htm (see ISCApad57) -XVII International Congress of Linguists, 24-29 July 2003 Prague, Czeck Republic. http://www.cil17.org -15th ICPhS 2003, Barcelona, 3-9 August 2003 http://shylock.uab.es/icphs/ Submission deadline: September 15,2002 (see ISCApad49) -Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, July 14-August 22,2003 The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (see ISCApad52) -2003 International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering Oct 26-29, 2003 Beijing China Submisson deadline June 30, 2003 http://www.cie-china.org/nlpke2003 http://www.caaai.org.cn -Fifth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI-PUI'03) Vancouver, BC, Canada November 5-7th, 2003 Submission deadline: April 21st CFP and further information available at: http://icmi.cs.ucsb.edu Conference Chair: Sharon Oviatt (see ISCAPad57) - 3 rd IJCAI Workshop on KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS August 10, 2003 Acapulco, Mexico http://www.ida.liu.se/~nlplab/ijcai-ws-03/ (see attached documents) - 6th NWCL International Conference PROSODY AND PRAGMATICS University of Central Lancashire (Preston) 14 - 16 November 2003 Organized by Anne Wichmann (University of Central Lancashire) & Diane Blakemore (University of Salford) (see attached files) http://www.nwcl.salford.ac.uk - Preliminary Announcement - ASRU2003 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. December 2003 CO-chairs: Jeff Bilmes,, University of Washington Bill Byrne, , Johns Hopkins University -----------------------------------------------------------------------------