New ISCA Fellows will be soon elected. Informations on ISCA fellowship can be found on our webpage www.isca-speech.org/fellows.html

We urge ISCA members to recommend  candidates by sending  nomination forms.  New nominations forms will be soon available on our website www.isca-speech.org. 

An ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on NON-LINEAR SPEECH PROCESSING (NOLISP'09) 25/06/2009 - // DeadLine: 20090315 Vic Catalonia Espagne http://nolisp2009.uvic.cat  After the success of NOLISP'03 held in Le Croisic, NOLISP'05 in Barcelona and NOLISP'07 in Paris, we are pleased to present NOLISP'09 to be held at the University of Vic (Catalonia, Spain) on June 25-27, 2009. The workshop will feature invited lectures by leading researchers as well as contributed talks. The purpose of NOLISP'09 is to present and discuss novel ideas, works and results related to alternative techniques for speech processing, which depart from mainstream approaches.  Prospective authors are invited to submit a 3 to 4 page paper proposal in English, which will be evaluated by the Scientific C! ommittee. Final papers will be due one month after the workshop to be included in the CD-ROM proceedings. Contributions are expected (but not restricted to) the following areas:  Non-linear approximation and estimation Non-linear oscillators and predictors Higher-order statistics Independent component analysis Nearest neighbours Neural networks Decision trees Non-parametric models Dynamics of non-linear systems Fractal methods Chaos modelling Non-linear differential equations  All fields of speech processing are targeted by the workshop, namely: Speech production, speech analysis and modelling, speech coding, speech synthesis, speech recognition, speaker identification/verification, speech enhancement/separation, speech perception, etc.  ADDITIONAL INFORMATION  Proceedings will be published in Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes Series in Computer Science (LNCS). LNCS is published, in parallel to the printed books, in full-text electronic form. All contributions should  be original, and must not have been previously published, nor be under review for presentation elsewhere. A special issue of Speech Communication (Elsevier) on “Non-Linear and Non-Conventional Speech Processing” will be also published after the workshop  Detailed instructions for submission to NOLISP'09 and further informations will be available at the conference Web site (http://nolisp2009.uvic.cat).  IMPORTANT DATES: * March 15, 2009 - Submission (full papers) * April 30, 2009 - Notification of acceptance * September 30, 2009 - Final (revised) paper

                           * INTERSPEECH 2009 *

Chiba, Japan
Conference Website
ISCA is pleased to announce that INTERSPEECH 2010 will take place in Makuhari-Messe, Chiba, Japan, September 26-30, 2010. The event will be chaired by Keikichi Hirose (Univ. Tokyo), and will have as a theme "Towards Spoken Language Processing for All - Regardless of Age, Health Conditions, Native Languages, Environment, etc."

Interspeech 2011

Palazzo dei Congressi,  Italy, August 27-31, 2011.

Organizing committee

Piero Cosi (General Chair),

Renato di Mori (General Co-Chair),

Claudia Manfredi (Local Chair),

Roberto Pieraccini (Technical Program Chair),

Maurizio Omologo (Tutorials),

Giuseppe Riccardi (Plenary Sessions).

More information www.interspeech2011.org

 This section shows recent books whose titles been have communicated by the authors or editors.

Also some advertisement for recent books in speech are included.

Book presentation is written by the authors and not by this newsletter editor or any  voluntary reviewer.

Music and speech share numerous aspects (language, structural, acoustics, cognitive), as long in their production, that in their representation and their perception. This list has for object to warn its users, various events dealing with the study of the links between music and speech. It thus intends to connect several communities, their allowing each to take advantage of a stimulating interaction.

As a member of the speech or music community, you are invited to
subscribe to musicspeech group. The group will be moderated and
maintained by IRCAM.

Group details:
* Name: musicspeech
* Home page: http://listes.ircam.fr/wws/info/musicspeech
* Email address: musicspeech@ircam.fr

Greg Beller, IRCAM,
moderator, musicspeech list

TOWARD IALL (INTERNET AIDED LANGUAGE LEARNING)

An  CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) demo for second language learning (English) has been designed and implemented at  LPTV (Laboratorio de Procesamiento y Transmisión de Voz -Speech Processing and Transmission Lab), Universidad de Chile. Go to:

 http://www.die.uchile.cl/LPTV

 and then click “On-line, try our second language learning demo”.

 It offers five activities based on speech technology: pronunciation evaluation assessment; text-comprehension questions; word-meaning association; spelling practice with dictation exercises; and, intonation evaluation. The proposed distributed architecture is based on a fully centralized processing: the speech signal is recorded locally on user´s host and sent over to our server by employing TCP/IP protocols. The requirements for the local host are very low: only Java version 1.6 (or more recent) and a low-cost microphone.

Please, feel free to use our demo. We would like know any comment about the system itself and about the Internet delay (in seconds) between the click to check a recorded audio and the reception of the feed-back result. The intonation evaluation may take a few seconds to be deployed in the user´s screen. As part of our research, we also need to collect speech data. Please, send any suggestion or comment to:

  nbecerra@ing.uchile.cl

Prof. Néstor Becerra Yoma, PhD

Speech Processing and Transmission Lab

Dept. of Electrical Engineering

Universidad de Chile

Tel. +56-2-978 4205

Fax. +56-2-695 3881

E-mail: nbecerra@ing.uchile.cl

http://www.die.uchile.cl/LPTV

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, controlling their mobile phone or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 2000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about. To strengthen our international team we are currently looking for a

Junior Research Engineer for Embedded Automatic Speech Recognition

Work Environment

·         You will work in the Embedded ASR research and production team in Merelbeke, Belgium or Aachen, Germany, working with state-of -he-art speech technology, tools and runtime software. Both Gent and Aachen are nice, historical European university cities.

·         You will work in an international company and cooperate with people and research teams on various locations across the globe. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

·         You will work  with our natural language understanding and dialogue research teams as well support our professional services teams.

·         You will work on the development of cutting edge speech recognition products for automotive platforms and mobile devices. You will help the engine cope with multi-lingual speech in various noise conditions, and this while respecting strong limitations on the usage of memory and processing power.

Key Responsibilities

·         Design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing of new algorithms and tools, with a strong focus on speech signal processing and acoustic modeling in adverse, noisy environments.

·         Activities are targeted at the creation of commercial products for resource limited platforms.

·         Focus on creating efficient production and development processes to bring the technology to marketable products in a wide range of languages.

·         Occasional application of the developed algorithms and tools for producing systems for a specific language.

·         Specification and follow-up of projects to make the system work with third party components, such as beam formers, echo cancellers or content data providers.

Your Profile

• You have a University degree in engineering, mathematics or physics.
• A PhD degree in speech processing or equivalent relevant experience is a strong asset.
• Experience in speech recognition research, especially acoustic modeling or signal processing, is required.
• Experience in speech processing, machine learning techniques or statistical modeling is required.
• Knowledge about small platforms and experience in developing software for them is a plus.
• Strong software skills are required, especially C/C++ and a scripting language like Perl or Python in a Linux/Unix environment. Knowledge of Matlab is a plus.
• Additional background in computational linguistics is a plus.
• You are a team player, willing to take initiative, and are goal oriented.
• You have a strong desire to make things “really work” in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.
• You are fluent in English and at least one other language, and you can write high quality English documentation.  

Interested?

Please send your CV to Deanna Roe at deanna.roe@nuance.com. If you have any questions, please contact her at +44 207 922 5757.

We are looking forward to receiving your application!

In order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

       SOFTWARE ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOGUE TOOLS

As part of our team, you will be creating solutions for voice user interfaces for embedded applications on mobile and automotive platforms.

OVERVIEW:

- You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR (automatic speech recognition) research and development team, developing technology, tools, and run-time software to enable our customers to develop and test embedded speech applications. Together with our team of speech and language experts, you will work on natural language dialogue systems for our customers in the Automotive and Mobile sector.

- You will work on fascinating technology that has now reached the maturity to enable new generations of powerful and natural user interfaces. Your code is crucial to the research in speech and language technology that defines the state of the art in this field It is equally important for the products that you will find in the market, in speech-enabled cars, navigation devices, and cell phones.

- You will work in a large international software company that is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. You will cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- You will work on the development of tools and solutions for cutting edge speech and language understanding technologies for automotive and mobile devices.

- You will work on enhancing various aspects of our advanced natural language dialogue system, such as the layer of connected applications, the configuration setup, inter-module communication, etc.

- In particular, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing, and documentation of tools such as GUI and XML applications that are used to develop, configure, and fine-tune advanced dialogue systems.

QUALIFICATIONS:

- You have a university degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, computational linguistics, or a related field.

- You have very strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally also for embedded applications.

- You have experience with Python or other scripting languages.

- GUI programming experience is an asset.

The following skills are a plus:

- Understanding of communication protocols

- Understanding of databases

- A background in (computational) linguistics, dialogue systems, speech processing, grammars, and parsing techniques, statistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning, especially as related to natural language processing, dialogue, and representation of information

- Understanding of computational agents and related frameworks (such as OAA).

- You can work both as a team player and as goal-oriented independent software engineer.

- You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

- You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

- You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

- Knowledge of other languages is a plus.

CONTACT:

Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

Benjamin Campued       Benjamin.Campued@nuance.com

Please make sure to document to us your excellent software engineering skills.

ABOUT US:

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 3500 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, controlling their mobile phone or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 2000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about. To strengthen our international team we are currently looking for a

 Speech Scientist for Embedded Automatic Speech Recognition

Work Environment

·          You will work in the Embedded ASR research and production team in Merelbeke, Belgium or Aachen, Germany, working with state-of-the-art speech technology, tools and runtime software. Both Gent and Aachen are nice, historical European university cities.

·          You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations, from the USA up to Japan. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

·          You will work on the localization and production of language variants for our cutting edge speech recognition products targeted at automotive platforms and mobile devices. You will help the engine cope with multi-lingual speech in various noise conditions.

·          Initially, you will work on the production of language variants of our acoustic models, later extending your knowledge towards production of statistical language models and natural language dialogue systems.

Key Responsibilities

·          Training of  acoustic models or statistical language models for new languages.

·          Localizing natural language dialogue systems towards a specific market.

·          Contributing to the improvement, design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing of new algorithms, tools and processes.

·          Supporting our professional services teams to contribute to customer project success.

·          Assisting senior team members in research tasks.

Your Profile

• You have a University degree in linguistics, engineering, mathematics or physics.
• A PhD or similar experience in a relevant field is a plus.
• Experience in acoustic modeling, NLU or statistical language modeling is recommended.
• Additional background in computational linguistics is a plus.
• Working in Windows and Linux environments comes naturally to you. Experience with computing farms and grid software is welcome.
• You are knowledgable about small, embedded platforms and requirements of software applications designed for them.
• Good software skills are required, especially scripting language like Perl or Python in a Linux/Unix environment, and knowledge of C/C++.
• Experience in speech processing or machine learning techniques is an asset.
• You are a team player, willing to take initiative, and are goal oriented.
• You have a strong sense of precision and quality in your daily job.
• You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.  
• You illustrate your interest in languages by speaking at least two other languages.

Interested?

Please send your CV to Deanna Roe at deanna.roe@nuance.com. If you have any questions, please contact her at +44 207 922 5757.

We are looking forward to receiving your application!

The experience speaks for itself™

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, controlling their mobile phone or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched.  With more than 2000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about. To strengthen our international team we are currently looking for a

Senior Research Engineer for Embedded Automatic Speech Recognition

Work Environment

·          You will work in the Embedded ASR research and production team in Merelbeke, Belgium or Aachen, Germany, working with state-of -he-art speech technology, tools and runtime software. Both Gent and Aachen are nice, historical European university cities.

·          You will work in an international company and cooperate with people and research teams on various locations across the globe. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

·          You will work  with our natural language understanding and dialogue research teams as well support our professional services teams.

·          You will work on the development of cutting edge speech recognition products for automotive platforms and mobile devices. You will help the engine cope with multi-lingual speech in various noise conditions, and this while respecting strong limitations on the usage of memory and processing power.

Key Responsibilities

·          Design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing of new algorithms and tools, with a strong focus on speech signal processing and acoustic modeling in adverse, noisy environments.

·          Activities are targeted at the creation of commercial products for resource limited platforms.

·          Focus on creating efficient production and development processes to bring the technology to marketable products in a wide range of languages.

·          Occasional application of the developed algorithms and tools for producing systems for a specific language.

·          Specification and follow-up of projects to make the system work with third party components, such as beam formers, echo cancellers or content data providers.

Your Profile

• You have a University degree in engineering, mathematics or physics.
• A PhD degree in speech processing or equivalent relevant experience is a strong asset.
• Experience in speech recognition research, especially acoustic modeling or signal processing, is required.
• Experience in speech processing, machine learning techniques or statistical modeling is required.
• Knowledge about small platforms and experience in developing software for them is a plus.
• Strong software skills are required, especially C/C++ and a scripting language like Perl or Python in a Linux/Unix environment. Knowledge of Matlab is a plus.
• Additional background in computational linguistics is a plus.
• You are a team player, willing to take initiative, and are goal oriented.
• You have a strong desire to make things “really work” in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.
• You are fluent in English and at least one other language, and you can write high quality English documentation. 

Interested?

Please send your CV to Deanna Roe at deanna.roe@nuance.com. If you have any questions, please contact her at +44 207 922 5757.

We are looking forward to receiving your application!

The experience speaks for itself™

Title: jr. Speech Scientist

Location: Aachen, Germany

Type: Permanent

Job:  

Overview:

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the World. Our technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses, experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, getting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is all about.

Responsibilities:

Nuance is seeking a jr. Speech Scientist who possesses a solid background in natural language technology and computational linguistics.

Candidates should enjoy working in a fast-paced, collaborative atmosphere that applies speech science in a commercial, result driven and customer oriented setting.

As a jr. Speech Scientist in the Embedded Professional Services group, you will work on speech recognition grammars, statistical language models, prompts and custom voice development for leading edge automotive applications across the world, covering a broad range of activities in all project phases, including the design, development, and optimization of the system.

Representative duties include:

• Develop rule based grammars, train statistical language models for speech recognition and natural language understanding in commercial products in a variety of languages, according to UI Design specifications
• Identify or gather suitable text for training language models and custom voices
• Design, develop, and test semantic classifier rules and models
• Develop custom voices for use with Nuance’s leading text to speech products
• Direct voice talents for prompt recordings
• Organize and conduct usability tests
• Localization of speech resources for embedded speech applications
• Optimize accuracy of applications by analyzing performance and tuning statistical language models, grammars, and pronunciations within CPU and memory constraints of embedded platforms
• Contribute to the generation and presentation of client-facing reports

Qualifications:

• University degree in computational linguistics or Software design or similar degree
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills and ability to troubleshoot issues
• Good judgment and quick-thinking
• Strong programming skills, preferably Perl or Python
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills
• Ability to scope work taking technical, business and time-frame constraints into consideration
• Ability and willingness to travel abroad
• Works well independently and collaboratively in team settings in fast-paced environment
• Mastering Office applications

Beneficial Skills

• Additional language skills, eg. French, German, Spanish or other
• Strong programming skills in either Perl, Python, C, VB
• Speech recognition knowledge
• Pattern recognition, linguistics, signal processing, or acoustics knowledge

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: Danish Linguist (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/mldc), is seeking a full-time temporary language expert in the Danish language, for a 3-4 month contract, to work in speech technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be native or near native Danish speaker

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics or related field (preferably in Danish Linguistics)

·         Have an advanced level of English

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – no programming is required, but he/she should be comfortable working with MS Windows and MS Office tools

·         Have team work experience

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to start in September 2008

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions. 

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: Catalan Linguist (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/mldc), is seeking a full-time temporary language expert in the Catalan language, for a 3-4 month contract, to work in speech technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be native or near native Catalan speaker

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics or related field (preferably in Catalan Linguistics)

·         Have an advanced level of English

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – no programming is required, but he/she should be comfortable working with MS Windows and MS Office tools

·         Have team work experience

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to start in September 2008

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions. 

titre du sujet : Synthèse vocale de haute qualité

Introduction
=========

Ces dernières années ont vu l'émergence de systèmes de synthèse de la parole construits autour de base de données de parole de taille importante qui correspondent le plus souvent à quelques heures d'enregistrement de parole. A des degrés divers, ces systèmes considèrent qu'il est possible de produire une parole de qualité en allant chercher des fragments de sons dans une base de données enregistrée au préalable par un locuteur. Ce type d'approche pousse à l'extrême l'hypothèse fonctionnelle des systèmes fondés sur la concaténation d'unités acoustiques. Avec une base de données suffisamment importante, il doit être possible de couvrir statistiquement les cas les plus fréquents de coarticulation sonore.

Des systèmes récents comme Festival (Black 1995), CHATR (Campbell 1996), Whistler (Huang 1996), XIMERA (Toda 2006), IBM \citethese{Eid06}, prouvent que cette approche méthodologique permet de construire des systèmes de synthèse de très bonne qualité.

En suivant cette méthodologie, les modèles ne sont plus utilisés pour produire des valeurs de paramètres qui serviront à la génération d'un signal de parole. Ils sont en revanche utilisés pour rechercher dans la base d'exemples sonores un extrait de parole qui sera le plus proche possible des paramètres modélisés et conformes à une élocution humaine. Concernant la problématique de recherche d'une séquence d'unités acoustiques, différentes solutions sont possibles. Les plus connues appliquent des solutions de recherche de meilleurs chemins (Sagisaka 1992) (Hunt 1996) en proposant une hypothèse de programmation dynmique. D'autres travaux (Donovan 1995) ont défini des modèles acoustiques permettant de guider le choix d'une séquence d'unités.

L'enjeu du procédé de sélection est double, (Iwahashi 1992). Il s'agit d'une part de trouver une correspondance entre une sous-séquence de la chaîne phonémique à synthétiser et un exemplaire plausible dans le corpus de référence. On parle alors d'une \emph{discrimination par critères de cible}, (Hune 1996). Une correspondance à la cible ne suffit pas puisque cette décision est prise unité par unité. Il faut un mécanisme supplémentaire garantissant que l'enchaînement du séquencement proposé réponde à des critères de continuité acoustique (de nature segmentale ou supra-segmentale). On parle dans ce cas de critères de concaténation. La difficulté du problème réside dans le fait que les deux critères sont combinés. Le choix d'une sous-séquence en correspondance avec une unité du corpus dépend de son contexte passé (contexte de la séquence à gauche) et à venir (contexte à droite). Il s'agit encore une fois d'un problème de nature combinatoire qui peut formellement être posé comme un problème de recherche d'un meilleur chemin dans un graphe.

La grande majorité des systèmes de synthèse appliquent un algorithme de Viterbi. Cet algorithme, efficace en complexité spatiale et temporelle, tire sa justification du fait que l'expression du coût global d'une séquence d'unités s'écrit, par hypothèse, sous la forme d'une suite récurrente additive. Cette justification est largement partagée par l'ensemble de la communauté pour ce qui est de l'expression des coûts de concaténation et des coûts de proximité à la cible. En revanche pour ce qui concerne la prise en compte de coûts de nature prosodique, une mise en forme recurrente est plus délicate et difficilement justifiable puisque ces phénomènes ont lieu à l'échelle du groupe intonatif et de la phrase.

Nous considérons qu'il est possible de dépasser la qualité des systèmes de synthèse actuels par la prise en compte de critère prosodiques lors de la recherche de la séquence optimale des unités. Tenir compte de ces critières proposidiques n'est pas une chose simple, puiqu'il faut définir de nouveaux modèles de description des coûts acoustiques et prosodiques d'une séquence. Ces nouvelles techniques de sélection devraient être acapables de proposer des voix avec d'une part plus de relief ou d'expressivité tout en maintenant une très bonne qualité sonore.

(Sagisake 1992) : Sagisaka, Y. and Kaiki, N. and Iwahashi, N. and Mimura, K., ATR mu-TALK speech synthesis system, proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP'92)", 1992, pp. 483-486.
(Hunt 1996) :  Hunt, A. and Black, A.W., Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database, proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'96), 1996, pp. 373-376.
(Donovan 1995) :  Donovan, R. and P. Woodland, P., Automatic speech synthesizer parameter estimation using HMMs, proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics and Signal Processing (ICASSP'95), 1995, pp. 640-643.
(Iwahashi 1992) : Iwahashi, N. and Kaiki, N. and Sagisaka, Y., Concatenative speech synthesis by minimum distortion criteria, proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'92), 1992, pp. 65-68.
(Black 1995) :  Alan W. Black and Nick Campbell, Optimizing selection of units from speech databases for concatenative sysnthesis, proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics and Signal Processing (ICASSP'95), vol. 1, pp. 581-584.
(Campbell 1996) :  Campbell, N. and Black, A., CHART: A High-definition speech re-sequencing system, in Progress in Speech Synthesis,
eds. van Santen, J. and Sproat, R. and Olive, J. and Hirschberg, J., 1996, pp. 365-381,
(Huang 1996) : Huang, X. and Acero, A. and Adcock, J. and Hon, H.-W. and Goldsmith, J. and Liu, J. and Plumpe, M., Whistler: A trainable text-to-speech system, proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP'96), 1996, pp. 2397-2390.
(Toda 2006) :  Tomoki Toda and Hisashi Kawai and Toshio Hirai and Jinfu Ni and Nobuyuki Nishizawa and Junichi Yamagishi and Minoru Tsuzaki and Keiichi Tokuda and Satoshi Nakamura, Developing a test bed of English text-to-speech system XIMERA for the Blizzard challenge 2006,  Blizzard Challenge, 2006.
(Eide 2006) :  Ellen Eide and Raul Fernandez and Ron Hoory and Wael Hamza and Zvi Kons and Michael Picheny and Ariel Sagi and Slava Shechtman and Zhi Wei Shuang, The IBM submission to the 2006 Blizzard text-to-speech challenge, Blizzard Challenge, 2006.

Proposition d'un travail de thèse
======================

Nous proposons de nous intéresser à de nouvelles méthodologies de sélection d'unités acoustiques pour la synthèse de la parole à partir du texte. La proposition de thèse comporte deux volets: un axe de propositions scientifiques permettant de lever certains verrous notamment dans la formulation du coût d'une séquence d'unités, et un axe expérimental par la proposition d'une évolution du système de synthèse du groupe Cordial permettant de mettre en place des évaluations perceptuelles qui permettront de valider ou d'invalider les hypothèses de travail qui auront été choisies. Le travail expérimental sera réalisé sur le français. Nous souhaitons doubler les expérimentations sur l'anglais et participer ainsi au challenge Blizzard qui est une compétition internationale en synthèse de la parole.

Le travail de thèse prendra comme point d'appui la proposition suivante:
  * Mise en place et évaluation d'un premier système reposant sur l'état de l'art actuel en synthèse de la parole par corpus de parole continue. Prise en compte des niveaux acoustiques. Utilisation d'une base de parole expressive,  "chronic",  issue du projet ANR Vivos.
  * Proposition de modèles de sélection de nature prosodique.
  * Propositions algorithmiques, définition d'heuristiques pour une solution acceptable en temps de calcul.
  * Intégration des propositions prosodiques au système de synthèse de référence et évaluation.

Contexte du travail de thèse
===================

L'étudiant sera accueilli au sein de l'équipe Cordial de l'irisa : http://www.irisa.fr/cordial dont les
principaux travaux concernent le traitement de la parole : synthèse, transformation de parole, annotation de corpus.
L'équipe de recherche est hébergée dans les locaux de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Sciences Appliquées et de Technologie,
http://www.enssat.fr, à Lannion. La thèse est financée sur trois ans par une bourse du conseil général des Côtes d'Armor.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: Norwegian Linguist (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/mldc), is seeking a full-time temporary language expert in the Norwegian language (Bokmal), for a 4-6 month contract, to work in speech technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be native or near native Norwegian Bokmal speaker

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics or related field (preferably in Norwegian Linguistics)

·         Have an advanced level of English

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – no programming is required, but he/she should be comfortable working with MS Windows and MS Office tools

·         Have team work experience

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to start in October 2008

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions.

Deadline for submissions: August 10, 2008 

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: Finnish Linguist (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/mldc), is seeking a full-time temporary language expert in the Finnish language, for a 6 month contract, to work in speech technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be native or near native Finnish speaker

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics or related field (preferably in Norwegian Linguistics)

·         Have an advanced level of English (oral and written)

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – no programming is required, but he/she should be comfortable working with MS Windows and MS Office tools

·         Have team work experience

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to work in a multicultural and multinational team across the globe

·         Willing to start in September 1, 2008

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions.

Deadline for submissions: August 10, 2008

Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, French, English, Polish Linguists (M/F)

MLDC – Microsoft Language Development Center, a branch of the Microsoft Product Group that develops Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies, situated in Porto Salvo, Portugal (http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/mldc), is seeking full-time temporary language experts in the following languages:

-          Norwegian language (Bokmal variety)

-          Finnish

-          Italian

-          English (UK)

-          French (France)

-          Polish

The contracts range from 2-6 months and the scope of them is to work in speech technology related development projects. The successful candidate should have the following requirements:

·         Be a native or near native speaker (for each of the required language)

·         Have a university degree in Linguistics or related field

·         Have an advanced level of English (oral and written)

·         Have some experience in working with Speech Technology/Natural Language Processing/Linguistics, either in academia or in industry

·         Have some computational ability – no programming is required, but he/she should be comfortable working with MS Windows and MS Office tools

·         Have team work experience

·         Willing to work in Porto Salvo (near Lisbon) for the duration of the contract

·         Willing to work in a multicultural and multinational team across the globe

·         Willing to start immediately

To apply, please submit your resume and a brief statement describing your experience and abilities to Daniela Braga: i-dbraga@microsoft.com

We will only consider electronic submissions.

Deadline for submissions: Opened until filled.

Title:      Assistant Professor Position at EURECOM
            in Multimedia content analysis and processing
Department: Multimedia Communications
URL:        http://www.eurecom.fr/research/
Start date: September 2008

Description:
Research in the Department currently focuses on several aspects of the processing of Multimedia Content:
• Video analysis and information filtering,
• Image Processing with application to 3D Face Cloning, watermarking and
biometrics,
• Speech and sound processing.
The new faculty is expected to undertake research in close collaboration with the existing activities and to participate in the teaching program for Master students. Extensions of the current research areas are encouraged.

Requirements:
The candidates must have a Ph.D. in computer science or electrical engineering with a solid background in signal processing and statistical analysis. The ideal candidate will have an established record of conducting research activities at the international level, and a proven record of collaboration with academic and industrial partners in national and European programs or equivalent. Excellence in research is a constant requirement for EURECOM. A strong commitment to excellence in research and teaching is essential.

Applications:
Send, by email, a letter of motivation, a resume including a list of publications, the names of 3 references and a copy of the three most important publications.

Contact:        Prof. Bernard Merialdo
Postal address: 2229 route des Crêtes
                BP 193
                06904 Sophia Antipolis cedex
                France
Email address:  Bernard.Merialdo@eurecom.fr
Web address:    http://www.eurecom.fr/main/institute/job.fr.htm
Phone:          +33/0 4 93 00 81 29
Fax:            +33/0 4 93 00 82 00

Located in the heart of Sophia Antipolis technology park, EURECOM is a graduate school and a Research center in Communication Systems, founded in 1991 by TELECOM ParisTech (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications) and EPFL (Swiss federal institute of Lausanne) in a consortium form, combining academic and industrial partners. Teaching and research activities of EURECOM focus on three areas: networking and security, mobile communications and multimedia communications. EURECOM has a strong international scope and strategy. 

Dans le cadre du projet RAPSODIS, l'IRISA recrute un post-doc pour une période de 12 mois. Le sujet porte sur l'intégration de connaissances syntaxiques et sémantiques dans un système de transcription automatique de la parole (voir les détails en fin de message). Le poste est à pourvoir d'ici la fin de l'année. Les personnes intéressés sont invités à contacter Guillaume Gravier (guig@irisa.fr) et/ou Pascale Sébillot (pascale.sebillot@irisa.fr).

SENIOR STAFF OPENING AT THE ICSI SPEECH GROUP

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) invites applications for a senior staff position in its speech research group. Successful applicants must have significant post-PhD experience, and a world-class research reputation.  Candidates must also have demonstrated ability to grow and manage a strong research effort. A successful track record with obtaining funding for the chosen area is essential. 

The ICSI Speech Group (including its predecessor, the ICSI Realization Group) has been a source of novel approaches to speech processing since 1988. ICSI’s speech group is well known for its efforts in speech recognition (particularly in neural network approaches and novel forms of feature extraction), as well as in speaker recognition, diarization, and speech understanding. It has close ties to research efforts in machine translation on the Berkeley campus, and to the STAR lab at SRI for the complete range of its research. It also works closely with several European labs, particularly IDIAP in Switzerland and to the University of Edinburgh.

ICSI is an independent not-for-profit Institute located a few blocks from the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It is closely affiliated with the University, and particularly with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department. Students, faculty, and administrative colleagues from the University all play a key role at the Institute. In addition to its Speech Group, areas of current strength in the Institute include: Artificial Intelligence (primarily in natural language), Internet research (primarily in architecture and internet security), and Algorithms (primarily associated with problems in bioinformatics and networking). We also have new activities in Computer Vision and Computer Architecture. See http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu to learn more about ICSI.

Applications should include a cover letter, a vita, the names of at least 3 references (with both postal and email addresses), and a research statement. Applications should be sent by email to speechjob@icsi.berkeley.edu and by postal mail to

Nelson Morgan (re Senior Search)

ICSI

1947 Center Street, Suite 600

Berkeley, CA 94704

ICSI is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Applications from women and minorities are especially encouraged. Hiring is contingent on eligibility to work in the United States.

12 PhD Positions and 2 Post Doc Positions available in

the Marie Curie International Training Network on

Speech Communication with Adaptive LEarning (SCALE)

SCALE is a cooperative project between

·        IDIAP Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland (Prof Herve Bourlard)

·        Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands (Prof Lou Boves, Dr Louis ten Bosch, Dr-ir Bert Cranen, Dr O. Scharenborg)

·        RWTH Aachen, Germany (Prof Hermann Ney, Dr Ralf Schlüter)

·        Saarland University, Germany (Prof Dietrich Klakow, Dr John McDonough)

·        University of Edinburgh, UK (Prof Steve Renals, Dr Simon King, Dr Korin Richmond, Dr Joe Frankel)

·        University of Sheffield, UK (Prof Roger Moore, Prof Phil Green, Dr Thomas Hain, Dr Guido Sanguinetti) .

Companies like Motorola or Philips Speech Recognition Systems/Nuance are associated partners of the program.

Each PhD position is funded for three years and degrees can be obtained from the participating academic institutions. 

Distinguishing features of the cooperation include:

·        Joint supervision of dissertations by lecturers from two partner institutions

·        While staying with one institution for most of the time, the program includes a stay at a second partner institution either from academic or industry for three to nine month 

·        An intensive research exchange program between all participating institutions

PhD and Post Doc projects will be in the area of

·        Automatic Speech Recognition

·        Machine learning

·        Speech Synthesis

·        Signal Processing

·        Human speech recognition

The salary of a PhD position is roughly 33.800€ per year. There are additional mobility (up to 800€/month) and travel allowances (yearly allowance). Applicants should hold a strong university degree which would entitle them to embark on a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline, and should be in the first four years of their research careers. As the project is funded by a EU mobility scheme, there are also certain mobility requirements.

Each Post Doc position is funded for two years. The salary is approximately 52000€ per year. Applicants must have a doctoral degree at the time of recruitment or equivalent research experience. The research experience may not exceed 5 years at the time of appointment.

Women are particularly encouraged to apply.

Deadlines for applications:

January 1, 2009

April 1, 2009

July 1, 2009

September 1, 2009.

After each deadline all submitted applications will be reviewed and positions awarded until all positions are filled.

Applications should be submitted at http://www.scale.uni-saarland.de/ .

To be fully considered, please include:

- a curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, disciplines covered

(e.g. list of courses ), publications, and other relevant experience

- a sample of written work (e.g. research paper, or thesis,

preferably in English)

- copies of high school and university certificates, and transcripts

- two references (e-mailed directly to the SCALE office

(Diana.Schreyer@LSV.Uni-Saarland.De) before the deadline)

- a statement of research interests, previous knowledge and activities

in any of the relevant research areas.

In case an application can only be submitted by regular post, it should

be sent to:

SCALE office

Diana Schreyer

Spoken Language Systems, FR 7.4

C 71 Office 0.02

Saarland University

P.O. Box 15 11 50

D-66041 Saarbruecken

Germany

If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow

(Dietrich.Klakow@LSV.Uni-Saarland.De).

Assistant Professor Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago  ########################################################  Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (http://www.tti-c.org) is a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute, dedicated to basic research and graduate education in computer science.  TTI-C opened for operation in 2003 and by 2010 plans to have 12 tenured and tenure track faculty and 18 research (3-year) faculty. Regular faculty will have a teaching load of at most one course per year and research faculty will have no teaching responsibilities.  Applications are welcome in all areas of computer science, but TTI-C is currently focusing on a number of areas including speech and language processing.  For all positions we require a Ph.D. degree or Ph.D. candidacy, with the degree conferred prior to date of hire.  Applications received after December 31 may not get full consideration.  Applications can be submitted online at http://www.tti-c.org/facultyapplication

Poste d'ingénieur CDD : environnement intelligent

Ingenieur - CDD

DeadLine: 15/02/2008

olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr

http://ims.metz.supelec.fr/spip.php?article99

Un poste d'ingénieur CDD de 18 mois est ouvert sur le campus de Metz de Supélec. Le candidat s’intégrera au sein de l’équipe « Information, Multimodalité & Signal » (http://ims.metz.supelec.fr). Cette équipe composée de 15 personnes est active dans les domaines du traitement numérique du signal et de l’information (traitement statistique du signal, apprentissage numérique, méthodes d’inspiration biologique), de la représentation des connaissances (fouille de données, analyse et apprentissage symbolique) et du calcul intensif et distribué. Le poste vise un profil permettant l’implémentation matérielle intégrée des méthodes développées au sein de l’équipe dans des applications liées aux environnements intelligents ainsi que leur maintenance. Le campus de Metz s’est en effet doté d’une plateforme en vraie grandeur reproduisant une pièce intelligente intégrant caméras, microphones, capteurs infrarouges, interfaces homme-machine (interface vocale, interface cerveau-machine), robo!

 ts et moyens de diffusion d’information. Il s’agira de réaliser une plateforme intégrée permettant de déployer des démonstrations rapidement dans cet environnement et de les maintenir.

Profil recherché :

– diplôme d’ingénieur en informatique, ou équivalent universitaire

– expérience de travail dans le cadre d’équipes multidisciplinaires,

– une bonne pratique de l’anglais est un plus.

Plus d'informations sont disponibles sur le site de l'équipe (http://ims.metz.supelec.fr)

Faire acte de candidature (CV+lettre) auprès de O. Pietquin : olivier.pietquin@supelec.fr.

http://gdr-isis.org/rilk/gdr/Kiosque/poste.php?jobid=3010

2009 PhD Research Fellowships 

=============================

The Adaptive Multimodal Information and  Interface  Research Lab

(casa.disi.unitn.it) at University of Trento (Italy) has several

PhD Research fellowships in the following areas:

                Statistical Machine Translation                

                Natural Language Processing    

                Automatic Speech Recognition

                Machine Learning

                Spoken/Multimodal Conversational Systems

We are looking for students with _excellent_ academic records

and relevant technical background. Students with EE, CS Master degrees

( or equivalent ) are welcome as well other related disciplines will

be considered. Prospective students are encouraged to look at the lab

website to search for current and past research projects.

PhD research fellowships benefits are described in the graduate school

website (http://ict.unitn.it/disi/edu/ict).

The  applicants should be fluent in _English_. The Italian language

competence is optional and applicants are encouraged to acquire

this skill during training. All applicants should have very good

programming skills. University of Trento is an equal opportunity employer.

The selection of candidates will be open until positions are filled.

Interested applicants should send their CV along with their

statement of research interest, transcript records and three reference

letters to :

                Prof. Dr.-Ing. Giuseppe Riccardi

        Email: riccardi@disi.unitn.it

-------------------

About University of Trento and Information Engineering and Computer

 Science Department

The University of Trento is constantly ranked as

 premiere Italian graduate university institution (see www.disi.unitn.it).

Please visit the DISI Doctorate school website at http://ict.unitn.it/edu/ict

DISI Department

DISI has a strong focus on Interdisciplinarity with professors from

different faculties of the University (Physical Science, Electrical

Engineering, Economics, Social Science, Cognitive Science, Computer Science)

 with international background.

DISI aims at exploiting the complementary experiences present in the

various research areas in order to develop innovative methods and

technologies, applications and advanced services.

English is the official language.

--

Prof. Ing. Giuseppe Riccardi

Marie Curie Excellence Leader

Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science

University of Trento

Room D11, via Sommarive 14

38050 Povo di Trento, Italy

tel  : +39-0461 882087

email: riccardi@dit.unitn.it

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia            
 Special Issue on Integration of Context and Content for Multimedia Management
=====================================================================

Guest Editors:

Alan Hanjalic, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Alejandro Jaimes, IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland
Jiebo Luo, Kodak Research Laboratories, USA
        Qi Tian, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

---------------------------------------------------
URL: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~qitian/cfp-TMM-SI.htm
---------------------------------------------------
Important dates:

Manuscript Submission Deadline:       April 1, 2008
        Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: July 1, 2008
        Final Manuscript Due to IEEE:         September 1, 2008
        Expected Publication Date:            January 2009

---------------------
Submission Procedure
---------------------
Submissions should follow the guidelines set out by IEEE Transaction on Multimedia.
Prospective authors should submit high quality, original manuscripts that have not
appeared, nor are under consideration, in any other journals.

-------
Summary
-------
Lower cost hardware and growing communications infrastructure (e.g., Web, cell phones,
etc.) have led to an explosion in the availability of ubiquitous devices to produce,
store, view and exchange multimedia (images, videos, music, text). Almost everyone is
a producer and a consumer of multimedia in a world in which, for the first time,
tremendous amount of contextual information is being automatically recorded by the
various devices we use (e.g., cell ID for the mobile phone location, GPS integrated in
a digital camera, camera parameters, time information, and identity of the producer).

In recent years, researchers have started making progress in effectively integrating
context and content for multimedia mining and management. Integration of content and
context is crucial to human-human communication and human understanding of multimedia:
without context it is difficult for a human to recognize various objects, and we
become easily confused if the audio-visual signals we perceive are mismatched. For the
same reasons, integration of content and context is likely to enable  (semi)automatic
content analysis and indexing methods to become more powerful in managing multimedia
data. It can help narrow part of the semantic and sensory gap that is difficult or
even impossible to bridge using approaches that do not explicitly consider context for
(semi)automatic content-based analysis and indexing.

The goal of this special issue is to collect cutting-edge research work in integrating
content and context to make multimedia content management more effective. The special
issue will unravel the problems generally underlying these integration efforts,
elaborate on the true potential of contextual information to enrich the content
management tools and algorithms, discuss the dilemma of generic versus narrow-scope
solutions that may result from "too much" contextual information, and provide us
vision and insight from leading experts and practitioners on how to best approach the
integration of context and content. The special issue will also present the state of
the art in context and content-based models, algorithms, and applications for
multimedia management.

-----
Scope
-----

The scope of this special issue is to cover all aspects of context and content for
multimedia management.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
        - Contextual metadata extraction
        - Models for temporal context, spatial context, imaging context (e.g., camera
          metadata), social and cultural context and so on
- Web context for online multimedia annotation, browsing, sharing and reuse
- Context tagging systems, e.g., geotagging, voice annotation
- Context-aware inference algorithms
        - Context-aware multi-modal fusion systems (text, document, image, video,
          metadata, etc.)
- Models for combining contextual and content information
        - Context-aware interfaces
- Context-aware collaboration
- Social networks in multimedia indexing
- Novel methods to support and enhance social interaction, including
          innovative ideas integrating context in social, affective computing, and
          experience capture.
- Applications in security, biometrics, medicine, education, personal
          media management, and the arts, among others
- Context-aware mobile media technology and applications
- Context for browsing and navigating large media collections
- Tools for culture-specific content creation, management, and analysis

------------
Organization
------------
Next to the standard open call for papers, we will also invite a limited number of
papers, which will be written by prominent authors and authorities in the field
covered by this Special Issue. While the papers collected through the open call are
expected to sample the research efforts currently invested within the community on
effectively combining contextual and content information for optimal analysis,
indexing and retrieval of multimedia data, the invited papers will be selected to
highlight the main problems and approaches generally underlying these efforts.

All papers will be reviewed by at least 3 independent reviewers. Invited papers will
be solicited first through white papers to ensure the quality and relevance to the
special issue. The accepted invited papers will be reviewed by the guest editors and
expect to account for about one fourth of the papers in the special issue.

---------
Contacts
---------
Please address all correspondences regarding this special issue to the Guest Editors
Dr. Alan Hanjalic (A.Hanjalic@ewi.tudelft.nl), Dr. Alejandro Jaimes
(alex.jaimes@idiap.ch), Dr. Jiebo Luo (jiebo.luo@kodak.com), and Dr. Qi Tian
(qitian@cs.utsa.edu).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guest Editors:
Alan Hanjalic, Alejandro Jaimes, Jiebo Luo, and Qi Tian

CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue of Speech Communication

on *Spoken Language Technology for Education*


*Guest-editors:*
Maxine Eskenazi, Associate Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Abeer Alwan, Professor, University of California at Los Angeles
Helmer Strik, Assistant Professor, University of Nijmegen
 

Language technologies have evolved to the stage where they are reliable
enough, if their strong and weak points are properly dealt with, to be
used for education. The creation of an application for education
presents several challenges: making the language technology sufficiently
reliable (and thus advancing our knowledge in the language
technologies), creating an application that actually enables students to
learn, and engaging the student. Papers in this special issue should
deal with several of these issues. Although language learning is the
primary target of research at present, papers on the use of language
technologies for other education applications are encouraged. The scope
of acceptable topic interests includes but is not limited to:

 

- Use of speech technology for education

- Use of spoken language dialogue for education

- Applications using speech and natural language processing for education

- Intelligent tutoring systems using speech and natural language

- Pedagogical issues in using speech and natural language technologies
for education

- Assessment of tutoring software

- Assessment of student performance

 

*Tentative schedule for paper submissions, review, and revision**: ** *

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2008.

Deadline for decisions and feedback from reviewers and editors: August
31, 2008.

Deadline for revisions of papers: November 31, 2008.

 

*Submission instructions:*

Authors should consult the "Guide for Authors", available online, at
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/specom for information about the
preparation of their manuscripts. Authors, please submit your paper via
_http://ees.elsevier.com/specom_, choosing *Spoken Language Tech. *as
the Article Type, and  Dr. Gauvain as the handling E-i-C.

Call for Papers

Recent Advances in Biometric Systems: A Signal Processing Perspective

Biometrics a digital recognition technology that relies on highly distinctive physical and physiological characteristics of an individual is potentially a powerful and reliable method for personal authentication. The increasing importance of biometrics is underscored by the rapidly growing number of educational and research activities devoted to this field; and by a large number of annually organized Conferences and Symposia exclusively devoted to biometrics. Biometrics is a multidisciplinary field with researchers from signal processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, and statistics. Recently, a number of new important directions have been identified for biometric research, including processing and encoding of nonideal data, biometrics at a distance, and data quality assessment. Problems in nonideal biometric data include off-angle, occluded, blurred, and noisy images. Biometrics at a distance is concerned with recognition from video or snapshots of a biometric samples captured from a noncooperative moving individual. The goal of this special issue is to focus on recent advances in signal processing of biometric data that allow improved recognition performance through novel restoration, processing, and encoding; matching techniques capable of dealing with complexity and distortions in data acquired from a distance; recognition from biometric data acquired from unconstrained environments or complex experimental set ups; and the characterization of quality and its relationship with performance.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Biometric-based recognition under unconstrained presentation and/or complex environment using the following:
    o Face
    o Iris
    o Fingerprint
    o Voice
    o Hand
    o Soft biometrics

Multimodal biometric recognition using nonideal data

Biometric image/signal quality assessment:
    o Face
    o Iris
    o Fingerprint
    o Voice
    o Hand
    o Soft biometrics

Biometric security and privacy
    o Liveness detection
    o Encryption
    o Cancelable biometrics

The special issue will focus both on the development and comparison of novel signal/image processing approaches and on their expanding range of applications.

Authors should follow the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing manuscript format described at the journal site http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asp/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/, according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due                 October 1, 2008
First Round of Reviews         January 1, 2009
Publication Date               April 1, 2009

Guest Editors

o Natalia A. Schmid, Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA; natalia.schmid@mail.wvu.edu
o Stephanie Schuckers, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY 13699, USA; sschucke@clarkson.edu
o Jonathon Phillips, National Institute of Standard and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA; jonathon@nist.gov
o Kevin Bowyer, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA; kwb@cse.nd.edu 

Call for Papers

Special issue of Eurasip journal on advanced signal processing

Analysis and Signal Processing of Oesophagial and Pathological Voices

Speech is the most important means of communication among humans. Speech, however, is not limited only to the process of communication, but is also very important for transferring emotions, expressing our personality, and reflecting situations of stress. Modern lifestyles have increased the risk of experiencing some kind of voice alteration. It is estimated that around 19% of the population suffer or have suffered from dysphonic voicing. This motivates new and objective ways to evaluate speech, its quality, and its connection with other phenomena.

Speech research to date has favored areas such as synthesis, recognition, and speaker verification. The last few years have witnessed the emerging topic of processing and evaluation of disordered speech. Acoustic analysis is a noninvasive technique providing an efficient tool for the objective diagnosis, the screening of voice diseases, the objective determination of vocal function alterations, and the evaluation of surgical treatment and rehabilitation. Its application extends beyond medicine, and now includes forensic analysis as well as voice quality control for voice professionals. Acoustic analysis may also be seen as complementary to other methods of evaluation based on the direct observation of the vocal folds using videoendoscopy.

This special issue aims to foster an interdisciplinary forum for presenting new work in the analysis and modeling of voice signals and videoendoscopic images, with applications in pathological and oesophageal voices.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

o Automatic detection of voice disorders
o Automatic assessment and classification of voice quality
o New strategies for the parameterization and modeling of normal and pathological voices (biomechanical-based parameters, chaos modeling, etc.)
o Databases of vocal disorders
o Inverse filtering
o Signal processing for remote diagnosis
o Speech enhancement for pathological and oesophageal voices
o Objective parameters extraction from vocal fold images using videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI, and other emerging techniques
o Multimodal analysis of disordered speech
o Robust pitch extraction algorithms for pathological and oesophageal voices

Since speech communication is fundamental to human interaction, we are moving towards a new scenario where speech is gaining greater importance in our daily lives, and many common speech disorders and dysfunctions would be treated using computer-based or physical prosthetics.

Authors should follow the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing manuscript format described at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asp/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following tentative timetable:

Manuscript Due                 November 1, 2008
First Round of Reviews         February 1, 2009
Publication Date               May 1, 2009

Guest Editors

o Juan I. Godino-Llorente, Department of Circuits and Systems Engineering, Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Ctra. de Valencia, 28031 Madrid, Spain; igodino@ics.upm.es
o Pedro Gómez-Vilda, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Boadilla del Monte, 28660 Madrid, Spain; pedro@pino.datsi.fi.upm.es
o Tan Lee, Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong; tanlee@ee.cuhk.edu.hk 

Special Issue on "Emergent Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Pattern Recognition in Speech and Language Processing"

      Computer Speech and Language, Elsevier       Deadline for paper submission: September 26, 2008.  http://speechlab.ifsc.usp.br/call/csl.pdf                        =

Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing **SIGNAL MODELS AND REPRESENTATION OF MUSICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS**  http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tap http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tap/sp_issue/audioCFP.pdf * *-- Submission deadline: 15 December, 2008 --  Notification of acceptance: 15 June, 2009 Final manuscript due: 1st July, 2009 Tentative publication date: 1st September, 2009   Guest editors Dr. Bertrand David (Telecom ParisTech, France)  bertrand.david@telecom-paristech.fr Dr. Laurent Daudet (UPMC University Paris 06, France) daudet@lam.jussieu.fr Dr. Masataka Goto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and  Technology, Japan) m.goto@aist.go.jp Dr. Paris Smaragdis (Adobe Systems, Inc, USA) paris@adobe.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------    The non-stationary nature, the richness of the spectra and the mixing of  diverse sources are common characteristics shared by musical and  environmental audio scenes. It leads to specific challenges of audio  processing tasks such as information retrieval, source separation,  analysis-transformation-synthesis and coding. When seeking to extract  information from musical or environmental audio signals, the  time-varying waveform or spectrum are often further analysed and  decomposed into sound elements. Two aims of this decomposition can be  identified, which are sometimes antagonist: to be together adapted to  the particular properties of the signal and to the targeted application.  This special issue is focused on how the choices of a low level  representation (typically a time-frequency distribution with or without  probabilistic framework, with or without perceptual considerations), a  source model or a decomposition technique may influence the overall  performance.  Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to: * factorizations of time-frequency distribution * sparse representations * Bayesian frameworks * parametric modeling * subspace-based methods for audio signals * representations based on instrument or/and environmental sources  signal models * sinusoidal modeling of non-stationary spectra (sinusoids, noise,  transients)  Typical applications considered are (non exclusively): * source separation/recognition * mid or high level features extraction (metrics, onsets, pitches, …) * sound effects * audio coding * information retrieval * audio scene structuring, analysis or segmentation * ...  B. David, L.Daudet, P. Smaragdis, M. Goto.

 "Speech Communication" special issue on "Speech and Face to Face Communication 
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505597/description

Speech communication is increasingly studied in a face to face perspective:
- It is interactive: the speaking partners build a complex communicative act together
involving linguistic, emotional, expressive, and more generally cognitive and social
dimensions;
- It involves multimodality to a large extent: the “listener” sees and hears the speaker who
produces sounds as well as facial and more generally bodily gestures;
- It involves not only linguistic but also psychological, affective and social aspects of
interaction. Gaze together with speech contribute to maintain mutual attention and to
regulate turn-taking for example. Moreover the true challenge of speech communication is
to take into account and integrate information not only from the speaker but also from the
entire physical environment in which the interaction takes place.

The present issue proposes to synthetize the most recent developments in
this topic considering its various aspects from complementary perspectives: cognitive and
neurocognitive (multisensory and perceptuo-motor interactions), linguistic (dialogic face to
face interactions), paralinguistic (emotions and affects, turn-taking, mutual attention),
computational (animated conversational agents, multimodal interacting communication
systems).

There will be two stages in the submission procedure.

- First stage (by DECEMBER 1ST): submission of a one-to-two page abstract describing the
contents of the work and its relevance to the "Speech and Face to Face Communication" topic
by DECEMBER 1ST. The guest editors will then make a selection of the most relevant
proposals in December.

- Second stage (by MARCH 1ST): the selected contributors will be invited to submit a full
paper by MARCH 1ST. The submitted papers will then be peer reviewed through the regular
Speech Communication journal process (two independent reviews). Accepted papers will then
be published in the special issue.

Abstracts should be directly sent to the guest editors:
Marion.Dohen@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr, Gerard.Bailly@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr, Jean-Luc.Schwartz@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr

SPECIAL ISSUE ON SCALABLE AUDIO-CONTENT ANALYSIS

The amount of easily-accessible audio, whether in the form of large
collections of audio or audio-video recordings, or in the form of
streaming media, has increased exponentially in recent times.
However this audio is not standardized: much of it is noisy,
recordings are frequently not clean, and most of it is not labelled.
The audio content covers a large range of categories including
sports, music and songs, speech, and natural sounds. There is
therefore a need for algorithms that allow us make sense of these
data, to store, process, categorize, summarize, identify and
retrieve them quickly and accurately.

In this special issue we invite papers that present novel approaches
to problems such as (but not limited to):

Audio similarity
Audio categorization
Audio classification
Indexing and retrieval
Semantic tagging
Audio event detection
Summarization
Mining

We are especially interested in work that addresses real-world
issues such as:

Scalable and efficient algorithms
Audio analysis under noisy and real-world conditions
Classification with uncertain labeling
Invariance to recording conditions
On-line and real-time analysis of audio.
Algorithms for very large audio databases.

We encourage theoretical or application-oriented papers that
highlight exploitation of such techniques in practical systems/products.

Authors should follow the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music
Processing manuscript format described at the journal site
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asmp/. Prospective authors should
submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the
journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/,
according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due: June 1st, 2009
First Round of Reviews: September 1, 2009
Publication Date: December 1st, 2009

Guest Editors:

1) Bhiksha Raj
Associate professor

School of computer science
Carnegie Mellon university

2) Paris Smaragdis
Senior Research Scientist
Advanced Technology Labs, Adobe Systems Inc.
Newton, MA, USA

3) Malcolm Slaney
Principal Scientist
Yahoo! Research
Santa Clara, CA
and
(Consulting) Professor
Stanford CCRMA

4) Chung-Hsien Wu
Distinguished Professor
Dept. of Computer Science & Infomation Engineering
National Cheng Kung University,
Tainan, TAIWAN

5) Liming Chen
Professor and head of the Dept. Mathematics & Informatics
Ecole Centrale de Lyon
University of Lyon
Lyon, France

6) Professor Hyoung-Gook Kim
Intelligent Multimedia Signal Processing Lab.
Kwangwoon University, Republic of Korea 

Atypical Speech
Call for Papers

Research in speech processing (e.g., speech coding, speech enhancement, speech recognition, speaker recognition, etc.) tends to concentrate on speech samples collected from normal adult talkers. Focusing only on these “typical speakers” limits the practical applications of automatic speech processing significantly. For instance, a spoken dialogue system should be able to understand any user, even if he or she is under stress or belongs to the elderly population. While there is some research effort in language and gender issues, there remains a critical need for exploring issues related to “atypical speech”. We broadly define atypical speech as speech from speakers with disabilities, children's speech, speech from the elderly, speech with emotional content, speech in a musical context, and speech recorded through unique, nontraditional transducers. The focus of the issue is on voice quality issues rather than unusual talking styles.

In this call for papers, we aim to concentrate on issues related to processing of atypical speech, issues that are commonly ignored by the mainstream speech processing research. In particular, we solicit original, previously unpublished research on:
• Identification of vocal effort, stress, and emotion in speech
• Identification and classification of speech and voice disorders
• Effects of ill health on speech
• Enhancement of disordered speech
• Processing of children's speech
• Processing of speech from elderly speakers
• Song and singer identification
• Whispered, screamed, and masked speech
• Novel transduction mechanisms for speech processing
• Computer-based diagnostic and training systems for speech dysfunctions
• Practical applications

Authors should follow the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing manuscript format described at the journal site

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asmp/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at

http://mts.hindawi.com/, according to the following timetable:
Manuscript Due
April 1, 2009
First Round of Reviews
July 1, 2009
Publication Date
October 1, 2009

Guest Editors
•

Georg Stemmer, Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, 80333 Munich, Germany
•

Elmar Nöth, Department of Pattern Recognition, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
•

Vijay Parsa, National Centre for Audiology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6G 1H1 

•

Audiovisual synthesis from text

•

Facial animation from audio

•

Trajectory formation systems

•

Evaluation methods for audiovisual synthesis

•

Perception of audiovisual asynchrony in speech and music

•

Control of speech and facial expressions

One page abstractJanuary 1, 2009
Preselection of papersFebruary 1, 2009
Manuscript dueMarch 1, 2009
First round of reviewsMay 1, 2009
Camera-ready papersJuly 1, 2009
Publication dateSeptember 1,2009

Guest Editors

We would like to invite you to participate in the Language Technology Days organised by Unit E1 - Language Technologies and Machine Translation, on 14-15 January 2009 in Luxembourg.

Our Unit has been established in July 2008 as part of Directorate E - Digital Content and Cognitive Systems of the Directorate-General Information Society and Media. In parallel, some 40 Meuro have been earmarked for multinational projects and networks to be established in 2009 under 

•       the FP7-ICT research programme (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/home_en.html)
•       The ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP), an innovation programme which supports actions aimed at fostering technology uptake and best practices  (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/ict_psp/about/index_en.htm)

The fourth FP7-ICT call for proposals, due to be launched within a few days, features Objective 2.2: Language-based interaction. 

The third ICT-PSP call is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2009, and will include Theme 5: Multilingual Web.

The respective work programmes and calls are in the process of being adopted. They will be presented at the ICT 2008 conference and exhibition held in Lyon on 25-27 November 2008 (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict/2008/index_en.htm). Our session is scheduled for 26 November 2008 at 16:00.

Further information is or will soon become available on

FP7-ICT: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/participating/calls_en.html

ICT-PSP: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/ict_psp/participating/calls/index_en.htm

Our Website (about to be launched): http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/fp7-call4_en.htm

The LT Days will take place in the conference complex of the Jean Monnet building in Luxembourg. Participation is free of charge but subject to prior registration and confirmation.

The particularities of each call will be described in detail and there will be Q&A opportunities after each presentation. We are also offering the chance to meet with EC project officers and discuss your ideas. The skills marketplace is a chance for you to present your organisation and perhaps find the ideal partner for your proposal.

Preliminary agenda:

14 January, 2009        LT and Innovation
12:30 - 14:00           Registration
14:00 - 15:30           Presentation of the Multilingual Web theme within the ICT-PSP call
16:00 - 18:00           Themed session I with the participation of high-level speakers:
Broadening the coverage. How to ensure a more balanced coverage of EU official languages, how to provide each language with an adequate starter kit, how to reduce fragmentation and mobilize or coordinate national efforts. Methods, tools and resources aimed at making LT more scalable and portable across languages, domains and tasks.

In parallel:
16:00 – 18:00           Proposals clinic; meet EC project officers and discuss your ideas

15 January, 2009        LT and Research
08:30 - 09:15           Registration
09:15 - 10:45           Presentation of the Language-based Interaction objective within the FP7-ICT call
11:00 - 13:00           Themed session II with the participation of high-level speakers:
Machine Translation and multilingual LT: Progress and prospects. Presentations will address topics such as Research avenues, towards a paradigm shift? Global communication and content management; Web, translation and LT: business drivers and success factors; LT within and beyond Web 2.0.

13:00 - 14:15           Lunch break & networking
14:15 - 15:30           Skills marketplace; present your organisation, skills and ideas
In parallel:
14:15 - 15:30           Proposals clinic; meet EC project officers and discuss your ideas
15:30 – 16:00           Wrap-up session: Two programmes, one broad vision. Interactive session with speakers and delegates

Participation is subject to prior registration and confirmation. Delegates will have to pay for their own travel and accommodation. The number of participants is limited due to space restrictions. With this in mind, and to help us ensure that the widest possible range of participants is represented, organisations should send only one delegate whenever possible. Please therefore do not definitely book your travel arrangements before your registration has been confirmed.

You are invited to register to the event by e-mail to our functional mailbox. The registration form is attached.

Please register by 19 December 2008 at the latest. For further information please contact: Mrs Susan Fraser (susan.fraser@ec.europa.eu)

Looking forward to seeing soon in Luxembourg,

Roberto Cencioni
Head of unit
DG Information Society and Media
Unit INFSO.E1 - Language technologies and Machine translation

Please fill the registration form below and return it to infso-e1@ec.europa.eu with the mention "LT Days" in the subject field.

Inquiries regarding the imminent FP7-ICT call can be submitted via the above mailbox.
Guidance regarding FP7-ICT pre-proposals and the ICT-PSP call will be provided on the upcoming unit's website.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Registration Form

[ ]  Tick the box to confirm that you have read and agreed to the Privacy Statement

[ ]  Tick the box if you do NOT wish your personal information to be published

Personal Information
Title (Mr/Mrs):
Last Name:     
First Name:    
Organisation:  
Department:    
Country of Organisation:
Email address:
You may choose to attend one or both of the days. 
Please tick your preferences:
14 January 2009
[ ] Multilingual Web within the ICT-PSP Programme

15 January 2009

[ ] Language based Interaction within the FP7-ICT Programme

Breakout sessions

[ ] Skills marketplace  your submission (one MS-PowerPoint foil) must reach us no later than 6 Jan 2009
[ ] Proposals clinic    your submission (up to three MS-Word pages) must reach us no later than 6 Jan 2009
Other information
[ ] I wish to bring a Poster

Have you previously participated in EU funded (IST, ICT, eContent+) projects?   [ ] Yes [ ] No 
Category of delegate:
[ ] Researcher          [ ] Developer/Vendor    [ ] User        [ ] EC or Gov official  [ ] Other (specify):

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Privacy Statement
1. Registration relating to the meeting Language Technology Information Days, 14-15 January 2009
While registering your personal data will be collected and further processed for the purposes detailed hereafter under point 2. The relevant processing operations thereof and the meeting are under the responsibility of the Head of the Unit “Language technologies, machine translation”, Directorate “Digital Content & Cognitive Systems”, Directorate-General Information Society and Media, acting as the Controller.

As this service collects and further processes personal data, Regulation (EC) 45/2001, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2000 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions and bodies and on the free movement of such data, is applicable.

2. What personal information do we collect, for what purpose and through which technical means?
Identification Data
The personal data collected and further processed are:
data necessary for the organisation and management of the meeting, such as Gender (needed for the right title)/name/surname/country/postal & e-mail addresses/phone number/fax number... 

The purpose of the processing of personal data performed in the context of the meeting is the management/organisation of the meeting, including management of: lists for contacts, invitations, participants, distribution of reports, feedback on reports, follow-on actions and meetings, and publication on EUROPA and/or CORDIS websites.

The processing operations on personal data linked to the organisation and management of this meeting are necessary for the management and functioning of the Commission, as mandated by the treaties, and more specifically articles 5, 7 and 211 - 219 of the EC Treaty.

Technical information
3. Who has access to your information and to whom is it disclosed?
Some of your personal data (e.g. name, organisation, email address) will be published on the EC website(s).  If you do not agree with this publication of your personal data, please opt-out where required or inform the data controller by using the Contact Information below and by explicitly specifying your request).

The access to all personal data as well as all information collected in the context of this meeting, and the organisation thereof, is only granted through User Id/Password to a defined population of users, without prejudice to a possible transmission to the bodies in charge of a monitoring or inspection task in accordance with Community legislation. These users typically are: the chairman and the secretary of the meeting, both supported by a team in the operational services inside DG Information Society and Media, acting as processor(s).

In order to keep the network of the participants operational a contact list of participants is shared between attendees. The report including the presence list is shared between participants and distributed to all organisations represented in the meeting.

As reports of these kind of official meetings are Commission documents, they fall under the scope of the Regulation (EC) 1049/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.

No personal data is transmitted to parties which are outside the recipients and the legal framework mentioned.
4. How do we protect and safeguard your information?
The collected personal data and all information related to the above mentioned meeting are stored on the servers of DG Information Society and Media, the operations of which abide by the Commission's security decisions and provisions established by the Directorate of Security for this kind of servers and services.

Access to all collected personal data and all information related to the above mentioned meeting is only possible to the above described populations with a User Id/Password.

5. How can you verify, modify or delete your information?
In case you want to verify which personal data is stored on your behalf by the responsible controller, have it modified respectively corrected or deleted, please contact the Controller by using the Contact Information below and by explicitly specifying your request.

Special attention is drawn to the consequences of a request for deletion, in which case any trace to be able to contact you will be lost.

6. How long do we keep your data?
Your personal data will be part of a list of contact details shared internally amongst the staff of Directorate General Information Society & Media for the purpose of contacting you in the future in the context of the Directorate General's activities. If you do not agree with this, please contact the Controller by using the Contact Information below and by explicitly specifying your request.

7. Contact Information
In case you wish to verify which personal data is stored on your behalf by the responsible controller, have it modified, corrected, or deleted, or if you have questions regarding the organisation of the meeting, or concerning any information processed in the context of the meeting, or on your rights, feel free to contact the support team, operating under the responsibility of the Controller, using the following contact information:

Mrs Susan Fraser
Communication Officer
DG Information Society and Media
Unit INFSO.E1 - Language technologies and Machine translation
Tel.: +352-4301 33721 / (Fax: +352-4301 32100)
E-mail address : susan.fraser@ec.europa.eu

8. Recourse
Complaints, in case of conflict, can be addressed to the European Data Protection Supervisor. 

 Jeudi 22 janvier 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe
========================================
Rachid RIDOUANE
Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris

Titre à préciser

Résumé à préciser

Salle de réunion du Département Parole et Cognition (B314)
3ème étage Bâtiment B ENSE3
961 rue de la Houille Blanche
Domaine Universitaire

Jeudi 5 février 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe
========================================
Daniele SCHON
Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée, Marseille

Titre à préciser

Résumé à préciser

Salle de réunion du Département Parole et Cognition (B314)
3ème étage Bâtiment B ENSE3
961 rue de la Houille Blanche
Domaine Universitaire

Jeudi 12 février 2009, 13h30 – Séminaire externe
========================================
Thierry NAZZI
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception
Paris

Titre à préciser

Résumé à préciser

Salle de réunion du Département Parole et Cognition (B314)
3ème étage Bâtiment B ENSE3
961 rue de la Houille Blanche
Domaine Universitaire

--  _______________________________________________________________________   Please note our NEW ADDRESS:  Helene Loevenbruck, CR CNRS     | Helene.Loevenbruck@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr  Dept Parole & Cognition (ex ICP)|  GIPSA-lab                       | Tel : (33) 4 76 57 47 14  961 rue de la Houille Blanche   | Fax : (33) 4 76 82 63 84  Domaine Universitaire Grenoble  |  F38402 St Martin d'Hères cedex  | http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr/

Early discounted registration for the Voice Search Conference

International Workshop on Pharyngeals & Pharyngealisation Co-organised by the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Science (CRiLLS), Newcastle University and Praxiling Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Montpellier III  Date: 26 March - 27 March 2009 Venue: Research Beehive, Newcastle University This is the first call for posters and for participants for this Pharyngeals and Pharyngealisation Workshop.  Background on Pharyngeals and Pharyngealisation Over the last 50 years, the study of pharyngeal and pharyngealised sounds has fascinated many a linguist due to their varied phonological representations, their complex articulation and co-articulation patterns, their late development in the process of language acquisition, and their sociolinguistic and crosslinguistic patterning. Approaches to the study of pharyngeal and pharyngealised sounds have included: a) phonological work looking at identifying consistent and uniform characteristics for this class of sounds b) experimental work looking at auditory, acoustic, and articulatory manifestations of pharyngeal constrictions c) acquisition studies looking at pharyngeals in babies’ early vocalisations regardless of language and later development in languages which contain these sounds d) socioliguistic work identifying cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal differences in the realisation of these sounds as well as the influence of social factors such gender, ethnicity, and social class. For more information please click here.  Aims of the Workshop The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from around the world who have worked on pharyngeal and pharyngealised sounds in order to share expertise in different methodologies and theoretical approaches to the study of these sounds and attempt to answer various outstanding questions regarding:  Language universals: why are pharyngeal sounds present in only 1% of languages surveyed in the UPSID data base when they are present in children’s early vocalisations? How have these sounds evolved in languages that have lost the pharyngeal distinctions? Is there a relationship between a dense consonantal system and the existence of pharyngeal/pharyngealised sounds in a language? Production and perception: what are the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual correlates of pharyngeal and pharyngealised sounds? What role do visual cues (e.g. lip rounding) play in processing pharyngeal articulations? The sociolinguistic indices of pharyngeal/pharyngealised articulations: How does pharyngealisation manifest itself in different languages/dialects? Is the gender-correlated patterning that has been documented in urban areas in the Arab world with respect to de-emphasis found in other varieties/languages with pharyngeal/pharyngealised articulations? How are pharyngeal articulations affected in language contact situations? Acquisition: at what age are pharyngeal and pharyngealised sounds acquired and what are the developmental manifestations across languages and/or dialects? Invited Speakers Dr John Esling, University of Victoria (Canada) Dr Zeki Hassan, University of Gottenbörg (Sweden) Dr Barry Heselwood, University of Leeds (UK) Prof Asher Laufer, The Hebrew University (Israel Prof Ian Maddieson, University of New Mexico (USA) Dr Slim Ouni, CNRS-Université de Nancy I (France) Dr Yves Laprie, CNRS-Université de Nancy I (France) Dr Rachid Ridouane, LPP CNRS-Université Paris III (France) Dr Kimary Shahin, Qatar University (Qatar) Prof Jim Scobbie, Queen Margaret University (UK) Prof Janet Watson, University of Salford (UK) Dr Chakir Zeroual, Faculté Polydisciplinaire de Taza (Morocco) Scientific Committee Jalal Al-Tamimi (Newcastle University) Enam Al Wer (Essex University) Thomas Baer (University of Cambridge) Jean-Francois Bonnot (Université de Besançon) Nick Clements (LPP CNRS-Université Paris III) Stuart Davis (Indiana University) Susanne Fuchs (Berlin University) John McCarthy (UMASS) Mohamed Embarki (Université Montpellier III) Kenneth de Jong (Indiana University) Ghada Khattab (Newcastle University) Amanda Miller (University of British Columbia) Daniel Recasens (University Autònoma of Barcelona) Harvey Sussman (University of Texas) Nathalie Vallée (Université Stendhal, Grenoble) Organisation of the Workshop The programme consists of 11 invited oral presentations and a poster session.  Workshop Themes We welcome work on pharyngeals and pharyngealisation in any of the following fields:  Universals Phonology Production and perception Modelling Acquisition Sociolinguistic variation To Apply to Present a Poster Abstracts on any of the workshop themes are invited for the poster session. Abstracts should be no longer than two pages including illustrations and references. Please submit your abstract to Crills@ncl.ac.uk by November 30, 2008. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee and applicants will be notified of their acceptance by December the 15th, 2008.  To Apply to Participate Places are available for participants who are not presenting papers but who will participate in discussions. Registration for this event will open in mid-December.  Important dates: Abstract Submission for the poster session: November 30, 2008 Notification of Acceptance: December 15, 2008 Workshop Dates: March 26-27, 2009 Registration: Early deadline (£80 for staff and £40 for students):  January 30, 2009 Late registration (£100 for staff and £50 for students):  January 30- March 25 Registration on the day: £120 for staff and £60 for students Registration for this event will open mid-December so please keep checking the website. Scholarships: Four scholarships of 125 Euros (approximately £100) each will be offered to students travelling from outside the UK and presenting at the poster session. In order to apply for one of the scholarships, please fill in the scholarship form and submit it together with your abstract by the 30th of November deadline. Travel For more information on travelling to and around Newcastle please visit link to www.ncl.ac.uk/travel/info where you can also download maps of the city centre and campus.  Accommodation Coming soon  Organization Committee Jalal Al-Tamimi, CRiLLS, Newcastle University (UK). Jalal.Al-Tamimi@ncl.ac.uk  Mohamed Embarki, Praxiling UMR 5267 CNRS-Montpellier III (France). mohamed.embarki@univ-montp3.fr  Ghada Khattab, CRiLLS, Newcastle University (UK). Ghada.Khattab@ncl.ac.uk  Hussain Kriba, CRiLLS, Newcastle University (UK). Hussin.Kriba@ncl.ac.uk

Call for Papers  3rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2009)  Tarragona, Spain, April 2-8, 2009  http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2009/  *********************************************************************  AIMS:  LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications that was developed at the host institute in the period 2002-2006, LATA 2009 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.).  SCOPE:  Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:  - algebraic language theory - algorithms on automata and words - automata and logic - automata for system analysis and programme verification - automata, concurrency and Petri nets - biomolecular nanotechnology - cellular automata - circuits and networks - combinatorics on words - computability - computational, descriptional, communication and parameterized complexity - data and image compression - decidability questions on words and languages - digital libraries - DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing - document engineering - extended automata - foundations of finite state technology - fuzzy and rough languages - grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.) - grammars and automata architectures - grammatical inference and algorithmic learning - graphs and graph transformation - language varieties and semigroups - language-based cryptography - language-theoretic foundations of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and artificial life - mathematical evolutionary genomics - parsing - patterns and codes - power series - quantum, chemical and optical computing - regulated rewriting - string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics - symbolic dynamics - symbolic neural networks - term rewriting - text algorithms - text retrieval, pattern matching and pattern recognition - transducers - trees, tree languages and tree machines - weighted machines  STRUCTURE:  LATA 2009 will consist of:  - 3 invited talks (to be announced in the second call for papers) - 2 invited tutorials (to be announced in the second call for papers) - refereed contributions - open sessions for discussion in specific subfields or on professional issues (if requested by the participants)  PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:  Parosh Abdulla (Uppsala) Stefania Bandini (Milano) Stephen Bloom (Hoboken) John Brzozowski (Waterloo) Maxime Crochemore (London) Juergen Dassow (Magdeburg) Michael Domaratzki (Winnipeg) Henning Fernau (Trier) Rusins Freivalds (Riga) Vesa Halava (Turku) Juraj Hromkovic (Zurich) Lucian Ilie (London, Canada) Kazuo Iwama (Kyoto) Aravind Joshi (Philadelphia) Juhani Karhumaki (Turku) Jarkko Kari (Turku) Claude Kirchner (Bordeaux) Maciej Koutny (Newcastle) Kamala Krithivasan (Chennai) Martin Kutrib (Giessen) Andrzej Lingas (Lund) Aldo de Luca (Napoli) Rupak Majumdar (Los Angeles) Carlos Martin-Vide (Tarragona & Brussels, chair) Joachim Niehren (Villeneuve d'Ascq) Antonio Restivo (Palermo) Joerg Rothe (Duesseldorf) Wojciech Rytter (Warsaw) Philippe Schnoebelen (Cachan) Thomas Schwentick (Dortmund) Helmut Seidl (Muenchen) Alan Selman (Buffalo) Jeffrey Shallit (Waterloo) Frank Stephan (Singapore)  ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:  Madalina Barbaiani Gemma Bel-Enguix Cristina Bibire Adrian-Horia Dediu Szilard-Zsolt Fazekas Alexander Krassovitskiy Guangwu Liu Carlos Martin-Vide (chair) Robert Mercas Catalin-Ionut Tirnauca Bianca Truthe Sherzod Turaev Florentina-Lilica Voicu  SUBMISSIONS:  Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0). Submissions have to be uploaded at:  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2009  PUBLICATION:  A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference. A refereed volume of extended versions of selected papers will be published after it as a special issue of a major journal. (This was Information and Computation for LATA 2007 and LATA 2008.)  REGISTRATION:  The period for registration will be open since September 1, 2008 to April 2, 2009. The registration form can be found at the website of the conference: http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2009/  Early registration fees: 450 euros Early registration fees (PhD students): 225 euros Registration fees: 540 euros Registration fees (PhD students): 270 euros  At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have a registered author by December 31, 2008 will be excluded from the proceedings.  Fees comprise free access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings volume, and coffee breaks. For the participation in the full-day excursion and conference lunch on Sunday April 5, the amount of 70 euros is to be added to the fees above: accompanying persons are welcome at the same rate.  PAYMENT:  Early registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before December 31, 2008 to the conference account at Open Bank (Plaza Manuel Gomez Moreno 2, 28020 Madrid, Spain): IBAN: ES1300730100510403506598 - Swift code: OPENESMMXXX (account holder: LATA 2009 – Carlos Martin-Vide).  (Non-early) registration fees can be paid either by bank transfer to the same account or in cash on site.  Besides paying the registration fees, it is required to fill in the registration form at the website of the conference. A receipt for the payment will be provided on site.  FUNDING:  Up to 20 grants covering partial-board accommodation will be available for nonlocal PhD students. To apply, candidates must e-mail their CV together with a copy of the document proving their present status as a PhD student.  IMPORTANT DATES:  Paper submission: October 22, 2008 Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: December 10, 2008 Application for funding (PhD students): December 15, 2008 Notification of funding acceptance or rejection: December 19, 2008 Final version of the paper for the proceedings: December 24, 2008 Early registration: December 31, 2008 Starting of the conference: April 2, 2009 Submission to the journal special issue: June 22, 2009  FURTHER INFORMATION:  carlos.martin@urv.cat  ADDRESS:  LATA 2009 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics Rovira i Virgili University Plaza Imperial Tarraco, 1 43005 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34-977-559543 Fax: +34-977-559597

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

http://icassp09.com

Sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society

April 19 - 24, 2009

Taipei International Convention Center

Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.

The 34th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taipei, Taiwan, April 19 - 24, 2009. The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 50 lecture and poster sessions on:

Audio and electroacoustics

Bio imaging and signal processing

Design and implementation of signal processing systems

Image and multidimensional signal processing

Industry technology tracks

Information forensics and security

Machine learning for signal processing

Multimedia signal processing

Sensor array and multichannel systems

Signal processing education

Signal processing for communications

Signal processing theory and methods

Speech and language processing

Taiwan: The Ideal Travel Destination. Taiwan, also referred to as Formosa – the Portuguese word for "graceful" – is situated on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean off the southeastern coast of mainland Asia, across the Taiwan Strait from Mainland China. To the north lie Okinawa and the main islands of Japan, and to the south is the Philippines. ICASSP 2009 will be held in Taipei, a city that blends traditional culture and cosmopolitan life. As the political, economic, educational, and recreational center of Taiwan, Taipei offers a dazzling array of cultural sights not seen elsewhere, including exquisite food from every corner of China and the world. You and your entire family will be able to fully experience and enjoy this unique city and island. Prepare yourself for the trip of your dreams, as Taiwan has it all: fantastic food, a beautiful ocean, stupendous mountains and lots of sunshine!

Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The ICASSP 2009 website www.icassp09.com will provide you with further details. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

Tutorial and Special Session Proposals: Tutorials will be held on April 19 and 20, 2009. Brief proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2008, to Tsuhan Chen at tutorials@icassp09.com and must include title, outline, contact information, biography and selected publications for the presenter, a description of the tutorial, and material to be distributed to participants. Special sessions proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2008, to Shih-Fu Chang at specialsessions@icassp09.com and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited speakers. Tutorial and special session authors are referred to the ICASSP website for additional information regarding submissions.

General Chair

Lin-shan, Lee

National Taiwan University

General Vice-Chair

Iee-Ray Wei

Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd.

Secretaries General

Tsungnan Lin

National Taiwan University

Fu-Hao Hsing

Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd

Technical Program Chairs

Liang-Gee Chen

National Taiwan University

James R. Glass

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Technical Program Members

Petar Djuric

Stony Brook University

Joern Ostermann

Leibniz University Hannover

Yoshinori Sagisaka

Waseda University

Plenary Sessions

Soo-Chang Pei (Chair)

National Taiwan University

Hermann Ney (Co-chair)

RWTH Aachen

Special Sessions

Shih-Fu Chang (Chair)

Columbia University

Lee Swindlehurst (Co-chair)

University of California, Irvine

Tutorial Chair

Tsuhan Chen

Carnegie Mellon University

Publications Chair

Homer Chen

National Taiwan University

Publicity Chair

Chin-Teng Lin

National Chiao Tung University

Finance Chair

Hsuan-Jung Su

National Taiwan University

Local Arrangements Chairs

Tzu-Han Huang

Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd.

Chong-Yung Chi

National Tsing Hwa University

Jen-Tzung Chien

National Cheng Kung University

Conference Management

Conference Management Services

3^rd Advanced Voice Function Assessment International Workshop (AVFA2009)

Madrid (Spain), 18^th - 20^th May 2009

http://www.avfa09.upm.es

     This is the first Call for Papers and Posters for the 3rd Advanced Voice Function Assessment International Workshop (AVFA2009) that will be held from May 18^th to 20^th at the Universidad Politécncia de Madrid, Spain.

Motivation

    Speech is the most important means of communication among humans, resulting from a complex interaction among vocal folds vibration at the larynx and voluntary movements of the articulators (i.e., mouth, tongue, velum, jaw, etc.). The function of voice, however, is not limited to speech communication. It also transfers emotions, expresses personality features and reflects situations of stress or pathology. Moreover, it has an aesthetic value in many different professional activities, affecting salesmen, managers, lawyers, singers, actors, etc.

     Although research in speech science has traditionally favoured areas such as synthesis, recognition or speaker verification, the previous facts motivate the current emerging of a new research area related to voice function assessment.

     AVFA2009 aims at fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and interactions among researchers in voice assessment beyond the framework of COST Action 2103, thus reaching the whole scientific community.

Topics

     Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

• Automatic detection of voice disorders
• Automatic assessment & rating of voice quality
• New strategies for parameterization and modelling normal and pathological voices (biomechanical-based parameters, chaos modelling, etc.)
• Databases of vocal disorders
• Inverse filtering
• Signal processing for remote diagnosis
• Speech enhancement for pathological & oesophageal voices
• Objective parameters extraction from vocal fold images using videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI and other emerging techniques
• Multi-modal analysis of disordered speech
• Robust pitch extraction algorithms for pathological & oesophageal voices
• Emotions in speech
• Speaker adaptation
• Voice Physiology and Biomechanics
• Modelling of Voice Production
• Diagnosis and Evaluation Protocols
• Substitution Voices
• Evaluation of Clinical Treatments
• Analysis of Oesophageal Voices

Submission

    Prospective authors are asked to electronically submit preliminary version of full papers with a maximum length of 4 pages, including figures and tables, in English. Preliminary papers should be submitted as pdf documents, fitted to the linked  template, by the 15^th of January. The submitted documents should include the title and authors' names, affiliations and addresses. In addition, the e-mail address and phone number of the corresponding author should be given. 

    Workshop proceedings will be edited both in paper and CD-ROM. Author registration to the conference is required for accepted papers to be included in the proceedings. The best papers presented at the workshop will be eligible for publication in a referred journal.

Best student paper award

Based on the comments given by the reviewers and the presentation at the conference, the organizing committee will give a best student paper award. The awarded author will be nominated at the closing ceremony of AVFA2009.

Schedule

·        Proposal due 15th January 2009

·        Notification of acceptance 15th February 2009

·        Final papers due 28th February 2009

·        Preliminary program 1st May 2009

·        Workshop 18th May – 20th May 2009

Registration and Information

Registration will be handled via the AVFA2009 web site (http://www.avfa09.upm.es). Please contact the secretariat (avfa09@ics.upm.es) for further information.

Program Committee

• Juan Ignacio Godino Llorente, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Co-Chair
• Pedro Gómez Vilda, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Co-Chair
• Rubén Fraile, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Scientific Secretariat
• Bartolomé Scola Yurrita, Gregorio Marañón Hospital 

·         Phillippe H. Dejonckere, University Medical Center Utrecht

·         Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS EACL 2009, NAACL HLT 2009, AND ACL-IJCNLP 2009

Joint site:  http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/callforworkshops

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for
workshops to be held in conjunction with one of the three flagship
conferences sponsored in 2009 by the Association for Computational
Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2009, EACL 2009, and NAACL HLT 2009.  We solicit
proposals on any topic of interest to the ACL community. Workshops will
be held at one of the following conference venues:

EACL 2009 is the annual meeting of the European chapter of the ACL. The
conference will be held in Athens, Greece, March 30-April 3 2009;
workshops March 30-31.

NAACL HLT 2009 is the annual meeting of the North American chapter of
the ACL.  It continues the inclusive tradition of encompassing relevant
work from the natural language processing, speech and information
retrieval communities.  The conference will be held in Boulder,
Colorado, USA, from May 31-June 5 2009; workshops will be held June 4-5.

ACL-IJCNLP 2009 combines the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL 2009) with the 4th International Joint
Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).  The conference will
be held in Singapore, August 2-7 2009; workshops will be held August 6-7.


    SUBMISSION INFORMATION

In a departure from previous years, ACL-IJCNLP, EACL and NAACL HLT will
coordinate the submission and reviewing of workshop proposals for all
three ACL 2009 conferences.

Proposals for workshops should contain:

    * A title and brief (2-page max) description of the workshop topic
      and content.
    * The desired workshop length (one or two days), and an estimate
      of the audience size.
    * The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses
      of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their
      research interests and areas of expertise.
    * A budget.
    * A list of potential members of the program committee, with an
      indication of which members have already agreed.
    * A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop.
    * A description of special requirements for technical needs.
    * A venue preference specification.

The venue preference specification should list the venues at which the
organizers would be willing to present the workshop (EACL, NAACL HLT, or
ACL-IJCNLP).  A proposal may specify one, two, or three acceptable
workshop venues; if more than one venue is acceptable, the venues should
be preference-ordered.  There will be a single workshop committee,
coordinated by the three sets of workshop chairs.  This single committee
will review the quality of the workshop proposals.  Once the reviews are
complete, the workshop chairs will work together to assign workshops to
each of the three conferences, taking into account the location
preferences given by the proposers.

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find general
information on policies regarding attendance, publication, financing,
and sponsorship, as well as on financial support of SIG workshops, at
the following URL:
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/index-policies.html

Please submit proposals by electronic mail no later than September 1
2008, to acl09-workshops at acl09-workshops@uni-konstanz.de with the
subject line: "ACL 2009 WORKSHOP PROPOSAL."


    PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS

Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals will occur no later
than September 23, 2008.  Since the three ACL conferences will occur at
different times, the timescales for the submission and reviewing of
workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be
different for the three conferences. Suggested timescales for each of
the conferences are given below.

ALL CONFERENCES
Sep 1, 2008     Workshop proposal deadline
Sep 23, 2008    Notification of acceptance of workshops

EACL 2009
Sep 30, 2008    Call for papers issued by this date
Dec 12, 2008    Deadline for paper submission
Jan 23, 2009    Notification of acceptance of papers
Feb  6, 2009    Camera-ready copies due
Mar 30-31, 2009 EACL 2009 workshops

NAACL HLT 2009
Dec 10, 2008    Call for papers issued by this date
Mar 6, 2009     Deadline for paper submissions
Mar 30, 2009    Notification of paper acceptances
Apr 12, 2009    Camera-ready copies due
June 4-5, 2009  NAACL HLT 2009 workshops

ACL-IJCNLP 2009
Feb 6, 2009     Call for papers issued issued by this date
May 1, 2009     Deadline for paper submissions
Jun 1, 2009     Notification of acceptances
Jun 14, 2009    Camera-ready copies due
Aug 6-7, 2009   ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshops

Workshop Co-Chairs:

    * Miriam Butt, EACL, University of Konstanz
    * Stephen Clark, EACL, Oxford University
    * Nizar Habash, NAACL HLT, Columbia University
    * Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, NAACL HLT, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
    * Jimmy Lin, ACL-IJCNLP, University of Maryland
    * Yuji Matumoto, ACL-IJCNLP, Nara Institute of Science and Technology

For inquiries, send email to: acl09-workshops at
acl09-workshops@uni-konstanz.de. 

NAACL HLT 09 Call for Demonstrations

The NAACL HLT 2009 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstration Program to be held June 1-3, 2009 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We encourage both the exhibition of early research prototypes and interesting mature systems. Commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstration Program, and should be arranged as part of the Exhibit Program. We invite proposals for two types of demonstrations:

·        Type I: theater-style, as part of the regular program

·        Type II: poster-style, where demos are to be presented on table-tops in sessions scheduled for a specific time slot.

Submission of a demonstration proposal on a particular topic does not preclude or require a separate submission of a paper on that topic; it is possible that some but not all of the demonstrations will illustrate concepts that are described in companion papers.

Areas of Interest

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following types of systems, some of which have been demonstrated at recent ACL conferences:

·        End-to-end natural language processing systems

·        User interfaces for monolingual and multilingual information access systems, including retrieval, summarization, and QA engines

·        Voice search interfaces

·        Dialogue and conversational systems

·        Multimodal systems utilizing language technology

·        Language technology on mobile devices

·        Applications using embedded language technology components

·        Meeting capture and analysis systems utilizing language technology

·        Natural language processing systems for medical informatics

·        Assistive applications of language technology

·        Visualization tools

·        Software for evaluating natural language systems and components

·        Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts

·        Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.)

·        Tools that assist in the development of other NLP applications (e.g., error analysis)

Format for Submission

Demo proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be sent to the Demonstration Co-Chairs. Please use the main ACL paper formatting guidelines. Please note that no hardware or software will be provided by the local organizer.

·        An extended abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated, including title, authors, full contact information, references, and acknowledgements. Please indicate a Type I or Type II demo.

·        A "script outline" of the demo presentation, including accompanying narrative, and either a Web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams).

The entire proposal must not be more than four pages.

Submissions Procedure

Proposals must be submitted by February 9, 2009 to the Demonstration Co-Chairs. Submissions must be received electronically. Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to:

Michael Johnston                                         Fred Popowich         

AT&T                                                                      Simon Fraser University

johnston “at” research “dot” att “dot” com   popowich “at” sfu “dot” ca

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to computational linguistics, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, as well as potential logistical constraints.

Accepted submissions will be allocated four pages in the Companion Volume to the Proceedings of the Conference.

Further Details

Further details on the date, time, and format of the demonstration session(s) will be determined and provided at a later date. Please send any inquiries to the demonstration co-chairs at the email addresses listed above.

Important Dates

All submissions or camera-ready copies are due by 11:59pm EST on the dates specified above.

IEEE ICASSP 2009

  International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

                           April 19-24, 2009

         Taipei International Convention Center, Taipei, Taiwan

4 distinguished plenary speakers have been invited:

(1) Dynamic Spectrum Management

    by John M. Cioffi, Stanford University & ASSIA Inc.

(2) Signal Processing Bringing on Market Growth – Its Industrial Successes and Future Expectations

    by Kazuo Murano, President, Fujitsu Laboratories Limited

(3) Cognitive User Interfaces: an Engineering Approach

    by Steve Young, University of Cambridge

(4) The Evolution and Trends of the Semiconductor Industry and Signal Processing SoC

    by Ming-Kai Tsai, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, MediaTek Inc.

12 Special Sessions have been organized:

Multimedia Surveillance

Voice Transformation

Signal Processing Challenges for 4G Wireless Communications

Distributed Signal Processing and Consensus Gossiping

Handling Reverberant Speech: Methodologies and Applications

Interference Channels and Spectrum Sharing

Signal Processing for Neural Spike Trains

Multimedia Social Networks

Signal Processing Techniques and Algorithms on Robot Audition

Signal Processing for Improper and Noncircular Complex-Valued Data

The Data Deluge: the Challenges and Opportunities of Unlimited Data in Signal Processing

Video Search and Event Analysis

Over 140 oral and poster sessions are planned on the following fields:

Audio and electroacoustics

Bio imaging and signal processing

Design and implementation of signal processing systems

Industry technology tracks

Image and multidimensional signal processing

Information forensics and security

Machine learning for signal processing

Multimedia signal processing

Sensor array and multichannel systems

Signal processing education

Signal processing for communications

Speech and language processing

Signal processing theory and methods

17 Tutorials are included in the technical program:

 - Fundamentals -

Distributed Adaptive Filters and Networks

Sparse Sampling: Theory, Algorithms and Applications

Beyond Bandlimited Sampling: Nonideal Sampling, Smoothness and Sparsity

Signal and System Theoretic Foundations of Quantization and Data Acquisition (A/D and D/A conversion)

 - Speech and audio -

Automatic Recognition of Natural Speech

Applications of Psychoacoustics to Signal Processing

Special Interests in Mandarin Speech Recognition and Chinese-to-English Machine Translation

 - Image and video -

Distributed Video Coding for Low Cost Multimedia Communications Systems

Distributed Processing in Smart Cameras

Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding

 - Communications -

Distributed Source Coding: Theory, Code Designs and Applications

Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction: Applications and Algorithms

A Unified Design Framework for Non-Linear MIMO Transceivers Using Majorization Theory

Game Theory and Resource Allocation in Wireless Communications

 - Retrieval -

Analysis and Retrieval Techniques for Music and Motion Data

Recent Developments in Content-based and Concept-based Image/Video Retrieval

 - Implementation -

Multimedia Signal Processing on CPU and GPU with Many Cores

                           Call for Proposals

                              Show & Tell

                                   at

                              ICASSP 2009

                           in Taipei, Taiwan

For the second year, the program committee for the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing is accepting proposals for the Show & Tell event that will be held during the conference.  The event will include demonstrations of latest innovations by research groups in industry, academia and government. Demonstrations can be related to any of the topics defined by ICASSP as shown in the call for papers (see http://www.icassp09.com/ICASSP2009.pdf).  Show & Tell sessions will run concurrently with regular ICASSP sessions in the morning and afternoon of April 22-23.

The deadline for submission of Show & Tell proposals is January 15, 2009 with notification of acceptance by February 13, 2009.  Submissions will be accepted via the ICASSP 2009 web site, http://www.icassp09.com.  Proposals should include the demonstration title, list of authors, and an abstract of one page or less.  The abstract should clearly explain what is novel and innovative in the proposed demonstration.  Show & Tell demonstrations should have an interactive component (i.e., should be more than a simple computer simulation or graph).  On the other hand, commercial product demonstrations will be considered more appropriate for ICASSP exhibits than Show & Tell.

Each demonstration will be allotted one 180x60cm table, space for a poster, and a power outlet.  Presenters are responsible for all other equipment and shipping to and from the conference.  Unlike 2008, there will be no charge for Show & Tell at ICASSP 2009 in Taipei.  Presenters must register for ICASSP 2009 in order to participate in Show & Tell demonstrations.

For more detailed information, please visit the ICASSP 2009 official website, http://icassp09.com/ . We look forward to seeing you in Taipei!

NAACL-HLT-09: Call for Tutorial Proposals

Proposals for tutorials on all topics of computational linguistics and speech processing, such as processing for purposes of indexing and retrieval, processing for data mining, and so forth, are welcome. Especially encouraged are tutorials that educate the community about advancements in speech and natural language processing occurring in situ with contextual awareness, such as understanding speech, language or gesture in particular physical contexts.

Information on the tutorial instructor payment policy can be found at http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title= Tutorial_teacher_payment_policy

PLEASE NOTE: Remuneration for Tutorial presenters is fixed according to the above policy and does not cover registration fees for the main conference.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Proposals for tutorials should contain:

1. A title and brief description of the tutorial content and its relevance to the NAACL-HLT community (not more than 2 pages).
2. A brief outline of the tutorial structure showing that the tutorial's core content can be covered in a three-hour slot (including a coffee break). In exceptional cases six-hour tutorial slots are available as well.
3. The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the tutorial instructors, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests and areas of expertise.
4. A list of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial has been given elsewhere; otherwise an estimate of the audience size.
5. A description of special requirements for technical equipment (e.g., internet access).

Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail, in plain ASCII text no later than January 15, 2009 to tutorials.hlt09 "at" gmail "dot" com. The subject line should be: "NAACL HLT 2009: TUTORIAL PROPOSAL".

PLEASE NOTE:

1. Proposals will not be accepted by regular mail or fax, only by email to: tutorials.hlt09 "at" gmail "dot" com.
2. You will receive an email confirmation from us that your proposal has been received. If you do not receive this confirmation 24 hours after sending the proposal, please contact us personally using all the following emails: ciprianchelba "at" google "dot" com,
   kantor "at" scils "dot" rutgers "dot" edu, and
   roark "at" cslu "dot" ogi "dot" edu.

TUTORIAL SPEAKER RESPONSIBILITIES

Accepted tutorial speakers will be notified by February 1, 2009, and must then provide abstracts of their tutorials for inclusion in the conference registration material by March 1, 2009. The description should be in two formats: an ASCII version that can be included in email announcements and published on the conference web site, and a PDF version for inclusion in the electronic proceedings (detailed instructions will be given). Tutorial speakers must provide tutorial materials, at least containing copies of the course slides as well as a bibliography for the material covered in the tutorial, by April 15, 2009.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline for tutorial proposals: January 15, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2009
• Tutorial descriptions due: March 1, 2009
• Tutorial course material due: April 15, 2009
• Tutorial date: May 31, 2009

TUTORIALS CO-CHAIRS

• Ciprian Chelba, Google
• Paul Kantor, Rutgers
• Brian Roark, Oregon Health & Science University

   

Please send inquiries concerning NAACL-HLT-09 tutorials to tutorials.hlt09 "at" gmail "dot" com  

7ème Atelier International sur Indexation Multimédia Par le Contenu.
7th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing

Lieu de la manifestation

Following the six successful previous events (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008), 2009 International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) will be held on June 3-5, 2009 at the picturesque city of Chania, in Crete Island, Greece. It will be organized by Image, Video and Multimedia Laboratory of National Technical University of Athens. CBMI 2009 aims at bringing together the various communities involved in the different aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, such as image processing and information retrieval with current industrial trends and developments. CBMI 2009 is supported by IEEE, EURASIP, University of Athens. The technical program of CBMI 2009 will include presentation of invited plenary talks, special sessions as well as regular sessions with contributed research papers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Multimedia indexing and retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
Matching and similarity search
Construction of high level indices
Multimedia content extraction
Identification and tracking of semantic regions in scenes
Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
Content-based search
Multimedia data mining
Metadata generation, coding and transformation
Large scale multimedia database management
Summarisation, browsing and organization of multimedia content
Presentation and visualization tools
User interaction and relevance feedback
Personalization and content adaptation
Evaluation and metrics

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit full papers at the conference web site: http://www.cbmi2009.org/submission. Style files (Latex and Word) will be provided for the convenience of the authors.

Important Dates

Venue

CBMI 2009 will be hosted at KAM - Mediterranean Centre of Architecture, Chania, at the island of Crete, one of the most exciting Greek destinations. KAM was settled by Chania municipality in 1996 and is situated since 2002 at Great Arsenali, the old port of Chania.

*Nasal 2009*
_Appel à communications_
*Site internet:* http://w3.umh.ac.be/~nasal/Workshop/home.html <http://w3.umh.ac.be/%7Enasal/Workshop/home.html>
*Contact: *nasal2009@umh.ac.be <mailto:nasal2009@umh.ac.be>
L?équipe Praxiling UMR 5267 CNRS (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3), et le Laboratoire des Sciences de la Parole de l'Académie Universitaire Wallonie-Bruxelles (Université de Mons-Hainaut), organisent un colloque international consacré à la *nasalité en phonétique et en phonologie.
*Le colloque aura lieu le *vendredi 5 juin 2009* de 9h00 à 18h30 au Grand Amphithéâtre de la Délégation régionale du CNRS, 1919, route de Mende, F-34293 Montpellier cedex 5.

Depuis les premières descriptions de langues signalant l?existence de sons nasals (dès Panini, au 5e siècle ACN) jusqu?aux monographies phonétiques et phonologiques des 20e et 21e siècles, en passant par les travaux effectués en grammaire comparée au 19e siècle, la nasalité a toujours été l?un des objets d?étude privilégiés pour ceux qui s?intéressent au fonctionnement des langues et de la parole humaine. Avec l?éclosion de la phonétique expérimentale, dès la fin du 19e siècle, des jalons importants ont été posés vers une meilleure compréhension des phénomènes de nasalité, notamment grâce à la mise au point de dispositifs instrumentaux novateurs (Rousselot, 1897). A partir du milieu du 20e s, les principes fondamentaux de l?acoustique et de la perception de la nasalité ont été établis (Delattre, 1954, House & Stevens, 1956, Fant, 1960). Au même moment, plusieurs médecins investiguaient les troubles de la parole liés aux fentes palatines, en particulier l?hypernasalité (Warren et Dubois, 1964). Les années 60 et 70 ont vu de nombreux progrès en ce qui concerne la description de la production de la nasalité, y compris en parole pathologique (p.ex. Björk, 1961, Fritzell, 1969, Bell-Berti , 1976, Benguerel et al., 1977, Weinberg et al., 1968). Diverses techniques ont été convoquées : cinéradiographie, électromyographie, fibroscopie, aérodynamique, tandis que des dispositifs spécifiquement dédiés à la nasalité étaient développés (p.ex. le nasographe : Ohala, 1971). Les études nasales ont ainsi massivement contribué à l?élaboration des théories et des modèles de la coarticulation (pour une revue, voir p.ex. Chafcouloff et Marchal, 1999). Plus récemment, dans les années 80 et 90, notre compréhension de la perception de la nasalité a connu d?importantes avancées, notamment grâce au développement de la synthèse de la parole et de la modélisation (Beddor, 1993, Kingston et MacMillan, 1995, Krakow et al., 1988, Maeda, 1993).

Malgré ces avancées, la nasalité demeure aujourd?hui encore l?un de ces objets linguistiques qui résistent à une complète compréhension. Les phénomènes de nasalisation et les processus qui les sous-tendent ne peuvent être décrits que via le recours à une complexité conceptuelle, méthodologique et instrumentale rarement égalée, et résistent souvent à l'articulation avec les théories et les modèles les mieux éprouvés. Ainsi, malgré de nombreux travaux sur les différents aspects de la production des sons nasals, on manque toujours d?un modèle opérationnel de la production de la nasalité qui rende compte des non linéarités entre les phases articulatoire, aérodynamique, et acoustique. Par ailleurs, malgré des résultats prometteurs obtenus en modélisation (p.ex. Maeda, 1982, 1993), on ne sait pas encore exactement dans quelle mesure l?étendue spatiale du geste d?ouverture vélo-pharyngée est reliée au percept de nasalité. La question du déploiement de la nasalité dans le domaine temporel demeure elle aussi largement non résolue. Chaque langue présente ses patrons spécifiques de coarticulation, d?ajustements et de coordination gestuels, mais il reste à déterminer les contraintes qui encadrent (ou déterminent) ces spécificités: liens avec la structure prosodique (Vaissière, 1988, Fougeron, 2001), avec le statut phonologique de la nasalité dans la langue, avec les autres éléments de l?inventaire phonologique, covariation avec d?autres traits/gestes (Solé, 2007) tels que le voisement et la friction (consonnes), l?aperture vocalique ou le lieu d?articulation (voyelles), etc. La perception de la coarticulation nasale à travers les langues est actuellement l?une des pistes de recherche les plus prometteuses pour la compréhension des phénomènes de nasalité (Beddor, 2007).

Enfin, la grande diversité des langues est génératrice d?infinie variabilité. Or, de nombreuses langues sont encore peu décrites, qui présentent des phénomènes intéressants liés à la nasalité. Qu?il s?agisse des fricatives nasales pré-nasalisées du kinyarwanda (Demolin, 2005) ou des occlusives nasales pré et post-oralisées du karitiana (Storto & Demolin, 2008), les travaux les plus récents concernant les variantes nasales dans les langues du monde permettent de confronter certaines hypothèses ou modélisations préalablement proposées (p.ex. Demolin, 2007). En effet, les bénéfices potentiels des études nasales pour la compréhension du fonctionnement du langage humain sont heureusement à la hauteur du défi que pose la nasalité au chercheur en sciences du langage. L?étude de la nasalisation permet de tester et d?améliorer nos hypothèses quant à la nature des relations entre phonétique et phonologie, que ce soit du point de vue de l?individu, au niveau cognitif, ou du point de vue de la langue, au niveau structurel. Les phénomènes de nasalité permettent également d?investiguer ce qui, dans l?organisation des sons d?une langue, relève de l?universel, et ce qui est spécifique à une langue donnée, en lien avec son système propre (voir p.ex. Maddieson, 2007). De même, les études nasales ont été, et seront sans doute à l?avenir, amenées à contribuer au développement et à la vérification d?outils, de théories et de modèles centraux en phonétique et en phonologie : modélisation articulatoire et acoustique, théories de la coarticulation, modèles d?apprentissage des langues étrangères, etc. Les études nasales sont au c?ur des enjeux majeurs des disciplines scientifiques reliées à la communication parlée.
L?objectif de ce colloque international est de permettre aux chercheurs du monde entier de se réunir et d?échanger à propos de leurs travaux récents concernant la nasalité. Toute proposition de communication concernant la nasalité est la bienvenue, en particulier les travaux concernant: la production (mesures articulatoires, études aérodynamiques, analyses acoustiques, etc.), la perception, les aspects phonologiques, les universaux phonétiques, la modélisation, les langues peu décrites, les aspects pathologiques et cliniques, l?acquisition du langage et l?apprentissage d?une langue seconde. Un intérêt tout particulier sera accordé aux communications traitant de questions transversales aux champs disciplinaires cités ci-dessus : multiinstrumentation, liens entre production et perception, comparaisons inter-langues, relations entre l?organisation des systèmes phonologiques et les contraintes phonétiques, points communs et divergences entre acquisition en L1 et apprentissage en L2, etc.
*Conférenciers invités
*Patrice S. Beddor, University of Michigan, USA
Didier Demolin, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique
John Hajek, University of Melbourne, Australia
Ian Maddieson, University of Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Alain Marchal, Université d'Aix-en-Provence, France
Jacqueline Vaissière, Université de Paris III, France
*Comité scientifique
*Pierre Badin, Gipsa-Lab, France
Nick Clements, Université de Paris III, France
Bernard Harmegnies, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Belgique
Sarah Hawkins, University of Cambridge, UK
Marie Huffman, State University of New York Stony Brook, USA
John Kingston, University of Massachussets at Amherst, USA
Christine Matyear, University of Texas at Austin, USA
John Ohala, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Daniel Recasens, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Espana
Ryan Shosted, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Maria Josep Solé, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Espana
Nathalie Vallée, Gipsa-Lab, France
Doug Whalen, Haskins Laboratories, USA
*Comité d'organisation
*Véronique Delvaux, FNRS, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Présidente
Mohamed Embarki, Université de Montpellier 3, Vice-Président
Christelle Dodane, Université de Montpellier 3, Actes
Josiane Clarenc, Université de Montpellier 3, Logistique
*Date limite de soumission
*15 février 2009

*Modalités de soumission
*Envoyer un message avec les coordonnées complètes du premier auteur et le nom des éventuels autres auteurs à nasal2009@umh.ac.be <mailto:nasal2009@umh.ac.be> avec, en fichier attaché, un article _anonyme_ de quatre pages A4 maximum sous la forme d'un fichier pdf.
Un modèle de fichier Word est téléchargeable sur le site du colloque: http://w3.umh.ac.be/~nasal/Workshop/appel.html <http://w3.umh.ac.be/%7Enasal/Workshop/appel.html>
*Date de notification de l'acceptation
*6 avril 2009
*Publication
*Les actes du colloque seront distribués gratuitement à toutes les personnes régulièrement inscrites et présentes le 5 juin 2009 à Montpellier. Pré-inscrivez-vous par simple mail à l'adresse: nasal2009@umh.ac.be <mailto:nasal2009@umh.ac.be>.
Les participants sont invités à soumettre une version longue de leur communication (50000 caractères) pour une éventuelle publication dans un livre à paraître chez un éditeur international. (Plus de détails bientôt). Date limite de soumission des papiers: 14 septembre 2009.
Pour le comité d'organisation,
V. Delvaux
Chargée de Recherches FNRS
Laboratoire de Phonétique
Service de Métrologie et Sciences du Langage
Université de Mons-Hainaut
18, Place du Parc
7000 Mons
Belgium
+3265373140
http://staff.umh.ac.be/Delvaux.Veronique/index.html 

SPECOM 2009 - SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

    13-th International Conference "Speech and Computer"
                             21-25 June 2009
     Grand Duke Vladimir's palace, St. Petersburg, Russia
                      http://www.specom.nw.ru


Organized by St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS)

Dear Colleagues, we are pleased to invite you to the 13-th International Conference on Speech and Computer SPECOM'2009, which will be held in June
21-25, 2009 in St.Petersburg. The global aim of the conference is to discuss state-of-the-art problems and recent achievements in Signal Processing and
Human-Computer Interaction related to speech technologies. Main topics of SPECOM'2009 are:
- Signal processing and feature extraction
- Multimodal analysis and synthesis
- Speech recognition and understanding
- Natural language processing
- Spoken dialogue systems
- Speaker and language identification
- Text-to-speech systems
- Speech perception and speech disorders
- Speech and language resources
- Applications for human-computer interaction

The official language of the event is English. Full papers up to 6 pages will be published in printed and electronic proceedings with ISBN.

Imporatnt Dates:
- Submission of full papers: February 1, 2009 (extended)
- Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2009
- Submission of final papers: March 20, 2009
- Early registration: March 20, 2009
- Conference dates: June 21-25, 2009

Scientific Committee:
Andrey Ronzhin, Russia (conference chairman)
Niels Ole Bernsen, Denmark
Denis Burnham, Australia
Jean Caelen, France
Christoph Draxler, Germany
Thierry Dutoit, Belgium
Hiroya Fujisaki, Japan
Sadaoki Furui, Japan
Jean-Paul Haton, France
Ruediger Hoffmann, Germany
Dimitri Kanevsky, USA
George Kokkinakis, Greece
Steven Krauwer, Netherlands
Lin-shan Lee, Taiwan
Boris Lobanov, Belarus
Benoit Macq, Belgium
Jury Marchuk, Russia
Roger Moore, UK
Heinrich Niemann, Germany
Rajmund Piotrowski, Russia
Louis Pols, Netherlands
Rodmonga Potapova, Russia
Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
Lawrence Rabiner, USA
Gerhard Rigoll, Germany
John Rubin, UK
Murat Saraclar, Turkey
Jesus Savage, Mexico
Pavel Skrelin, Russia
Viktor Sorokin, Russia
Yannis Stylianou, Greece
Jean E. Viallet, France
Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine
Christian Wellekens, France

The invited speakers of SPECOM'2009 are:
- Prof. Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany), lecture "Towards Natural Acoustic Interfaces for Automatic Speech Recognition"
- Prof. Mikko Kurimo (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland), lecture "Unsupervised decomposition of words for speech recognition and retrieval"

The conference venue is House of Scientists (former Grand Duke Vladimir's palace) located in the very heart of the city, in the neighborhood
of the Winter Palace (Hermitage), the residence of Russian emperor, and the Peter's and Paul's Fortress. Independently of the scientific actions
we will provide essential possibilities for acquaintance with cultural and historical valuables of  Saint-Petersburg, the conference will be hosted
during a unique and wonderful period known as the White Nights.

Contact Information:
SPECOM'2009 Organizing Committee,
SPIIRAS, 39, 14-th line, St.Petersburg, 199178, RUSSIA
E-mail: specom@iias.spb.su
Web: http://www.specom.nw.ru 

at Johns Hopkins University invites one page research proposals for a

NSF-sponsored, Six-week Summer Research Workshop on

Machine Learning for Language Engineering

to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA,

June 22 to July 31, 2009.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2008.

One-page proposals are invited for the 15^th annual NSF sponsored JHU summer workshop.  Proposals should be suitable for a six-week team exploration, and should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT) including speech recognition, machine translation, information retrieval, text summarization and question answering.  This year, proposals in related areas of Machine Intelligence, such as Computer Vision (CV), that share techniques with HLT are also being solicited.  Research topics selected for investigation by teams in previous workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal. (See http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops.)

Proposals on all topics of scientific interest to HLT and technically related areas are encouraged.  Proposals that address one of the following long-term challenges are particularly encouraged.

Ø  ROBUST TECHNOLOGY FOR SPEECH:  Technologies like speech transcription, speaker identification, and language identification share a common weakness: accuracy degrades disproportionately with seemingly small changes in input conditions (microphone, genre, speaker, dialect, etc.), where humans are able to adapt quickly and effectively. The aim is to develop technology whose performance would be minimally degraded by input signal variations.

Ø  KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY FROM LARGE UNSTRUCTURED TEXT COLLECTIONS: Scaling natural language processing (NLP) technologies—including parsing, information extraction, question answering, and machine translation—to very large collections of unstructured or informal text, and domain adaptation in NLP is of interest.

Ø  VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g., generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned image features that have recently become popular for object detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search for the best analysis.

Ø  UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data to address any of the challenges above could potentially make large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV are therefore of considerable interest.

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated no later than October 22, 2008. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas to a peer-review panel on November 7-9, 2008.  It is expected that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2009 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.  Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.  Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance, usually by the senior researchers. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, will be rising seniors who are new to the field and have shown outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2009 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join us for the organizational meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available for participation in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp@jhu.edu by 4PM EST on Wed, October 15, 2008.