| | ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing
Special Issue on
Speech and Language Processing of Children's Speech
for Child-machine Interaction Applications
The state-of the-art in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is suitable for a broad range of interactive applications. Although
children represent an important user segment for speech processing technologies, the acoustic and linguistic variability present in
children's speech poses additional challenges for designing successful interactive systems for children.
Acoustic and linguistic characteristics of children's speech are widely different from those of adults and voice interaction of
children with computers opens challenging research issues on how to develop effective acoustic, language and pronunciation models for
reliable recognition of children's speech. Furthermore, the behavior of children interacting with a computer is also different from the
behavior of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding
conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults.
In order to develop reliable voice-interactive systems further studies are needed to better understand the characteristics of children's
speech and the different aspects of speech-based interaction including the role of speech in multimodal interfaces. The development of pilot
systems for a broad range of applications is also important to provide experimental evidence of the degree of progress in ASR technologies
and to focus research on application-specific problems emerging by using systems in realistic operating environments.
We invite prospective authors to submit papers describing original and previously unpublished work in the following broad research areas:
analysis of children's speech, core technologies for ASR of children's speech, conversational interfaces, multimodal child-machine
interaction and computer instructional systems for children. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech
- Discourse analysis of spoken language in child-machine interaction
- Intra- and inter-speaker variability in children's speech
- Age-dependent characteristics of spoken language
- Acoustic, language and pronunciation modeling in ASR for children
- Spoken dialogue systems
- Multimodal speech-based child-machine interaction
- Computer assisted language acquisition and language learning
- Tools for children with special needs (speech disorders, autism, dyslexia, etc)
Papers should have a major focus on analysis and/or acoustic and linguistic processing of children's speech. Analysis studies should
be clearly related to technology development issues and implications should be extensively discussed in the papers. Manuscripts will be
peer reviewed according to the standard ACM TSLP process.
Submission Procedure
Authors should follow the ACM TSLP manuscript preparation guidelines described on the journal web site http://tslp.acm.org and submit an
electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal manuscript submission site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/acm/tslp.
Authors are required to specify that their submission is intended for this Special Issue by including on the first page of the manuscript
and in the field 'Author's Cover Letter' the note 'Submitted for the Special Issue on Speech and Language Processing of Children's Speech
for Child-machine Interaction Applications'. Without this indication, your submission cannot be considered for this Special Issue.
Schedule
Submission deadline: May 12, 2010
Notification of acceptance: November 1, 2010
Final manuscript due: December 15, 2010
Guest Editors
Alexandros Potamianos, Technical University of Crete, Greece (potam@telecom.tuc.gr)
Diego Giuliani, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy (giuliani@fbk.eu)
Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California, USA (shri@sipi.usc.edu)
Kay Berkling, Inline Internet Online GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany (Kay@Berkling.com)
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