Workshop on New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research
University of Pennsylvania, January 28-31, 2011.

Today, advances in networking, computation and mass storage are promising a new revolution in phonetics research: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger. To welcome and promote this revolution, we are organizing a workshop on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies (including software to facilitate teaching and research); variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics.

The last day of the workshop (January 31st) is for those interested in discussing development of tools suitable for teaching acoustic-phonetic analysis to beginners while allowing smooth progression to efficient advanced research protocols. The aim is to capitalize on the strengths of existing freeware systems, losing none of their capabilities, while providing as unified a platform as possible for future development.

Authors of contributions on Very-Large-Scale phonetics may submit either extended abstracts or Interspeech-style papers (up to four pages) via the workshop website at http://ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/workshop. In addition, those interested in participating in the freeware tools workshop on January 31st are warmly invited to apply by emailing speech.tools.workshop@gmail.com with an outline (less than 1000 words) of what you would like to contribute to the workshop, and (if you wish) other topics that you would like discussed.

Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop. Further details are available on the workshop website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/workshop.

Organizing Committee