The 8th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference will take place in Istanbul (Turkey) on May 21-27, 2012.
More information will be available soon on: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/lrec2012.htm

Submit an Abstract for Oral and Poster presentation:

To submit your abstract, please go to:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/lrec2012/ Your abstract must consist of 1500 to 2000 words (about 3-4 pages; can contain references, tables, figures)  and must be formatted in PDF.
There is no template for the pdf abstract. The template will be made available online for the final papers.  Submissions are NOT anonymous.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
In addition to the LRE Map, for LREC2012 we introduce a new feature, the Language Library: it is an experiment of a collaboratively created repository which can be built with a small effort from each of you.

We suggest to submit your abstract and the corresponding LRE Map information as soon as possible. Note that you will be able to revise and re-submit an improved version of the abstract and the Map forms at any time (before the call closure).

Please do not wait until the last moment!

Submit a proposal for Workshop, Tutorial or Panel:

Submission of workshop, tutorial and panel proposals should be made via the LREC2012 conference website. The links for making your submission are the following:

http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/Submit-a-Workshop-Proposal.html
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?Submit-a-Tutorial-Proposal
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?Submit-a-Panel

Back

Top

The updated schedule for LREC 2012 workshops and tutorials is online: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?-Workshops-and-Tutorials-
Many workshops have already issued their 2nd Call for papers and deadlines have been extended.
Please visit the page to find more information on each event, including submission information and deadlines, organizers, invited speakers, etc.

LREC 2012 in Istanbul
Workshops & Tutorials: 21-22 May & 26-27 May 2012
Main conference: 23-24-25 May 2012

http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012

Back

Top

APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS JEP'2012

http://www.jeptaln2012.org/ 29e Journées d'Études sur la Parole Grenoble du 4 au 8 juin 2012

le site de soumission des JEP est désormais ouvert.
Vous trouverez les consignes aux auteurs sur : http://www.jeptaln2012.org/?page_id=65
et les liens pour soumettre sont sur http://www.jeptaln2012.org/?page_id=69

Attention, cette année , les styles présentent des modifications importantes par rapport aux versions des conférences précédentes car ils ont été optimisés pour une lecture à l’écran. Nous souhaitons ainsi réduire l’impact écologique de l’utilisation de nos articles en évitant des impressions dues à un format inadapté.

Par ailleurs, les orateurs invités suivant ont confirmé leur venue à JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012 (titres à venir)

Ian MADDIESON, University of California, Berkeley
Jacqueline LEON, CNRS, Paris
Yoshinori SAGISAKA, University of Waseda, Tokyo
Hans USZKOREIT, DFKI, Saarbrucken

CALENDRIER

Date limite de soumission : 31 janvier 2012 Notification aux auteurs : 20 mars 2012 Date limite de soumission des versions définitives : 15 avril 2012 Conférence : 4-8 juin 2012

PRÉSENTATION

 Organisée par l’équipe GETALP du LIG (Laboratoire Informatique de Grenoble), le LIDILEM (Laboratoire de linguistique et didactique des langues étrangères et maternelles) et le Gipsa-lab, les JEP’2012 se tiendront du 4 au 8 juin 2012 à Grenoble à l’occasion de la conférence jointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL’2012. JEP-TALN-RECITAL’2012 regroupe la 29ème édition des Journées d’Étude sur la Parole (JEP’2012), la 19ème édition de la conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN’2012) et la 14ème édition des Rencontres des Étudiants Chercheurs en Informatique pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues (RECITAL’2012). Pour la quatrième fois, après Nancy en 2002, Fès en 2004, et Avignon en 2008, l’AFCP (Association Francophone pour la Communication Parlée) et l’ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues) organisent conjointement leur principale conférence afin de réunir en un seul lieu les deux communautés du traitement de la langue orale et écrite. Les JEP’2012 comprendront des communications orales et affichées et des conférences invitées.

 Thématiques Les communications porteront sur la parole dans ses différents aspects. Les thèmes de la conférence incluent, de façon non limitative : •Acoustique de la parole •Acquisition de la parole et du langage •Analyse, codage et compression de la parole •Applications à composantes orales (dialogue, indexation, interaction, etc) •Apprentissage d’une langue seconde •Communication multimodale •Dialectologie •Évaluation, corpus et ressources •Langues en danger •Modèles de langage •Pathologies de la parole •Perception de parole •Phonétique et phonologie •Phonétique clinique •Prises de position présentant un point de vue sur les sciences et technologies de la parole •Production de parole •Prosodie •Psycholinguistique •Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole •Reconnaissance de la langue •Reconnaissance du locuteur •Signaux sociaux, sociophonétique •Synthèse de la parole

Critères de Sélection

Les auteurs sont invités à soumettre des travaux de recherche originaux, n’ayant pas fait l’objet de publications antérieures. Les contributions proposées seront examinées par au moins deux spécialistes du domaine. Seront considérées en particulier : •l’importance et l’originalité de la contribution ; •la discussion critique des résultats, en particulier par rapport aux autres travaux du domaine ; •la situation des travaux présentés dans le contexte de la recherche internationale ; •l’organisation et la clarté de la présentation ; •l’adéquation aux thèmes de la conférence. Les articles sélectionnés seront publiés dans les actes de la conférence. Modalités de Soumission Les articles soumis ne devront pas dépasser 4 pages en Times 10, sur deux colonnes, format A4. Les différents modèles (Word, Word 2007, OpenOffice Writer et LaTeX) seront disponibles sur le site internet de la conférence (à venir cet automne). Contact : laurent.besacier@imag.fr

Bourses L’AFCP offre un certain nombre de bourses pour les doctorants et jeunes chercheurs désireux de prendre part à la conférence, voir le site de l’AFCP L’ISCA apporte également un soutien financier aux jeunes chercheurs participant à des manifestations scientifiques sur la parole et le langage, voir le site de l’ISCA

Back

Top

http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=2022

Invitation to and call for papers for the

International Symposium on Audiovisual Detection of Errors in
Pronunciation Training (IS ADEPT)

KTH, Stockholm, Sweden
6-8 June 2012
www.speech.kth.se/isadept

This symposium is a one-time event endorsed by SLaTE (the ISCA Special
Interest Group on Speech and Language Technologies in Education) and
organized to bring together academia and industry within the field of
Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT). Its aim is to reach a
common understanding of the current state-of-the-art in methods for
pronunciation error analysis and their use in CAPT software in order
to identify the needs and paths for future research.

Keynote speakers
Lewis Johnson, Chief scientist at Alelo Inc.
Gary Pelton, Vice President, Speech Development at Rosetta Stone
Horacio Franco, Speech Technology & Research Laboratory SRI International
Gary Pelton, Vice President Carnegie Speech
Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen
Silke Witt-Ehsani, Vice President, TuVox Design Center
Florian Hoenig, University of Erlangen

The invited speakers will give presentations focusing on overviews of
automatic pronunciation detection methods in commercial applications
and research projects, ongoing development of pronunciation analysis
algorithms, and the pedagogical or pragmatic needs in future
development.
The symposium program will also include regular scientific
presentations, a demo session, panel discussion plus a social program
(included common lunches, symposium dinner and guided visit to the
Stockholm City Hall).

Paper submissions
Prospective participants should submit a full 4 or 6 page paper, or a
1 page demo proposal.

Important Dates
Paper Submission: 15 February 2012
Notification of Acceptance: 13 April 2012
Demo description Submission: 13 April 2012
Camera-Ready Paper: 4 May 2012
Early registration Deadline: 4 May 2012

www.speech.kth.se/isadept
isadept2012@speech.kth.se

Back

Top

Appel pour ateliers et tutoriels

OBJECTIFS

Un atelier porte sur une thématique particulière de TALN afin de
rassembler quelques exposés plus ciblés. Il a son propre président et
son propre comité de programme. Le responsable d'un atelier est chargé
de l'appel à candidatures et de la coordination de son comité de
programme. Les organisateurs de TALN ne s'occuperont que de la partie
matérielle (gestion des salles, pauses café, déjeuner et diffusion des
actes). Les ateliers et tutoriels auront lieu en parallèle sur une
journée ou une demi-journée (2 à 4 sessions de 1h30).

MODALITÉS DE PROPOSITION

Les propositions d'ateliers et tutoriels seront envoyées sous forme
électronique à claude.ponton@u-grenoble3.fr ou à
virginie.zampa@u-grenoble3.fr au plus tard le 24 janvier 2012.

Les propositions d'ateliers comprendront une description synthétique (1
page) de la thématique de la conférence ainsi que son comité de
programme et la durée souhaitée.

Les propositions de tutoriel comprendront une description synthétique (1
page) de la thématique, les noms des intervenants ainsi que la durée
souhaitée (1 à 2 sessions de 1h30).

Le comité de programme de TALN choisira parmi toutes les propositions et
donnera sa réponse au plus tard le 6 février 2012.

CALENDRIER

  * Date limite de soumission : 24 janvier 2012
  * Réponse du comité de programme : 6 février 2012
  * Version finale pour actes: 15 avril 2012
  * Date des ateliers et tutoriels: 8 juin 2012

FORMAT

Les conférences auront lieu en français (ou en anglais pour les
non-francophones). Les articles devront suivre le format de TALN et ne
pas dépasser 10 pages en Times 12, espacement simple, figures, exemples
et références compris.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message diffuse par la liste Langage Naturel 
Informations, abonnement : http://www.atala.org/article.php3?id_article=48
English version       : 
Archives                 : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ln.html
                                http://liste.cines.fr/info/ln

La liste LN est parrainee par l'ATALA (Association pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues)
Information et adhesion  : http://www.atala.org/

Back

Top

 NAACL-HLT 2012 workshop is 'Will We Ever Really Replace the N-gram Model?
On the Future of Language Modeling for HLT. '
The details of our workshop are given on our web page
https://sites.google.com/site/wlm2012naacl/

Back

Top

APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2012 (http://www.apsipa2012.org/)
Hollywood, California, USA, December 3-6, 2012 
Paper submission Deadline: June 10, 2012
 
Important Dates:
Submission of Proposals for Special Sessions, Forum, Panel & Tutorial Sessions: May 10, 2012
Submission of Full and Short Papers: June 10, 2012 
Submission of Papers in Special Sessions: July 10, 2012 
Notification of Papers Acceptance: Aug. 30, 2012 
Submission of Camera Ready Papers: Sep. 30, 2012

Welcome to the APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference (ASC) 2012 located in Hollywood, California. Hollywood is home to the stars and to some of the most recognizable attractions in the world. APSIPA ASC 2012 will be the 4th annual conference organized by Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA). Founded in 2009, APSIPA aims to promote research and education on signal processing, information technology and communications. The annual conference was previously held in Japan (2009), Singapore (2010) and China (2011). 

The regular technical program tracks and topics of interest include (but not limited to):

1.   Biomedical Signal Processing and Systems (BioSPS) 
1.1 Biomedical Imaging 
1.2 Modeling and Processing of Physiological Signals (EKG, MEG, EKG, EMG, etc) 
1.3 Biologically-inspired Signal Processing 
1.4 Medical Informatics and Healthcare Systems 
1.5 Genomic and Proteomic Signal Processing 
 
2.  Signal Processing Systems: Design and Implementation (SPS) 
2.1 Nanoelectronics and Gigascale Systems 
2.2 VLSI Systems and Applications 
2.3 Embedded Systems 
2.4 Video Processing and Coding 
2.5 Signal Processing Systems for Data Communication 

3.  Image, Video, and Multimedia (IVM) 
3.1 Image/video Coding 
3.2 3D image/video Processing 
3.3 Image/video Segmentation and Recognition 
3.4 Multimedia Indexing, Search and Retrieval
3.5 Image/video Forensics, Security and Human Biometrics 
3.6 Graphics and Animation 
3.7 Multimedia Systems and Applications 

4.  Speech, Language, and Audio (SLA) 
4.1 Speech Processing: Analysis, Coding, Synthesis, Recognition and Understanding 
4.2 Natural Language Processing: Translation, Information Retrieval, Dialogue 
4.3 Audio Processing: Coding, Source Separation, Echo Cancellation, Noise Suppression 
4.4 Music Processing  

5.  Signal and Information Processing Theory and Methods (SIPTM) 
5.1 Signal Representation, Transforms and Fast Algorithms 
5.2 Time Frequency and Time Scale Signal Analysis 
5.3 Digital Filters and Filter Banks 
5.4 DSP Architecture 
5.5 Statistical Signal Processing 
5.6 Adaptive Systems and Active Noise Control 
5.7 Sparse Signal Processing 
5.8 Signal Processing for Communications 
5.9 Signal Processing for Energy Systems 
5.10 Signal Processing for Emerging Applications 

6.  Wireless Communications and Networking (WCN) 
6.1 Wireless Communications: Physical Layer 
6.2 Wireless Communications and Networking: Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks, MAC, Wireless Routing and Cross-layer Design 
6.3 Wireless Networking: Access Network and Core Network 
6.4 Security and Cryptography 
6.5 Devices and Hardware  

Submission of Papers:
Prospective authors are invited to submit either full papers, up to 10 pages in length, or short papers up to 4 pages in length, where full papers will be for the single-track oral presentation and short papers will be mostly for poster presentation. The conference proceedings of the main conference will be published, available and maintained at the APSIPA website. The proceedings will be indexed by EI Compendex.
 
Tutorial Proposals:
Tutorials will be held on Monday, December 3, 2012. Proposals must include title, outline, contact and biography information of the presenter, and a short description of the material to be distributed.

Special Session Proposals:
Proposals must provide title, rationale, contact and biography information of the organizers, and a list of invited papers with tentative title and abstract.

Awards will be given to a number of papers with best quality. More information can be found at conference website http://www.apsipa2012.org/. 

Look forward to seeing you in Hollywood!

General Chairs: 
C.-C. Jay Kuo, Shrikanth Narayanan and Antonio Ortega
University of Southern California

Back

Top

19th International ECSE Summer School in Novel Computing
June 18-21, 2012, JOENSUU, FINLAND
http://cs.joensuu.fi/ecse/2012/

Registration deadline: May 31, 2012
==================================================================

University of Eastern Finland (UEF) announces the 19th
International ECSE Summer School in Novel Computing:

http://cs.joensuu.fi/ecse/2012/

The summer school includes two parallel tracks:

Course 1:     Recent Advances in Probabilistic Modeling for Pattern Recognition
Lecturer:     Dr. PATRICK KENNY, Lead researcher, CRIM, Montreal, Canada
Description:  http://cs.joensuu.fi/ecse/2012/Kenny_probabilistic.pdf

Course 2:     Social Computing
Lecturer:     Dr. ROSTA FARZAN, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Description:  http://cs.joensuu.fi/ecse/2012/Farzan_social.pdf

By participating to the lectures, the course participants earn two credit points (2 ECTS) according to the European credit transfer system. Upon successful participation, each participants will be given a printed course certificate.

In addition to high-quality lectures, the summer school offers an
inspiring learning environment and relaxed social program, in the middle of
North Carelia region. Experience the unique Finnish midsummer with lakeside
sauna and the nearly 'nightless night'.

With approximately 15000 students and 2800 members of staff, the University of
Eastern Finland is one of the largest universities in Finland. The university
has campuses in Joensuu, Kuopio and Savonlinna. The university has extensive
international relations and it is involved in several international networks.
The university's teaching and research staff and students are active in
participating in various mobility programmes.

The summer school is organized by the School of Computing, University of Eastern Finland (http://www.uef.fi/cs). The research areas of the department include intelligent media computing (speech & image processing, color research and computational intelligence), information systems and software quality, interactive technologies and educational technology.

Contact:

WWW:    http://cs.joensuu.fi/ecse/2012/
e-mail: ecse2012@cs.joensuu.fi

Any questions about the individual courses can be directed to:

Pattern recognition:    Dr. Tomi Kinnunen (tkinnu@cs.joensuu.fi)
Social Computing:       Dr. Roman Bednarik (rbednari@cs.joensuu.fi)
General inquiries:      Prof. Pasi Fränti (franti@cs.joensuu.fi)

See you in Joensuu!

Back

Top

the submission date for CBMI'2012 has been extended to February 20th, 2012

********10th International Workshop On Content –Based Multimedia Indexing******
*******************************************************************************
Call for papers

Following the nine successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001, Rennes
2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania 2009, Grenoble 2010 and Madrid
2011), LISTIC University of Savoy/CNRS will organize the next Context Based Multimedia
Indexing event on June 27-29 2012 10th. www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012

 International Workshop CBMI 2012 aims at bringing together the various communities
involved in the different aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing
and presentation. The scientific program of CBMI 2011 will include invited keynote talks and
regular and special sessions with contributed research papers. Best papers will be published
in a special issue of ACM Multimedia tools and Applications, Springer. The Workshop is supported by IEEE,
French national Research network GDR-CNRS ISIS, Rhône-Alpes Region. ACM SIGMM and Eurasip supports are pending.

Technical Program:
Topics of interest, grouped in technical tracks, include, but are not limited to:   
      * Visual Indexing (image, video, graphics)
      * Visual content extraction Identification and tracking of semantic regions
      * Identification of semantic events   
      * Audio and Multi-modal Indexing
      * Audio indexing (audio, speech, music)
      * Audio content extraction
      * Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
      * Metadata generation, coding and transformation   
      * Multimedia Information Retrieval (image, audio, video, …)
      * Matching and similarity search
      * Content-based search
      * Multimedia data mining
      * Multimedia recommendation
      * Large scale multimedia database management
      * Multimedia Browsing and Presentation
      * Summarisation, browsing and organization of multimedia content
      * Personalization and content adaptation
      * User interaction and relevance feedback
      * Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools

All accepted and registered papers will be published in the workshop proceedings which will
be indexed and distributed by the IEEExplore. Selected papers will appear, after extension
and peer-review, in a special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications journal.

Paper submission:
Prospective authors are invited to submit full papers of not more than six (6) pages including
results, figures and references. Papers will be accepted only by electronic submission
through conference management system. Style files (Latex and Word) will be provided for
the convenience of the authors at www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012

Important dates:
      * Submission of full paper (to be received by): January 13, 2012
      * Notification of acceptance: February 27, 2011
      * Submission of camera-ready papers: March 12, 2011

Chairs: 
General chair: Patrick Lambert, LISTIC, Polytech de Savoie Technical
Technical Program chair: Stéphane Marchand-Maillet, University of Geneva
Technical Program co-chair: Shin’ichi Satoh, NII, Japan
Special Session chair: Philippe Joly, IRIT, France
Publicity chair: Jenny Benois-Pineau, LABRI, University of Bordeaux, France
Publication chair: Alexandre Benoit, University of Savoie, France
Demo chair: Sid-Ahmed Berrani, Orange Labs, France
ACM SIGMM liaison officer: Suzanne Boll, University of Oldenburg, Germany

Steering committee:
Régine André-Obrecht, IRIT, France
Jenny Benois-Pineau, LABRI, University of Bordeaux, France
Chabane Djeraba, LIFL, France Moncef Gabbouj, University of Tampere, Finland
Patrick Gros, INRIA, France
Ebroul Izquierdo, QMUL, UK
Philippe Joly, IRIT, France
Riccardo Leonardi, University of Brescia, Italy
Bernard Merialdo, EURECOM, France
Georges Quénot, LIG, France
Thomas Sikora, TUB, Germany

Special issue:
Extended communications will be published in a special issue of an open call of ACM
Multimedia Tools and Applications journal, Springer after peer-review.

Cultural program:
The cultural program will be devoted to the history of media production and will comprise a
visit to the French museum of cartoons and a cruise at a historical lake of Annecy with finest
testing of traditional French cuisine.

CALL FOR PAPERS www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012
contact: patrick.lambert@univ-savoie.fr

Back

Top

Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation: Benchmarking efforts, multimedia databases/ datasets of various modalities (speech, audio, video, sensory, etc.) and fidelities (quality, bitrate, etc.), testing conditions and methods, new objective metrics and models for upcoming standards.

Back

Top

Call for papers

LabPhon 13
The 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology
Stuttgart, Germany, July 27-29, 2012

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2012

Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2012

Conference website:
http://www.labphon13.labphon.org/

Abstracts are solicited for contributed papers for presentation as 20-minute oral contributions or as posters. Contributions relating to the conference themes are especially encouraged; there will also be sessions for non-thematic papers.

The overall theme for the conference is “Phonological and phonetic computations: between grammar and neural activity.” Our goal is to bring together researchers from phonology, phonetics, and adjacent psycho- and neurosciences and to seek to advance these disciplines by encouraging the joint pursuit of interdisciplinary research questions. Specific topics that address this theme are the following:

    Simulation as a research method in Laboratory Phonology.
    Invited speakers: Bruce Hayes (UCLA), Andrew Wedel (Univ. Arizona)
    Invited moderator: Bernd Möbius (Saarland Univ.)

    Computational approaches to sound change: data-driven and model driven.
    Invited speakers: Jonathan Harrington (LMU Munich), Paul Boersma (Univ. Amsterdam)
    Invited moderator: John Coleman (Univ. Oxford)

    Temporal mechanisms in neural processing of sounds and prosodies.
    Invited speakers: Karsten Steinhauer (McGill Univ.), William Idsardi (Univ. Maryland)
    Invited moderator: Carsten Eulitz (Univ. Konstanz)

    Rich memory for rich phonology.
    Invited speakers: Stephen Goldinger (Arizona State Univ.), Robert Port (Indiana Univ.)
    Invited moderator: Holger Mitterer (MPI Nijmegen)

Non-thematic sessions (both oral and poster) will include contributions to other topics of interest to the LabPhon community.

Back

Top

*********************************************************************

2012 INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES

SSLST 2012

(formerly International PhD School in Language and Speech Technologies)

Tarragona, Spain

July 30 – August 3, 2012

Organized by:

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/sslst2012/

*********************************************************************

AIM:

SSLST 2012 offers a broad and intensive series of lectures at different levels on language and speech technologies. The students choose their preferred courses according to their interests and background. Instructors are top names in their respective fields. The School intends to help students initiate and foster their research career.

The previous event in this series was WSLST 2012: http://grammars.grlmc.com/wslst2012/

ADDRESSED TO:

Graduate (and advanced undergraduate) students from around the world. Most appropriate degrees include: Computer Science and Linguistics. Other students (for instance, from Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Philosophy, or Cognitive Science) are welcome too.

The School is appropriate also for people more advanced in their career who want to keep themselves updated on developments in the field.

There will be no overlap in the class schedule.

COURSES AND PROFESSORS:

- Jont B. Allen (Illinois Urbana-Champaign), A Parametric Analysis of Speech Perception [introductory, 8 hours]

- Hervé Bourlard (Idiap Research Institute, Martigny), Introduction to Speech Recognition, and New Trends in Multilingual Speech Processing [introductory/intermediate, 6 hours]

- Marcello Federico (Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento), Statistical Machine Translation [introductory/intermediate, 8 hours]

- Giuseppe Riccardi (Trento), Spoken Language Understanding [intermediate/advanced, 6 hours]

- Noah A. Smith (Carnegie Mellon), Probability and Structure in Natural Language Processing [intermediate, 8 hours]

- Bayya Yegnanarayana (International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad), Speech Signal Processing [introductory/intermediate, 8 hours]

REGISTRATION:

It has to be done on line at

http://grammars.grlmc.com/sslst2012/Registration.php

FEES:

They are variable, depending on the number of courses each student takes. The rule is:

1 hour =

- 10 euros (for payments until May 18, 2012),

- 15 euros (for payments after May 18, 2012).

PAYMENT PROCEDURE:

The fees must be paid to the School's bank account:

Uno-e Bank

bank’s address: Julian Camarillo 4 C, 28037 Madrid, Spain

IBAN: ES3902270001820201823142

BIC/SWIFT code: UNOEESM1

account holder: Carlos Martin-Vide GRLMC

account holder’s address: Av. Catalunya 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain

Please mention SSLST 2012 and your name in the subject. A receipt will be provided on site.

Remarks:

- Bank transfers should not involve any expense for the School.

- People claiming early registration will be requested to prove that the bank transfer order was carried out by the deadline.

- Students may be refunded only in the case when a course gets cancelled due to the unavailability of the instructor.

People registering on site at the beginning of the School must pay in cash. For the sake of local organization, however, it is much recommended to do it earlier.

ACCOMMODATION:

Information about accommodation will be available on the website of the School.

CERTIFICATES:

Students will be delivered a certificate stating the courses attended, their contents, and their duration.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Announcement of the programme: April 12, 2012

Starting of the registration: April 12, 2012

Early registration deadline: May 18, 2012

Starting of the School: July 30, 2012

End of the School: August 3, 2012

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

Lilica Voicu:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

WEBSITE:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/sslst2012/

POSTAL ADDRESS:

SSLST 2012

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

Av. Catalunya, 35

43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34-977-559543

Fax: +34-977-558386

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Diputació de Tarragona

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Back

Top

EUSIPCO 2012
27-31 August 2012, Bucharest, Romania

Back

Top

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON IMITATION AND CONVERGENCE IN SPEECH (ISICS 2012)

Aix-en-Provence, France, 3-5 September 2012

mail: isics2012@lpl-aix.fr
website: spim.risc.cnrs.fr/ISICS.htm

OVERVIEW

In the course of a conversational interaction, the behavior of each talker often tends to become more similar to that of the conversational partner. Such convergence effects have been shown to manifest themselves under many different forms, which include posture, body movements, facial expressions, and speech. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate their conversational exchange.  It occurs, by definition, within a social interaction, but has consequences for language that extend much beyond the temporal limits of that interaction. It has been suggested that imitation plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. The behavioral tendency shown by humans to imitate others may be connected at the brain level with the presence of mirror neurons, whose discovery has raised important issues about the role that these neurons may fulfill in many different domains, from sensorimotor integration to the understanding of others' behavior.

The focus of this international symposium will be the fast-growing body of research on convergence phenomena between speakers in speech. The symposium will also aim to assess current research on the brain and cognitive underpinnings of imitative behavior. Our main goal will be to bring together researchers with a large variety of scientific backgrounds (linguistics, speech sciences, psycholinguistics, experimental sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences) with a view to improving our understanding of the role of imitation in the production, comprehension and acquisition of spoken language.

The symposium is organized by the laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France (www.lpl.univ-aix.fr). It will be chaired by Noël Nguyen (LPL) and Marc Sato (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), and will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines.

INVITED SPEAKERS

. Luciano Fadiga, University of Ferrara, Italy
. Maëva Garnier, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
. Beatrice Szczepek Reed, University of York, United Kingdom

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on the topics covered by the symposium. Abstracts not exceeding 2 pages must be submitted electronically and in pdf format by 15 April 2012. They will be selected by the Scientific Committee on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the symposium. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent to the authors by 31 May 2012.

IMPORTANT DATES

. 15 April 2012: Abstract submission deadline
. 31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance / rejection
. 30 June 2012: Early registration deadline

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

. Patti Adank, University of Manchester, UK
. Martine Adda-Decker, laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris, France
. Gérard Bailly, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Roxane Bertrand, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Ann Bradlow, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
. Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, Urbana-Champaign, USA
. Mariapaola D’Imperio, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Laura Dilley, Department of Psychology and Linguistics, Michigan State University, USA
. Sophie Dufour, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA
. Jonathan Harrington, University of Munich, Germany
. Jennifer Hay, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
. Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, New York, USA
. Holger Mitterer, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
. Lorenza Mondada, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
. Kuniko Nielsen, Oakland University, Rochester, USA
. Noël Nguyen, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh, UK
. Marc Sato, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Jean-Luc Schwartz, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Véronique Traverso, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
. Sophie Wauquier, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

Back

Top

TSD 2012 - FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
      *********************************************************

Fifteenth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2012)
	      Brno, Czech Republic, 3-7 September 2012
		    http://www.tsdconference.org/

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen.  The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES:

    March 15 2012 ............ Submission of abstracts
    March 22 2012 ............ Submission of full papers

Submission of abstract serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.

TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.  TSD Proceedings
are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation
Index.  Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases
such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.


The TSD 2012 conference will be accompanied by a one-day satellite workshop

    Hybrid Machine Translation

The workshop is organized in cooperation with the PRESEMT EU project
Consortium, submissions from other EU machine translation and other
projects are more than welcomed.  The MT workshop submissions will
undergo two separate review processes - the best papers which will
succeed in both review processes (by the TSD 2012 Conference PC and MT
Workshop 2012 PC) will be published in the TSD 2012 Springer
Proceedings, all other accepted MT workshop papers will be published
in a separate proceedings with ISBN.  The MT workshop will take
place on September 3 2012 in the conference venue.


TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

    Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual,
    text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation,
    specialized lexicons, dictionaries)

    Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional
    speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words,
    alternative way of feature extraction, new models for
    acoustic and language modelling)

    Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech
    (morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and
    disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis,
    credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization,
    authorship attribution)

    Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high
    fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing)

    Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information
    extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web,
    knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense
    disambiguation, plagiarism detection)

    Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing
    (machine translation, natural language understanding,
    question-answering strategies, assistive technologies)

    Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
    question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in
    dialogues)

    Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial
    animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions
    and personality modelling)

Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Hynek Hermansky, USA (general chair)
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Genevieve Baudoin, France
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, GB
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Patrick Hanks, GB
    Ludwig Hitzenberger, Germany
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Steven Krauwer, The Netherlands
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    Diana McCarthy, UK
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Elmar Noeth, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Vladimir Petkevic, Czech Republic
    Fabio Pianesi, Italy
    Maciej Piasecki, Poland
    Adam Przepiorkowski, Poland
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Milan Rusko, Slovakia
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Stefan Steidl, Germany
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine
    Yorick Wilks, GB
    Victor Zakharov, Russia


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
    Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will
be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 8 pages
formatted in the LNCS style (see below). Those accepted will be
presented either orally or as posters. The decision about the
presentation format will be based on the recommendation of the
reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the
on-line form accessible from the conference website.

Papers submitted to TSD 2012 must not be under review by any other
conference or publication during the TSD review cycle, and must not be
previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...',
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as 'Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...'.  Papers that do not conform to the
requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.

The authors are strongly encouraged to write their papers in TeX
or LaTeX formats. These formats are necessary for the final
versions of the papers that will be published in the Springer
Lecture Notes.  Authors using a WORD compatible software for the
final version must use the LNCS template for WORD and within the
submit process ask the Proceedings Editors to convert the paper
to LaTeX format.  For this service a service-and-license fee of
CZK 1500 will be levied automatically.

The paper format for review has to be either PDF or PostScript file
with all required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance,
presenters will receive further information on submitting their
camera-ready and electronic sources (for detailed instructions on
the final paper format see
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html#Proceedings).

Authors are also invited to present actual projects, developed
software or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference.  The presenters of the demonstration should provide the
abstract not exceeding one page. The demonstration abstracts will not
appear in the conference proceedings.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 15 2012 ............ Submission of abstracts
March 22 2012 ............ Submission of full papers
May 15 2012 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2012 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
July 26 2012 ............. Submission of demonstration abstracts
July 31 2012 ............. Notification of acceptance for
                           demonstrations sent to the authors
September 3-7 2012 ....... Conference date

Submission of abstracts serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.

The accepted conference contributions will be published in proceedings
that will be made available to participants at the time of the
conference.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 3-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation will be available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
    
    Vendula Halkova, TSD 2012
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2012@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2012 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, Eindhoven, Rome and Prague and by trains or
buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, nearby places may
also be of interest.  Local ones include: Brno Castle now called
Spilberk, Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the
Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian
Margraves, Church of St.  James, Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul,
Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat
designed by Mies van der Rohe along with other important
buildings of between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with
Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of the Battle of
three emperors (Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz
- Battle by Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz),
Pernstejn Castle, Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice
Chateau, Letovice Chateau, Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish
cemeteries in Central Europe, Telc - a town on the UNESCO
heritage list, and many others are all within easy reach.

Back

Top

*********************************************************
       Hybrid Machine Translation - LAST CALL FOR PAPERS
    *********************************************************

Hybrid Machine Translation Workshop, satellite workshop of TSD 2012
	     Brno, Czech Republic, 3 September 2012
     http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2012/conf_workshop.html

The MT Workshop is organized by the Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University, Brno, in cooperation with the PRESEMT EU
project Consortium. The MT Workshop is a satellite workshop of
the Text, Speech and Dialog Conference.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE:

    March 25 2012 ............ Submission of full papers

The submission will be closed during the next day after the deadline.

HYBRID MACHINE TRANSLATION

Interest in flexible and adaptable MT systems, based on the
language-independent hybrid methods, whose principles ensure easy
portability to new language pairs has led us to organizing
an MT Workshop in the framework of the TSD Conference 2012. These
methods attempt to overcome well-known problems of some
MT approaches, e.g. bilingual corpora compilation or the
laborious creation of the new rules per language pair. We also
want to address the issue of effectively managing multilingual
content and would welcome interesting suggestions in the
direction of a language-independent machine-learning-based
methodology.

The key aspects that should be touched at the MT Workshop involve
among others syntactic phrase-based modelling, pattern
recognition approaches (such as extended clustering) or
techniques towards the development of a language-independent
analysis. These aspects are intended to be of a hybrid nature,
combining linguistic processing with the positive aspects of the
corpus-based approaches, such as SMT and EBMT.

The need for easy amenability to new language pairs and
relatively inexpensive, readily available language resources as
well as bilingual lexica should be touched too. Modelling of the
translation context on phrases can improve the translation
quality so it should be considered too. Producing phrases via
a semi-automatic and language-independent process of
morphological and syntactic analysis may remove the need for
compatible NLP tools per language pair.

Another relevant aspect to which the attention has to be paid is
a parallelisation of the main translation processes since their
investigation may help to reach a fast, high-quality translation
system. Furthermore, the optimisation and personalisation of the
system parameters via automated processes (such as GAs or swarm
intelligence) is an issue which deserves to be investigated in
any case.

One of the points relevant for MT systems is a user adaptability
and user feedback with appropriate integrated interactive
interfaces. Such systems can be easily customised to both new
language pairs and specific sublanguages.


TOPICS

Topics of the MT Workshop include all themes of machine
translation (with stress on hybrid aspects of MT).

The workshop is organized in cooperation with the PRESEMT EU project
Consortium, submissions from other EU machine translation and other
projects are more than welcomed.

Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    George Tambouratzis, Greece (chair)
    Bjorn Gamback, Sweden
    Adam Kilgarriff, GB
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Paul Schmidt, Germany


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    George Tambouratzis
        Institute for Lnaguage and Speech Processing, Greece
        PRESEMT Machine Translation System


FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP

The MT Workshop program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster session.

As a part of the main TSD 2012 Conference, social events including
a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal
interactions.


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.  TSD Proceedings
are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation
Index.  Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases
such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

The MT Workshop submissions will undergo two separate review processes
- the best papers which will succeed in both review processes (by the
TSD 2012 Conference PC and MT Workshop 2012 PC) will be published in
the TSD 2012 Springer Proceedings, all other accepted MT Workshop
papers will be published in a separate MT Workshop proceedings
with ISBN.

Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 8 pages
formatted in the LNCS style (see below). Those accepted will be
presented either orally or as posters. The decision about the
presentation format will be based on the recommendation of the
reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the
on-line form accessible from the conference website, MT Workshop
submissions have to tick 'MT Workshop review' check box in the form.

Papers submitted to the MT Workshop must not be under review by any
other conference or publication during the workshop review cycle, and
must not be previously published or accepted for publication
elsewhere.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...',
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as 'Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...'.  Papers that do not conform to the
requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.

The authors are strongly encouraged to write their papers in TeX
or LaTeX formats. These formats are necessary for the final
versions of the papers that will be published in the Springer
Lecture Notes.  Authors using a WORD compatible software for the
final version must use the LNCS template for WORD and within the
submit process ask the Proceedings Editors to convert the paper
to LaTeX format.  For this service a service-and-license fee of
CZK 1500 will be levied automatically.

The paper format for review has to be either PDF or PostScript file
with all required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance,
presenters will receive further information on submitting their
camera-ready and electronic sources (for detailed instructions on
the final paper format see
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html#Proceedings).


IMPORTANT DATES

March 25 2012 ............ Submission of full papers
May 15 2012 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2012 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
September 3 2012 ......... MT workshop date
September 4-7 2012 ....... TSD 2012 Conference date

Submission of abstracts serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.

The accepted workshop contributions will be published in proceedings
that will be made available to participants at the time of the
conference.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 3-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation will be available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to

    Karel Pala, MT Workshop, TSD 2012
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2012@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2012 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, Eindhoven, Rome and Prague and by trains or
buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, nearby places may
also be of interest.  Local ones include: Brno Castle now called
Spilberk, Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the
Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian
Margraves, Church of St.  James, Cathedral of St. Peter&Paul,
Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat
designed by Mies van der Rohe along with other important
buildings of between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with
Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of the Battle of
three emperors (Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz
- Battle by Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz),
Pernstejn Castle, Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice
Chateau, Letovice Chateau, Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish
cemeteries in Central Europe, Telc - a town on the UNESCO
heritage list, and many others are all within easy reach.

Back

Top

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON IMITATION AND CONVERGENCE IN SPEECH (ISICS 2012)
Aix-en-Provence, France, 3-5 September 2012 

Second call for communications - Website: http://isics2012.sciencesconf.org/
Extended deadline to 30th April 2012. 

OVERVIEW

In the course of a conversational interaction, the behavior of each talker often tends to become more similar to that of the conversational partner. Such convergence effects have been shown to manifest themselves under many different forms, which include posture, body movements, facial expressions, and speech. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate their conversational exchange. It occurs, by definition, within a social interaction, but has consequences for language that extend much beyond the temporal limits of that interaction. It has been suggested that imitation plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. The behavioral tendency shown by humans to imitate others may be connected at the brain level with the presence of mirror neurons, whose discovery has raised important issues about the role that these neuro
 ns may fulfill in many different domains, from sensorimotor integration to the understanding of others' behaviour.

The focus of this international symposium will be the fast-growing body of research on convergence phenomena between speakers in speech. The symposium will also aim to assess current research on the brain and cognitive underpinnings of imitative behavior. Our main goal will be to bring together researchers with a large variety of scientific backgrounds (linguistics, speech sciences, psycholinguistics, experimental sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences) with a view to improving our understanding of the role of imitation in the production, comprehension and acquisition of spoken language.

The symposium is organized by the laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France (www.lpl.univ-aix.fr). It will be chaired by Noël Nguyen (LPL) and Marc Sato (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), and will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines.

INVITED SPEAKERS

- Alessandro d'Ausilio, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy
- Maeva Garnier, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
- Beatrice Szczepek Reed, University of York, United Kingdom

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on the topics covered by the symposium. Abstracts not exceeding 2 pages must be submitted electronically and in pdf format by 30 April 2012 (http://isics2012.sciencesconf.org/). They will be selected by the Scientific Committee on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the symposium. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent to the authors by 31 May 2012.

IMPORTANT DATES

- 30 April 2012: Abstract submission extended deadline 
- 31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance / rejection
- 30 June 2012: Early registration deadline

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 

- Noël Nguyen (Chair)
- Marc Sato (Co-Chair)
- Nadéra Bureau
- Sophie Dufour
- Amandine Michelas
- Nadia Monségu

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

- Patti Adank, University of Manchester, UK
- Martine Adda-Decker, laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris, France
- Gérard Bailly, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Roxane Bertrand, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Ann Bradlow, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
- Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, Urbana-Champaign, USA
- Mariapaola D'Imperio, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Laura Dilley, Department of Psychology and Linguistics, Michigan State University, USA
- Sophie Dufour, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA
- Jonathan Harrington, University of Munich, Germany
- Jennifer Hay, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
- Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, New York, USA
- Holger Mitterer, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- Lorenza Mondada, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
- Kuniko Nielsen, Oakland University, Rochester, USA
- Noël Nguyen, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Marc Sato, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Jean-Luc Schwartz, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Véronique Traverso, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
- Sophie Wauquier, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

Back

Top

Call for Participation
INTERSPEECH 2012 
Speaker Trait Challenge 

Personality, Likability, Pathology

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________

The Challenge

Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more 'conventional' phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last instalment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and intoxication. Consequently, we now focus on speaker traits. The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain.

In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results.

Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:

. In the Personality Sub-Challenge, the personality of a speaker has to be determined based on acoustics potentially including linguistics for the OCEAN five personality dimensions, each mapped onto two classes.

. In the Likability Sub-Challenge, the likability of a speaker's voice has to be determined by a learning algorithm and acoustic features. While the annotation provides likability in multiple levels, the classification task is binarised.

. In the Pathology Sub-Challenge, the intelligibility of a speaker has to be determined by a classification algorithm and acoustic features.

The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Recall of the two classes. Transcription of the train and development sets will be known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature set will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have to stick to the definition of training, development, and test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but have only five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes peer-review and has to be accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge. The organisers preserve the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves in the Challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in all Sub-Challenges. 
Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:

. Participation in the Personality Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Likability Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Pathology Sub-Challenge
. Novel features and algorithms for the analysis of speaker traits
. Unsupervised learning methods for speaker trait analysis
. Perception studies, additional annotation and feature analysis on the given sets
. Context exploitation in speaker trait assessment

The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in the Speaker Trait Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage: 
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________  

Organisers:

Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Rob van Son (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands)
_____________________________________________  



If you want to participate, please find the License Agreement at:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS12-STC-Agreement.pdf

Thank you for excusing cross-postings.


All the best,

Björn Schuller
On behalf of the Organisers


___________________________________________

Dr. Björn Schuller
Senior Lecturer

Technische Universität München
Institute for Human-Machine Communication
D-80333 München
Germany
+49-(0)89-289-28548

schuller@tum.de
www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch
___________________________________________

Back

Top

Special session at the next Interspeech conference  Portland, Oregon, September 9-13, 2012.
 
This special session is entitled “Glottal Source Processing: from Analysis to Applications”.
 
The special session aims at gathering researchers interested in speech processing techniques dealing with the analysis of the glottal excitation, and in its applicability in various speech technologies such as voice pathology detection, speech synthesis, speaker identification and emotion recognition.
 
The deadline for full paper submission is April 1, 2012. Note that your paper will go through the regular reviewing system and will be included in the special session if it is accepted and fits the scope.
 
First we have to collect a list of potential papers that could be submitted to the special session. 
 
If you think that you could have a contribution to submit, please return the tentative title, authors and affiliations by email: thomas.drugman - at - umons.ac.be

 If you think that you could have a contribution to submit in April, could you please return by email for January 12 the tentative title, authors and affiliations
 
T. Drugman, P. Alku, B. Yegnanarayana and A. Alwan

Back

Top

Special Session at Interspeech 2012

Speech and Audio Analysis of Consumer and Semi-Professional Multimedia

              http://interspeech2012.org/Special.html

**********************************************************************
**********************************************************************
**********************************************************************
**********************************************************************


Consumer-grade and semi-professional multimedia material (video) is becoming abundant on the Internet and other online archives. It is easier than ever to download material of any kind. With cell-phones now featuring video recording capability along with broadband connectivity, multimedia material can be recorded and distributed across the world just as easily as text could just a couple of years ago. The easy availability of vast amounts of text gave a huge boost to the Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval research communities, The above-mentioned multimedia material is set to do the same for multi-modal audio and video analysis and generation. We argue that the speech and language research community should embrace that trend, as it would profit vastly from the availability of this material, and has significant own know-how and experience to contribute, which will help shape this field.

Consumer-created (as opposed to broadcast news, “professional style”) multimedia material offers a great opportunity for research on all aspects of human-to-human as well as man-machine interaction, which can be processed offline, but on a much larger scale than is possible in online, controlled experiments. Speech is naturally an important part of these interactions, which can link visual objects, people, and other observations across modalities. Research results will inform future research and development directions in interactive settings, e.g. robotics, interactive agents, etc., and give a significant boost to core (offline) analysis techniques such as robust audio and video processing, speech and language understanding, as well as multimodal fusion.

Large-scale multi-modal analysis of audio-visual material is beginning in a number of multi-site research projects across the world, driven by various communities, such as information retrieval, video search, copyright protection, etc. While each of these have slightly different targets, they are facing largely the same challenges: how to robustly and efficiently process large amounts of data, how to represent and then fuse information across modalities, how to train classifiers and segmenters on un-labeled data, how to include human feedback, etc. Speech, language and audio researchers have considerable interest and experience in these areas, and should be at the core and forefront of this research. To make progress at a useful rate, researchers must be connected in a focused way, and be aware of each other’s work, in order to discuss algorithmic approaches, ideas for evaluation and comparisons across corpora and modalities, training methods with various degrees of supervision, available data sets, etc. Sharing software, databases, research results and projects' descriptions are some of the key elements to success which are at the core of the Speech and Language in Multimedia (SLIM) SIG's objectives.

The special session will serve these goals by bringing together researchers from different fields – speech, but also audio, multimedia – to share experience, resources and foster new research directions and initiatives. Contributions are expected on all aspects of speech and audio processing for multimedia contents: research results but also presentation of ongoing research projects or software, multimedia databases and benchmarking initiatives, etc. A special session, as opposed to a regular session, offers unique opportunities to emphasize interaction between participants with the goal of strengthening and growing the SLIM community. The following format will be adopted: a few selected talks targeting a large audience (e.g., project or dataset descriptions, overview) will open the session, followed by a panel and open discussion on how to develop our community along with poster presentations.

Back

Top

54th International Symposium ELMAR-2012
                   September 12-14, 2012
                     Zadar, Croatia

        Paper submission deadline: March 19, 2012

               http://www.elmar-zadar.org/


                     CALL FOR PAPERS


 TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS

 IEEE Region 8
 IEEE Croatia Section
 IEEE Croatia Section SP, AP and MTT Chapters
 EURASIP - European Association for Signal Processing


 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS INDEXED BY

 IEEE Xplore, INSPEC, SCOPUS and CPCI 
 (Conference Proceedings Citation Index)


 TOPICS

 --> Image and Video Processing
 --> Multimedia Communications
 --> Speech and Audio Processing
 --> Wireless Communications
 --> Telecommunications
 --> Antennas and Propagation
 --> e-Learning and m-Learning
 --> Navigation Systems
 --> Ship Electronic Systems
 --> Power Electronics and Automation
 --> Naval Architecture
 --> Sea Ecology

 --> Special Sessions:
     http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2012/special_sessions/

 --> Student Session (B.Sc. and M.Sc. students only):
     http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2012/student_session/


 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 * Prof. Abdelhak M. Zoubir, Germany:
   Recent Advances on Bootstrap for Signal Processing

 * Prof. Alan Hanjalic, The Netherlands:
   Advances in Multimedia Information Retrieval


 SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES

 Deadline for submission of full papers: March 19, 2012
 Notification of acceptance mailed out by: May 21, 2012
 Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: May 29, 2012
 Preliminary program available online by: June 12, 2012
 Registration forms and payment deadline: June 19, 2012

Back

Top

International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2012 (IALP 2012)
Hanoi, Vietnam, Nov 13-15, 2012
http://www.mica.edu.vn/IALP-2012
Paper Submission deadline: Jul 1,2012

The International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP) is a series
of conferences with unique focus on Asian Language Processing. The
conference aims to advance the science and technology of all the aspects of
Asian Language Processing by providing a forum for researchers in the
different fields of language study all over the world to meet. The first
meeting of the series was held in Singapore in 1986 and was called the
'International Conference on Chinese Computing (ICCC)' then. This meeting
initiated the study of Chinese and oriental languages processing in
Singapore and resulted in the formation of COLIPS in Singapore in 1988, as
well as the publication of the journal 'Communications of COLIPS' in 1991,
which is known as 'International Journal on Asian Language Processing'
today.

Over the years, IALP has developed into one of important anaual events on
nature language processing in Asia. IALP 2008 was held in Chiang Mai
University, Thailand and the proceedings were indexed by ISTP/ISI. IALP 2009
was held in Singapore and was co-organized by COLIPS and IEEE Singapore
Computer Chapter. IALP 2010 was held in Harbin and was co-organized by
COLIPS and IEEE Singapore Computer Chapter, Chinese Information Processing
Society of China and Heilongjiang Institute of Technology (HIT). IALP 2011
was held in Penang, Malaisia and jointly organized by Chinese and Oriental
Languages Information Processing Society (COLIPS) of Singapore, IEEE
Singapore Computer Chapter, and Universiti Sains Malaysia. The proceedings
of IALP 2009,2010 and 2011 were published by CPS (Conference Publication
Services) and submitted for indexing in EI, ISTP/ISI and Current Contents on
Diskette.

This year, the International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2012
(IALP 2012) will be jointly organized by Chinese and Oriental Languages
Information Processing Society (COLIPS) of Singapore, IEEE Vietnam Computer
Chapter, and Hanoi University of Science and Technology (and MICA
Institute). The conference will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam on Nov 13-15,
2012. The 2012 edition (IALP 2012) will focus on under-resourced languages
studies. We will continue to work with CPS to publish the conference
proceesings. They will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library and
submitted for indexing in INSPEC, EI, ISTP/ISI and Current Contents on
Diskette.

Hanoi (Vietnamese: Hà Noi, 'River Interior') is the capital and
second-largest city of Vietnam. As the capital of Vietnam for almost a
thousand years. Hanoi hosts more cultural sites than any city in Vietnam,
including over 600 pagodas and temples.Hanoi is is the social, cultural and
economic center of the country.The Old Quarter, near Hoan Kiem lake, has the
original street layout and architecture of old Hanoi. At the beginning of
the 20th century the city consisted of only about 36 streets, most of which
are now part of the old quarter. Each street then had merchants and
households specialized in a particular trade, such as silk traders,
jewellery, etc. The street names nowadays still reflect these
specializations, although few of them remain exclusively in their original
commerce. The area is famous for its small artisans and merchants, including
many silk shops. Local cuisine specialties as well as several clubs and bars
can be found here also. A night market (near Ðong Xuân market) in the heart
of the district opens for business every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
evening with a variety of clothing, souvenirs and food.

We welcome you to Vietnam to experience the nature, history, and cultural in
one of best countries in South-East Asia.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Paper submissions are invited on substantial, original and unpublished
research in all aspects of Asian Language Processing, including, but not
limited to:

 - Under-resourced language studies
 - Input and output of large character sets of Asian languages
 - Typesetting and font designs of Asian languages
 - Asian character encoding and compression
 - Multimodal representations and processing
 - Voice input and output
 - Phonology and morphology
 - Lexical semantics and word sense
 - Grammars, syntax, semantics and discourse
 - Word segmentation, chunking, tagging and syntactic parsing
 - Word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling and semantic parsing
 - Discourse analysis
 - Language, linguistic and speech resource development
 - Evaluation methods and user studies
 - Machine learning for natural language
 - Text analysis, understanding, summarization and generation
 - Text mining and information extraction, summarization and retrieval
 - Text entailment and paraphrasing
 - Text Sentiment analysis, opinion mining and question answering
 - Machine translation and multilingual processing
 - Linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language,
computational psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and mathematical
linguistics
 - Language modeling, statistical methods in natural language processing and
speech processing
 - Spoken language processing, understanding, generation and translation
 - Rich transcription and spoken information retrieval
 - Speech recognition and synthesis
 - Natural language applications, tools and resources, system evaluation
 - Asian language learning, teaching and computer-aided language learning
 - NLP in vertical domains, such as biomedical, chemical and legal text
 - NLP on noisy unstructured text, such as email, blogs, and SMS
 - Special hardware and software for Asian language computing

PAPER SUBMISSION

Submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished
work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be
included. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical
strength, significance, relevance to the conference, and interest to the
attendees. Each submission will be reviewed by three program committee
members. Accepted papers will be presented in one of the oral sessions or
poster sessions as determined by the program committee.
As the reviewing will be blind, manuscripts must not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Authors should ensure that their identities are not
revealed in any way in the paper. Self-references that reveal the author's
identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...', must be avoided.
Instead, use citations such as 'Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'.
Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without
review.

All submissions must be electronic and in Portable Document Format (PDF)
only. Paper submissions should follow the IEEE Proceedings' two-column
format without exceeding four (4) pages including references. We strongly
recommend the use of the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files
according to IEEE Proceedings' format. Submissions must conform to the
official style guidelines.

The official language of the conference is English. Papers submitted should
be written in English.

Papers may be submitted until July 1, 2012, in PDF format via the START
system:
https://www.softconf.com/d/ialp2012/

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline         Jul 1, 2012
Notification of acceptance  Aug 3, 2012
Final manuscript due        Aug 17, 2012
Earlybird registration due  Aug 19, 2012
Regular registration due    Oct 31, 2012
Conference date             Nov 13-15, 2012

MORE INFORMATION

To get other details and the latest information about the conference, please
visit the conference website at http://www.mica.edu.vn/IALP-2012.

Pham Thi Ngoc Yen and Deyi Xiong
Program Co-chairs, IALP 2012

Back

Top

International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012)

Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones.

Paris, France, November 28-30, 2012

http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iwsds2012

Second Announcement

Following the success of IWSDS'2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS'2010
(Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan) and IWSDS'2011 (Granada, Spain),the
Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012)
will be held in Paris (France) on November 28-30, 2012.

The IWSDS Workshop series provides an international forum for the
presentation of research and applications and for lively discussions
among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest
to the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems in everyday
applications. Scientific achievements in language processing now
results in the development of successful applications such as IBM
Watson, Evi, Apple Siri or Google Assistant for access to knowledge
and interaction with smartphones, while the coming of domestic
robots advocates for the development of powerful communication means
with their human users and fellow robots.

We therefore put this year workshop under the theme
'Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones',
which covers:

-Dialog for robot interaction (including ethics),
-Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access,
-Dialog for interacting with smartphones,
-Mediated dialog (including multilingual dialog involving Speech
Translation),
-Dialog quality evaluation.

We would also like to encourage the discussion of common issues of
theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and
techniques, and therefore also invite the submission of original
papers in any related area, including but not limited to:

-Speech recognition and semantic analysis,
-Dialog management, Adaptive dialog modeling,
-Recognition of emotions from speech, gestures, facial expressions
and physiological data,
-Emotional and interactional dynamic profile of the speaker during
dialog, User modeling,
-Planning and reasoning capabilities for coordination and conflict
description,
-Conflict resolution in complex multi-level decisions,
-Multi-modality such as graphics, gesture and speech for input and output,
-Fusion, fission and information management, Learning and adaptability
-Visual processing and recognition for advanced human-computer interaction,
-Spoken Dialog databases and corpora, including methodologies and ethics,
-Objective and subjective Spoken Dialog evaluation methodologies,
strategies and paradigms,
-Spoken Dialog prototypes and products, etc.

We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a
demonstration, and we will organize the conference in order to best
accommodate these papers, whatever their category.

*PAPER SUBMISSION*

We distinguish between the following categories of submissions:

Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research
results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range
of 8-12 pages.

Short Research Papers should not exceed 6 pages in total. Authors
may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case
studies or ongoing but interesting and original research efforts

Demo - System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system
may choose this category and provide a description of their system
and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.

As usual, it is planned that a selection of accepted papers will be
published in a book by Springer following the conference.

*IMPORTANT DATES*

Deadline for submission: July 16, 2012
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2012
Deadline for final submission of accepted paper: October 8, 2012
Deadline for Early Bird registration: October 8, 2012
Final program available online: November 5, 2012
Workshop: November 28-30, 2012

VENUE: IWSDS 2012 will be held as a two-day residential seminar in
the wonderful Castle of Ermenonville near Paris, France, where all
attendees will be accommodated.

IWSDS Steering Committee: Gary Geunbae Lee(POSTECH, Pohang,
Korea), Ramón López-Cózar (Univ. of Granada, Spain), Joseph Mariani
(LIMSI and IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Wolfgang Minker (Ulm Univ.,
Germany), Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and
Technology, Japan)

IWSDS 2012 Program Committee: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI & IMMI-CNRS,
Chair), Laurence Devillers (LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sorbonne 4),
Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI-CNRS), Sophie Rosset (LIMSI-CNRS)

Organization Committee: Martine Garnier-Rizet (Chair), Lynn
Barreteau, Joseph Mariani (IMMI-CNRS)

Supporting organizations (to be completed): IMMI-CNRS and
LIMSI-CNRS (France), Postech (Korea), University of Granada (Spain),
Nara Institute of Science and Technology and NICT (Japan), Ulm
University (Germany)

Scientific Committee: To be announced

Sponsors: To be announced

Please contact iwsds2012@immi-labs.org
<mailto:iwsds2012@immi-labs.org>
or visit
http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iwsds2012
to get more information.

Back

Top

SLT 2012: IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Miami Florida, December 2-5, 2012

http://www.slt2012.org

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Fourth IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) will be held between December 2-5, 2012 in Miami, FL. The goal of this workshop is to allow the speech/language processing community to share and present recent advances in various areas of spoken language technology. SLT will include oral and poster presentations. In addition, there will be three keynote addresses by well-known experts on topics such as machine learning and speech/language processing. The workshop will also include free pre-workshop tutorials on introduction or recent advances in spoken language technology.

Submission of papers in all areas of spoken language technology is encouraged, with emphasis on the following topics:

• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Spoken language understanding
• Spoken dialog systems
• Spoken document summarization
• Machine translation for speech
• Question answering from speech
• Speech data mining
• Spoken document retrieval
• Spoken language databases
• Multimodal processing
• Human/computer interaction
• Educational and healthcare applications
• Assistive technologies
• Natural Language Processing

Important Deadlines

Submission Procedure

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the SLT 2012 website. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

Back

Top

UNSW Forensic Speech Science Conference, Sydney, 2012 

The Forensic Voice Comparison Laboratory at the School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, University of New South Wales will host a Forensic Speech Science Conference on 3 December 2012 as a satellite event to the 14th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST-12).  

We welcome submissions related to all aspects of forensic speech science.  

Abstract submission deadline: 5 October 2012 

For more infomation see: http://sydney2012.forensic-voice-comparison.net/ 

Contact: sydney2012@forensic-voice-comparison.net

Back

Top

      CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
           EACL 2012 / NAACL-HLT 2012 / ACL 2012
      (http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~kjokinen/WorkshopCFP/)

The European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(EACL), The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (NAACL), and The Association for Computational Linguistics
(ACL) invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the
EACL, NAACL, or ACL conferences in the spring and summer of 2012. We
solicit proposals on any topic of interest to the ACL communities.
Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:

 * EACL 2012 is the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the
  Association for Computational Linguistics. It will be held in
  Avignon, April 23 - 27, 2012. The dates for the EACL workshops
  will be April 23-24. The webpage for EACL 2012 is:
  http://eacl2012.org/.

 * NAACL-HLT 2012 is the 13th Annual Meeting of the North American
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It will
be held Montreal, Canada, June 3 - 8, 2012. The dates for the
NAACL-HLT workshops will be June 7 - 8. The webpage for NAACL-HLT
2012 is: http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/.

 * ACL 2012 is the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL). It will be held in Jeju, Republic
of Korea, July 8 - 14, 2012. The ACL workshops will be held July
12 - 13. The webpage for ACL 2012 is: http://www.acl2012.org/.

Proposals will be jointly reviewed by the workshop organizers for all
three conferences.

    SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Similarly to previous conferences, the submission and reviewing of
workshop proposals for EACL, NAACL-HLT, and ACL will be coordinated.

Proposals for workshops should contain:

  1. A title and brief (2-page max) description of the workshop topic
     and content.
  2. The desired workshop length (one or two days), and an estimate of
     the number of attendees.
  3. The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of
     the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research
     interests and areas of expertise.
  4. A list of potential members of the program committee, with an
     indication of which members have already agreed.
  5. A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop.
  6. A description of special requirements for technical needs.
  7. A note specifying which venue(s) (EACL versus NAACL-HLT versus
     ACL) would be acceptable to you; if all are acceptable, you may
     express preference for one or the other.

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 the ACL's
general policies on workshops at
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshop-support-general-policy.html,
the financial policy for workshops at
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshop-conf-financial-policy.html,
and the financial policy for SIG workshops at
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/ACL/Workshops/workshops-Sig-financial-policy.html.

  * Please submit proposals in plain text in the body of an email to the
    workshop organizers:
    eacl.naacl.acl.workshops.2012_AT_helsinki_DOT_fi

    no later than *October 28, 2011, 23:59:59 UTC/GMT*
    (which is 18:59:59 EST, 15:59:59 PST, and 08:59:59 JST on Oct 29).

  * Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals will occur no later
    than *November 11, 2011*.

Since the three 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 each
conference. Suggested timescales for each of the conferences are given
below. Workshop organizers should not deviate from this schedule unless
absolutely necessary.

Workshop organisers are also requested to pay attention to the fact that
there will be only a week between the notification of the workshop
acceptance and sending out the first CFPs for the workshop (in case of EACL
and ACL). Thus it is important that the workshop proposals are already well
structured and organised at the time of the submission, to allow quick launch
of the first CFP.


TIMELINES FOR 2012 WORKSHOPS

 * SHARED DATES
  Oct 28, 2011 Workshop proposal deadline
  Nov 11, 2011 Notification of acceptance


 * EACL 2012
  Nov 18, 2011  Proposed 1st workshop CFP
  Jan 27, 2012  Proposed paper due date
  Feb 24, 2012  Proposed notification of acceptance
  Mar 09, 2012  Camera-ready deadline
  Apr 23-24, 2012  Workshops


 * NAACL-HLT 2012
  Dec 16, 2011  Proposed 1st workshop CFP
  Mar 02, 2012  Proposed paper due date
  Mar 30, 2012  Proposed notification of acceptance
  Apr 13, 2012  Camera-ready deadline
  Jun 7-8, 2012  Workshops


 * ACL 2012
  Nov 21, 2011  Proposed 1st workshop CFP
  Mar 18, 2012  Proposed paper due date
  Apr 15, 2012  Proposed notification of acceptance
  Apr 30, 2012  Camera-ready deadline
  Jul 12-13, 2012  Workshops


WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

 * EACL 2012
Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki - http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~kjokinen/
Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento - http://disi.unitn.it/moschitti/

 * NAACL-HLT 2012
Colin Cherry, National Research Council Canada - https://sites.google.com/site/colinacherry/
Mona Diab, Columbia University - http://www1.ccls.columbia.edu/~mdiab/

 * ACL 2012
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex - http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/poesio/
Satoshi Sekine, New York University - http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/sekine/

For inquiries, send email to the workshop organizers:
   eacl.naacl.acl.workshops.2012_AT_helsinki_DOT_fi

Back

Top

CALL FOR PAPERS

6th International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing
BIOSIGNALS website: http://www.biosignals.biostec.org


February 11 - 14, 2013
Barcelona, Spain

Sponsored by: INSTICC
INSTICC is Member of: WfMC


IMPORTANT DATES:
  Regular Paper Submission: July 20, 2012
  Authors Notification (regular papers): October 23, 2012
  Final Regular Paper Submission and Registration: November 13, 2012

_____________________________________


The International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing (BIOSIGNALS 2013 - 

http://www.biosignals.biostec.org) steering committee cordially invites you to submit a paper to the BIOSIGNALS 2013 Conference, to be held in Barcelona, Spain. The deadline for paper submission is scheduled for July 20, 2012.

The purpose of the International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing is to bring together researchers and practitioners from multiple areas of knowledge, including biology, medicine, engineering and other physical sciences, interested in studying and using models and techniques inspired from or applied to biological systems. A diversity of signal types can be found in this area, including image, audio and other biological sources of information. The analysis and use of these signals is a multidisciplinary area including signal processing, pattern recognition and computational intelligence techniques, amongst others. 

This conference is part of the International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - BIOSTEC (http://www.biostec.org) and it is co-located with three related conferences, namely:
- Biomedical Electronics and Devices (http://www.biodevices.biostec.org)
- Bioinformatics Models, Methods and Algorithms (http://www.bioinformatics.biostec.org) 
- Health Informatics (http://www.healthinf.biostec.org)
Registration to one conference allows free access to all conferences.

Submitted papers will be subject to a double-blind review process. All accepted papers (full, short and posters) will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support. JHPZ
A short list of presented papers will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in a CCIS Series book.

The proceedings will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (ISI), INSPEC, DBLP and EI (Elsevier Index).
All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). SciTePress is member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/).

Best paper awards will be distributed during the conference closing session. Please check the website for further information (http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/BestPaperAward.aspx).


Workshops, Special Sessions, Tutorials as well as Demonstrations dedicated to other technical/scientific topics are also envisaged: companies interested in presenting their products/methodologies or researchers interested in holding a tutorial are invited to contact the conference secretariat. Workshop chairs and Special Session chairs will benefit from logistics support and other types of support, including secretariat and financial support, to facilitate the development of a valid idea.


We hope to welcome you in Barcelona, Spain next February, 2013!
Should you have any question please don't hesitate contacting me.


Kind regards,
Vera Coelho   
BIOSIGNALS Secretariat

Av. D. Manuel I, 27A 2.Esq.
2910-595 Setubal, Portugal
Tel.: +351 265 100 033 
Fax: +44 203 014 5436 
Email: biosignals.secretariat@insticc.org


_____________________________________

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS
Jordi Sole-Casals, University of Vic, Spain
Ana Fred, Technical University of Lisbon  IT, Portugal
Hugo Gamboa, CEFITEC  FCT - New University of Lisbon, Portugal

PROGRAM CHAIR:
Sergio Alvarez, Boston College, United States

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Please check the program committee members at http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/ProgramCommittee.aspx


CONFERENCE TOPICS:
- Speech Recognition
- Neural Networks
- Biometrics
- Pattern Recognition
- Medical Signal Acquisition, Analysis and Processing
- Wearable Sensors and Systems
- Real-Time Systems
- Evolutionary Systems
- Acoustic Signal Processing
- Time and Frequency Response
- Wavelet Transform
- Medical Image Detection, Acquisition, Analysis and Processing
- Physiological Processes and Bio-signal Modeling, Non-linear dynamics
- Cybernetics and User Interface Technologies
- Electromagnetic fields in biology and medicine
- Fuzzy Systems and Signals
- Monitoring and Telemetry
- Cardiovascular Signals
- Image Analysis and Processing
- Detection and Identification
- Motion Control

Back

Top

Call for Participation
MediaEval 2012 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation
http://www.multimediaeval.org
Please register by 31 May 2012
--------------------------------------------------

MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2012 focuses on aspects of multimedia including and going beyond visual content, including speech, language, audio and social factors. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2012 workshop.

For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a 'required reading' list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. Please sign up via http://www.multimediaeval.org (regular sign up will remain open until 31 May).

The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2012:

Placing Task
This task involves automatically assigning geo-coordinates to Flickr videos using one or more of: Flickr metadata, visual content, audio content, social information (Data: Creative Commons Flickr data, predominantly English language, extended from the 2011 data set.)

Social Event Detection Task
This task requires participants to discover events and detect media items that are related to either a specific social event or an event-class of interest. By social events we mean that the events are planned by people, attended by people and that the social media are captured by people. (Data: URLs of images and videos available on Flickr and other internet archives together with metadata).

Spoken Web Search Task
This task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. It is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection. (Data: Audio from four different Indian languages and four South African languages. Each of the ca. 2000 data item is an 8 KHz audio file 4-30 secs in length.)

Tagging Task
Given a set of tags and a video collection, participants are required to automatically assign the tags to each video based on a combination of modalities, i.e., speech, metadata, audio and visual. (Data: Creative Commons internet video, nearly exclusively English, extended from the 2011 collection.)

Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection
This task requires participants to deploy multimodal features to automatically detect portions of movies containing violent material. Any features automatically extracted from the video, including the subtitles, can be used by participants. (Data: A set of ca. 18 Hollywood movies that must be purchased by the participants.)

Visual Privacy Task
For this task, participants propose methods whereby human faces occurring in digital imagery can be obscured so as to render them unrecognizable.  An optimal balance should be struck between obscuring identity and maintaining the quality of the viewing experience from the user perspective. (Data: about 100 high resolution video files of ca 1m30s each and containing one or more persons in an indoor environment.)

Brave New Tasks
This year, MediaEval will also run three new tasks in the areas of social media, spoken content search and hyperlinking, and music tagging. These tasks are 'by invitation only' and are not included in the general registration form. In order to receive an invitation, please contact the task organizers.

MediaEval 2012 Timeline (dates vary slight from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2012)

31 May: Last day for regular sign up
1 June: Latest day for development data release
1 July: Latest day for test data release
ca. 10 September: Run submission deadline
28 September: Working notes papers due
4-5 October: MediaEval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy*
*The workshop is timed so that it is possible to attend the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2012 (http://eccv2012.unifi.it/), held 7-13 October in Firenze, Italy, in the same trip.

MediaEval 2012 Coordination
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University

Contact
For questions or additional information please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl or visit visit http://www.multimediaeval.org

MediaEval 2012 Organization Committee:

Robin Aly, University of Twente, Netherlands
Xavier Anguera, Telefonica, Spain
Atta Badii, University of Reading, UK
Etienne Barnard, CSIR, South Africa
Claire-Helene Demarty, Technicolor, France
Maria Eskevich, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gerald Friedland, ICSI, USA
Isabelle Ferrané, University of Toulouse, France
Guillaume Gravier, IRISA, France
Claudia Hauff, TU Delft, Netherlands
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pascal Kelm, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Christoph Kofler, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Chattun Lallah, University of Reading, UK
Martha Larson, TU Delft, Netherlands
Cynthia Liem, TU Delft, Netherlands
Florian Metze, CMU, USA
Vasileios Mezaris, ITI Certh, Greece
Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Netherlands
Nicola Orio, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Geoffroy Peeters, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique Paris, France
Cedric Penet, Technicolor, France
Tomas Piatrik, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Adam Rae, Yahoo! Research, Spain
Nitendra Rajput, IBM Research, India
Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria
Sebastian Schmiedeke, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Mohammad Soleymani, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Robin Sommer, ICSI/LBNL, USA
Raphael Troncy, Eurecom, France

A large number of projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including (alphabetically): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), Chorus+ (http://www.ist-chorus.org), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), IISSCoS (http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/IISSCoS/), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu/), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu/), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl/), VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu/) and SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org/).

Back

Top

This Call for Proposal is distributed on behalf of IEEE Signal Processing Society Conference Board for the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to be held in March or April of 2017. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing theory and applications. The series is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has been held annually since 1976. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. ICASSP is a cooperative effort of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees:

The conference organizing team is advised to incorporate into their proposal the following items.

• Proposed Dates (March or April 2017)
• Organizing Committee Members
  • Name
  • Biographical information
  • Membership in the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• List of scientific and research groups who reside in the local area who are in favor of the proposal and who are committed to attend and participate.
• Proposed budget. (For advice on building an IEEE budget please contact Kartik Patel at kartik.patel@ieee.org.)
• Support that can be anticipated from the local government, universities and or corporations
• Why this location?
  • Airport information
  • Customs and Visa regulations
  • Hotel and convention center information (i.e. space diagrams, maps, etc.)
  • Tourist destinations (i.e. museums, natural wonders, etc.)
  • Average weather conditions for the time of year

Submission of Proposal
Proposals for ICASSP are currently being accepted for 2017. Proposals should be sent no later than 15 August 2012. Notification of acceptance will be made after ICIP 2012 in Orlando, FL. Send the proposal to Lisa Schwarzbek, Manager, Conference Services IEEE Signal Processing Society (l.schwarzbek@ieee.org).

For additional guidelines for ICASSP please contact Lisa Schwarzbek, Manager, Conference Services (l.schwarzbek@ieee.org).

Proposal Presentation
Proposals that are of interest to the Conference Board may be asked to present their proposal at the Conference Board meeting to be held in Orlando, Florida tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 4 October 2012.

Back

Top