Correction: it is a special issue of Speech communication and not of Signal Processing as previously announced.

Call for Papers

 Special Issue on Processing Under-Resourced Languages

The creation of language and acoustic resources, for any given spoken language, is typically a costly task. For example, a large amount of time and money is required to properly create annotated speech corpora for automatic speech recognition (ASR), domain-specific text corpora for language modeling (LM), etc. The development of speech technologies (ASR, Text-to-Speech) for the already high-resourced languages (such as English, French or Mandarin, for example) is less constrained by this issue and, consequently, high-performance commercial systems are already on the market. On the other hand, for under-resourced languages, the above issue is typically the main obstacle.

Given this, the scientific community’s concern with porting, adapting, or creating language and acoustic resources or even models for low-resourced languages has been growing recently and several algorithms and methods of adaptation have been proposed and experimented with. In the mean time, workshops and special sessions have been organized on this domain.

This special issue focuses on research and development of new tools based on speech technologies for less-resourced national languages, mainly, used in the following large geographical regions: Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, West Asia, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America, Oceania. The special issue is open to present problems and peculiarities of targeted languages in application to spoken language technologies, including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, speech-to-speech translation, spoken dialogue systems in an internationalized context. When developing speech-based technologies researchers are faced with many new problems from lack of audio databases and linguistic resources (lexicons, grammars, text collections), to inefficiency of existing methods for language and acoustical modeling, and limited infrastructure for the creation of relevant resources. They often have to deal with novel linguistic phenomena that are poorly studied or researched from a speech technology perspective (for instance, clicks in southern African languages, tone in many languages of the world, language switching in multilingual systems, rich morphology, etc).

Well-written papers on speech technologies for targeted languages are encouraged, and papers describing original results (theoretical and/or experimental) obtained for under-resourced languages, but important for well-elaborated languages too, are invited as well. Good papers from any countries and any authors may be accepted if they present new speech studies concerning the languages of interest of the special issue. Submissions from countries where issues related to under-resourced languages are a practical reality, are strongly encouraged for this special issue.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline:  1st August 2012

Notification of acceptance: 1st February 2013

Final manuscript due:  April 2013

Tentative publication date: Summer 2013

Editors

Etienne Barnard

North-West University, South Africa

Laurent Besacier

Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, France

Alexey Karpov

SPIIRAS, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Tanja Schultz

University of Karlsruhe, Germany