7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA

THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

LATA 2013

Bilbao, Spain

April 2-5, 2013

Organized by:

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2013/

AIMS:

LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the International Schools in Formal Languages and Applications developed at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2013 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.).

VENUE:

LATA 2013 will take place in Bilbao, at the Basque Country in Northern Spain. The venue will be the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM).

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

‐ algebraic language theory

‐ algorithms for semi‐structured data mining

‐ algorithms on automata and words

‐ automata and logic

‐ automata for system analysis and programme verification

‐ automata, concurrency and Petri nets

‐ automatic structures

‐ cellular automata

‐ combinatorics on words

‐ computability

‐ computational complexity

‐ computational linguistics

‐ data and image compression

‐ decidability questions on words and languages

‐ descriptional complexity

‐ DNA and other models of bio‐inspired computing

‐ document engineering

‐ foundations of finite state technology

‐ foundations of XML

‐ fuzzy and rough languages

‐ grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.)

‐ grammars and automata architectures

‐ grammatical inference and algorithmic learning

‐ graphs and graph transformation

‐ language varieties and semigroups

‐ language‐based cryptography

‐ language‐theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life

‐ parallel and regulated rewriting

‐ parsing

‐ pattern recognition

‐ patterns and codes

‐ power series

‐ quantum, chemical and optical computing

‐ semantics

‐ string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics

‐ string processing algorithms

‐ symbolic dynamics

‐ symbolic neural networks

‐ term rewriting

‐ transducers

‐ trees, tree languages and tree automata

‐ weighted automata

STRUCTURE:

LATA 2013 will consist of:

‐ invited talks

‐ invited tutorials

‐ peer‐reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Jin-Yi Cai (Madison), Complexity Dichotomy for Counting Problems

Kousha Etessami (Edinburgh), Algorithms for Analyzing Infinite-state Recursive Probabilistic Systems

Luke Ong (Oxford), tutorial Languages and Automata for Higher-order Model Checking

Joël Ouaknine (Oxford), tutorial Discrete Linear Dynamical Systems

Thomas Schwentick (Dortmund), Applications of Automata in Database Theory -- Challenges to Automata Theory from Databases

Andrei Voronkov (Manchester), The Lazy Reviewer Assignment Problem in EasyChair

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Parosh Aziz Abdulla (Uppsala)

Franz Baader (Dresden)

Jos Baeten (CWI, Amsterdam)

Christel Baier (Dresden)

Gerth Stølting Brodal (Aarhus)

John Case (Delaware)

Marek Chrobak (Riverside)

Mariangiola Dezani (Torino)

Rod Downey (Wellington)

Ding-Zhu Du (Dallas)

Ivo Düntsch (Brock)

E. Allen Emerson (Austin)

Javier Esparza (Technical University Munich)

Michael R. Fellows (Darwin)

Alain Finkel (ENS Cachan)

Dov M. Gabbay (King’s, London)

Jürgen Giesl (Aachen)

Rob van Glabbeek (NICTA, Sydney)

Georg Gottlob (Oxford)

Annegret Habel (Oldenburg)

Reiko Heckel (Leicester)

Sanjay Jain (Singapore)

Charanjit S. Jutla (IBM Thomas J. Watson)

Ming-Yang Kao (Northwestern)

Deepak Kapur (Albuquerque)

Joost-Pieter Katoen (Aachen)

S. Rao Kosaraju (Johns Hopkins)

Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton)

Hans-Jörg Kreowski (Bremen)

Tak-Wah Lam (Hong Kong)

Gad M. Landau (Haifa)

Kim G. Larsen (Aalborg)

Richard Lipton (Georgia Tech)

Jack Lutz (Iowa State)

Ian Mackie (École Polytechnique, Palaiseau)

Rupak Majumdar (Max Planck, Kaiserslautern)

Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, chair)

Paliath Narendran (Albany)

Tobias Nipkow (Technical University Munich)

David A. Plaisted (Chapel Hill)

Jean-François Raskin (Brussels)

Wolfgang Reisig (Humboldt Berlin)

Michaël Rusinowitch (LORIA, Nancy)

Davide Sangiorgi (Bologna)

Bernhard Steffen (Dortmund)

Colin Stirling (Edinburgh)

Alfonso Valencia (CNIO, Madrid)

Helmut Veith (Vienna Tech)

Heribert Vollmer (Hannover)

Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Tech)

Pierre Wolper (Liège)

Louxin Zhang (Singapore)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)

Peter Leupold (Tarragona)

Carlos Martín‐Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)

Magaly Roldán (Bilbao)

Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg)

Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

Enrique Zuazua (Bilbao, co-chair)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single‐spaced pages (including eventual appendices) and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Submissions have to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2013

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer‐reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from August 6, 2012 to April 2, 2013. The registration form can be found at the website of the conference:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2013/

FEES:

Early registration fees: 500 Euro

Early registration fees (PhD students): 400 Euro

Late registration fees: 540 Euro

Late registration fees (PhD students): 440 Euro

On‐site registration fees: 580 Euro

On‐site registration fees (PhD students): 480 Euro

At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have a registered author who paid the fees by January 2, 2013 will be excluded from the proceedings.

One registration gives the right to present only one paper.

Fees comprise access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings volume, coffee breaks and lunches.

PAYMENT:

Early (resp. late) registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before January 2, 2013 (resp. March 23, 2013) to the conference bank account:

Uno-e Bank

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

IBAN: ES3902270001820201823142

BIC/SWIFT: UNOEESM1

account holder: C. Martin – GRLMC

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

Please mention LATA 2013 and your name in the subject. A receipt will be provided on site.

Remarks:

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

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

- PhD students will need to provide evidence of their status on site.

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

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: November 9, 2012 (23:59h, CET)

Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: December 16, 2012

Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: December 25, 2012

Early registration: January 2, 2013

Late registration: March 23, 2013

Starting of the conference: April 2, 2013

End of the conference: April 5, 2013

Submission to the post‐conference journal special issue: July 5, 2013

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

LATA 2013

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:

Basque Center for Applied Mathematics

Diputació de Tarragona

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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CORIA 2013, Neuchâtel (Suisse), du 3 au 5 Avril 2013  

CORIA 2013 (http://coria.unine.ch) est la dixième édition de la COnférence en Recherche d'Information et Applications.  Organisée avec le support de l'ARIA (Association francophone de Recherche d'Information et Applications, http://www.asso-aria.org), elle est la principale manifestation francophone dans ce domaine. CORIA a pour but de rassembler les équipes et les chercheurs menant des travaux scientifiques dans le domaine de la recherche d'informations : recherche d'information sur le web, extraction d'information au sein de documents multimédia, analyse d'opinion ou de réseaux sociaux, contextes monolingue ou multilingue, recherche de documents numériques et d'images, apprentissage et classification automatiques, interfaces homme-machine pour l'accès à l'information, etc.    CORIA se veut largement ouverte à l'ensemble de la communauté scientifique concernée par la Recherche d'Information.  Après s'être tenue à Toulouse, Grenoble, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Lannion, Toulon, Sousse (Tunisie, en partenariat avec CIFED), Avignon, Bordeaux (en partenariat avec CIFED), CORIA aura lieu cette année du 3 avril au 5 avril 2013 à Neuchâtel (Suisse).   L'activité scientifique en recherche d'information connaît une évolution forte depuis la généralisation du web et, plus récemment, le développement de l'informatique nomade.  Les limites du domaine sont elles-mêmes en mutation et favorisent les synergies avec les travaux en apprentissage automatique, traitement automatique des langues, traitement de l'image, traitement de la parole, communication écrite et documents, systèmes d'information et bases de données, représentation et gestion des connaissances...  Les domaines d'application sont vastes et peuvent être appliqués au web dans sa globalité ou restreints par exemple à des bibliothèques numériques ou des réseaux sociaux.    Le public visé par CORIA 2013 est celui des universitaires et chercheurs - confirmés ou non -, des industriels et des spécialistes du domaine et des étudiants en Master se dirigeant vers les métiers de la Recherche.  Les soumissions peuvent être faites en anglais ou en français.  Les contributions peuvent concerner des travaux académiques ou des applications industrielles.      Le programme prévoit deux conférences invitées, l'une de Jamie Callan (CMU), la seconde de Donna Harman (NIST).  Ces deux conférenciers feront par ailleurs un cours dédiés aux doctorants lors d'un séminaire du CUSO, le mardi 2 avril 2013 (le jour précédant la conférence).        Pendant la conférence CORIA 2013 seront également organisées les 8e Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs en Recherche d'Information (RJCRI). Elles ont pour objectif de permettre à tous les doctorants de présenter leur problématique de recherche, d'établir des contacts avec des équipes travaillant sur des domaines similaires ou connexes, et d'offrir à l'ensemble de la communauté un aperçu des axes de recherche actuels. Les travaux sélectionnés pour  les RJCRI donneront lieu à une présentation orale et sous forme de poster. Cette année, les soumissions conjointes RJCRI et CORIA sont autorisées (voir modalités dans RJCRI http://coria.unine.ch/rjcri.htm )      

 Thématiques (liste non exhaustive)  

•                Théorie et modèles formels pour la RI : modèle logique, modèles de langages

•                Multilinguisme : Recherche d'information multilingue, traduction automatique

•                Multimédia (images, audio, vidéos, son, musique) : indexation, navigation, accès, interactions avec le texte

•                Passage à l'échelle : indexation, performances, architectures

•                Classification automatique, clustering, ranking, apprentissage automatique

•                Filtrage, routage, détection de nouveautés

•                Systèmes de Questions Réponses

•                Extraction d'informations : ontologies, ressources et recherche d'informations, détection d'entités nommées

•                Web : grands graphes, utilisation de la topologie du web, lois de puissances, citations, analyse de liens

•                RI et documents structurés : RI et XML, RI précise et recherche de passages

•                Réseaux sociaux : analyse de blogs et de sites communautaires, suivi de conversations, analyse de rumeurs, analyse de sentiments, détection d'opinion

•                Recherche collaborative : filtrage, systèmes de recommandation

•                Interaction utilisateur : interrogation flexible, interfaces, visualisation, modélisation de l'utilisateur, accessibilité, indexation collaborative

•                Traitement et représentation des connaissances : logique floue, méta-données, ontologies, web sémantique, ingénierie des connaissances

•                Bibliothèques numériques : RI sur des livres numérisés, robustesse, OCR et indexabilité

•                Systèmes de recherche d'information dédiés : recherche d'information génomique, géographique

•                RI distribuée : recherche d'information mobile, située, P2P

•                Outils pour la recherche d'information : évaluation, bancs d'essais, métriques, expérimentations qualitatives des systèmes      

Dates importantes (modifiées)

La soumission des articles se fera en deux étapes : d'abord la soumission d'un résumé et ensuite la soumission de l'article. Le calendrier de soumission est le même pour CORIA et les RJCRI : -       Date limite de soumission des articles : 14/12/2012 -       Réponse aux auteurs : 01/02/2013 -       Date limite de soumission de la version finale : 22/02/2013

Site de dépôt des articles de Coria : https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coria2013  

Site de dépôt des articles de RJCRI : https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rjcri2013  

Format des articles  

•                Les soumissions peuvent être faites en anglais ou en français.

•                Les contributions peuvent concerner des travaux académiques ou des applications industrielles. •                Les textes de communications doivent comporter 16 pages maximum au format des revues Hermes. Ils doivent être précédés d'une page de garde comportant le titre, les noms et coordonnées précises des auteurs, une liste de mots clé en français et en anglais, un résumé d'une vingtaine de lignes au maximum. La mention « article soumis à CORIA et RJCRI » doit être portée sur la page de garde le cas échéant.

•                Les articles peuvent être écrits en Word ou en LaTeX.

•                Le format des articles Word et LaTeX peut être téléchargé sur le site Hermes.

•                Les articles déposés doivent être au format PDF exclusivement.   Modalités RJCRI : voir http://coria.unine.ch/rjcri.htm

 Catherine Berrut, Professeur Université Joseph Four ier Laboratoire LIG et Polytech Grenoble

 BP 53 - 38041 Grenoble cedex 9 tel : 04 76 51 42 63 mail : catherine.berrut@imag.fr

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 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)                 Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre May 26 - 31, 2013 , Vancouver, Canada www.ICASSP2013.com CALL FOR PAPERS Announcement: New paper submission deadline has been extended to November 30, 2012 due to the recent hurricane. Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. Topics include but are not limited to: Audio and acoustic signal processing Bio-imaging and signal processing Signal processing education Speech processing Industry technology tracks Information forensics and security Machine learning for signal processing Multimedia signal processing Sensor array & multichannel signal processing Design & implementation of signal processing systems Signal processing for communications & networking Image, video & multidimensional signal processing Signal processing theory & methods Spoken language processing Vancouver: Vancouver is consistently rated as the most livable city in the world. It is surrounded by dense pine forests, snow-capped mountains and fjords. It is a city with vast beaches and lush parks combined with magnificent architecture. Please see www.ICASSP2013.com for details regarding Paper Submission , “no-show” policy and tutorials Organizing Committee ==================== General Chairs Rabab Ward, University of British Columbia Li Deng, Microsoft Technical Program Chairs Vikram Krishnamurthy, University of British Columbia Kostas Plataniotis, University of Toronto Finance Chair Jane Wang, University of British Columbia Special Sessions Chairs Xiaodong He, Microsoft Wu Chou, Huawei Tutorials Chair Khaled El-Maleh, Qualcomm Local Arrangement Chair Panos Nasiopoulos, University of British Columbia Social Program Chair Rabab Ward, University of British Columbia Publicity Chairs Lina Karam, Arizona State University Michel Sarkis, Qualcomm Publication Chairs Michael Adams, University of Victoria Vicky Zhao, University of Alberta Exhibit Chairs Dong Yu, Microsoft Wu Chou, Huawei Hank Liao, Google Entrepreneurial Relationship Ton Kalker, Huawei Conference Management Billene Mercer, Conference Management Services, Inc. 

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Appel aux 16èmes Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs (30-31 mai): modèles et modélisation dans les sciences du langage | date limite: 13 janv. 2013

Créées en 1998, les Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs de l'École Doctorale « Langage et langues» (ED 268, Université Sorbonne nouvelle) offrent la possibilité aux jeunes chercheurs inscrits en Doctorat ou en Master Recherche de présenter leurs travaux sous forme de communication orale ou de poster.

Modèles et modélisation dans les sciences du langage

    Comment appréhender la diversité du réel sans chercher à la structurer et à formuler des règles supposées expliquer ou du moins décrire son fonctionnement ? Comment comprendre un phénomène sans d’abord en concevoir des fonctionnements possibles ? Même si le recours à une réalité idéale ne suffit pas toujours à la compréhension d’un phénomène langagier, d’un fonctionnement psychologique ou encore d’une stratégie cognitive, la construction et l’exploitation de modèles semblent parfois indispensables. Tout

comme apparaît nécessaire la remise en cause et la révision de ces représentations, afin d’appréhender des réalités plus nuancées.

   La multiplicité des approches adoptées par les différentes disciplines engage à interroger non seulement la notion de modèle, mais aussi la modélisation des données langagières, que ce soit à des fins descriptives, explicatives ou prédictives. On peut donc s’intéresser aux différentes définitions du modèle, et se pencher sur leur mise en pratique, leur potentiel transdisciplinaire et leurs éventuelles transformations.

   On peut aussi s’interroger sur la pertinence et les limites de ces modèles, voire de la notion même de modèle. Selon les approches des chercheurs et chercheuses, le modèle peut ainsi être perçu comme une nécessité ou comme un obstacle, comme un indice de rigueur ou comme un biais scientifique. S’agit-il d’un carcan théorique auquel les données empiriques doivent s’ajuster ? Ou s’agit-il d’une construction sans laquelle la dynamique et le fonctionnement d’une réalité seraient impossible à appréhender ?

   Les RJC 2013 invitent les participants à réfléchir sur la conception, l’utilisation, l’adaptation et la remise en cause de modèles en sciences du langage. Nous retiendrons en particulier les communications appartenant aux disciplines suivantes :

acquisition du langage et des langues, analyse du discours, anthropologie linguistique,

didactique des langues et des cultures, histoire des idées linguistiques, linguistique générale,

linguistique historique et comparée, morphologie, neurolinguistique, phonétique, phonologie,

pragmatique, psycholinguistique, rhétorique, sémantique, sociolinguistique, syntaxe, TAL,

traduction et traductologie, typologie linguistique.

Le colloque est ouvert à tous : masterants, doctorants, chercheurs...

Date limite de soumission des propositions : 14 janvier 2013

Contact : rjc.ed268.p3@gmail.com

Appel complet et détails sur la page Internet :

www.univ-paris3.fr/rjc2013

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PAC 2013: Spoken English Corpora: from annotation to interphonologies

We are pleased to announce that the PAC annual conference ‘Spoken English corpora: from annotation to interphonologies’ is due to take place from Thursday May 30 to Saturday June 1, 2013 and will be hosted by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (http://www.lpl.univaix.fr/~PAC2013 , available soon) and the Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence.

The PAC Project (http://www.projet-pac.net), ‘La Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure; The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure’ is coordinated by Anne Przewozny, Philip Carr and Jacques Durand. Among other things it aims at:

·giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and diversity (geographical, social and stylistic);

·testing phonological and phonetic models from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, making room for the systematic study of variation,

·favouring communication between specialists in speech and in phonological theory,

·providing data and analyses which will help improve the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Papers from a wide range of theoretical perspectives addressing the above issues and related topics are welcome. Other things being equal, we will give priority to papers focusing on the relationship between corpus studies and the phonological/phonetic modelling of spoken English.

For the 2013 conference, we would particularly welcome proposals on the use of automatic tools for the study of very large data sets. One afternoon will be dedicated to a workshop on tools and annotation: Brigitte Bigi will present SPPAS, a tool to produce automatically phonetic annotations from a recorded speech sound and its orthographic transcription (http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~bigi/sppas/), and Sophie Herment will do a demo on Momel and Intsint for prosodic annotation.

We would also like to open perspectives on L2 research, with papers dealing with interphonologies and will organize a special session on this issue (see below).

The deadline for sending a title with a one-page abstract (excluding references) is extended to 22 February 2013. Please send your proposal in 2 files, one in .doc with name and affiliation, the other anonymous in .pdf to:

gabor.turcsan@univ-amu.fr & sophie.herment@univ-amu.fr

Please indicate whether you would prefer i. oral, ii. poster or iii. any type of presentation. Notification of acceptance will be sent by mid March.

Special session on interphonology

(organisers: V. Lacoste, N. Herry-Bénit & T. Kamiyama)

This special session offers to investigate the phonetic and phonological systems developed by non-native speakers/learners of English who have command of English either as a foreign language (EFL) or a second language (ESL) in various parts of the world and in different contexts of communication. Interphonology will be discussed both as a theoretical, linguistic construct and empirically by looking into aspects of the learners’ new phonological system, while in the process of establishing itself or when it has already been stabilised and/or regularised. Inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation will also be central to our study of interphonology to understand, for instance, how segmental variability is integrated in the newly developed phonological system and how the phonologies of two (or more) languages at work mutually influence each other. Finally, this panel hopes to bring together scholars from the field of variationist sociolinguistics and scholars from a more formal linguistic tradition to deepen our appreciation of interphonology as a phenomenon specifically from a learner’s perspective.

Local organisation team:

Carine André, Laurence Colombo, Stéphanie Desous, Sophie Herment, Valérie Kerfelec, Joëlle Lavaud, Claudia Pichon-Starke, Gabor Turcsan.

Scientific committee:

Cyril Auran, Université de Lille 3, France

Nicolas Ballier, Université Paris 7 Diderot, France

Joan Beal, University of Sheffield, England

Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, University of Manchester, England

Brigitte Bigi, LPL, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

Philip Carr, University of Montpellier III, France

Sylvain Detey, Waseda University, Japan

Jacques Durand, CLLE-ERSS, University of Toulouse II, France

Jean-Michel Fournier, University of Tours, France

Martine Faraco, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Ulrike Gut, Münster University, Germany

Silke Hamann, Düsseldorf University, Germany

Sophie Herment, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Nadine Herry-Bénit, Université Paris 8, France

Daniel Hirst, LPL, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

Patrick Honeybone, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Takeki Kamiyama, Université Paris 8, France

Mariko Kondo, Waseda University, Japan

Véronique Lacoste, University of Freiburg, Germany

Noël Nguyen, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Peter Prince, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

Anne Przewozny, Université Toulouse II, France

Jane Stuart-Smith, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Gabor Turcsan, LPL, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, France

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 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
          Supported by IEEE Technical Committees

                Deadline: January 15, 2013
        Workshop: June 1, 2013, Vancouver, Canada

      http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/

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


Following the success of the 1st PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and
Recognition Challenge, we are happy to announce a new challenge
dedicated to speech recognition in real-world reverberant, noisy conditions,
that will culminate in a dedicated satellite workshop of ICASSP 2013.

The challenge is supported by several IEEE Technical Committees and by
an Industrial Board.


FEATURED TASKS

The challenge consists of recognising distant-microphone speech mixed in
two-channel nonstationary noise recorded over a period of several weeks
in a real family house. Entrants may address either one or both of the
following tracks:

Medium vocabulary track: WSJ 5k sentences uttered by a static speaker

Small vocabulary track: simpler commands but small head movements


TO ENTER

You will find everything you need to get started (and even more) on the
challenge website:
- a full description of the challenge,
- clean, reverberated and multi-condition training and development data,
- baseline training, decoding and scoring software tools based on HTK.

Submission consists of a 2- to 8-page paper describing your system and
reporting its performance on the development and the test set. In
addition, you are welcome to submit an earlier paper to ICASSP 2013,
which will tentatively be grouped with other papers into a dedicated
session.

Any approach is welcome, whether emerging or established.

If you are interested in participating, please email us so we can
monitor interest and send you further updates about the challenge.


BEST CHALLENGE PAPER AWARD

The best challenge paper will distinguished by an award from the
Industrial Board.


IMPORTANT DATES

July 2012          Launch
October 2012       Test set release
January 15, 2013   Challenge & workshop submission deadline
February 18, 2013  Paper notification & release of the challenge results
June 1, 2013       ICASSP satellite workshop


INDUSTRIAL BOARD

Masami Akamine, Toshiba
Carlos Avendano, Audience
Li Deng, Microsoft
Erik McDermott, Google
Gautham Mysore, Adobe
Atsushi Nakamura, NTT
Peder A. Olsen, IBM
Trausti Thormundsson, Conexant
Daniel Willett, Nuance


WORKSHOP SPONSORS

Conexant Systems Inc.
Audience Inc.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories


ORGANISERS

Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe & Jonathan Le Roux, MERL
Francesco Nesta & Marco Matassoni, FBK-IRST

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International workshop on Field Speech and Mobile Data. 

http://www2.nict.go.jp/univ-com/isp/fsmd2013/index.html

Advances of speech recognition technologies for mobile devices like smart phones has made “speech data” an integral part of mobile data management. More and more attentions from both academics and industries are paid to voice user interfaces (VUI), multilingual translation, audio-video transcription, and even speech-to-blogging for mobile devices. Hereafter, management of real-world “field” speech data will be crucial for searching, analyzing, sharing, and delivering them in mobile service networks. With special emphasis on management of real-world “field” speech data, a new ICT platform integrating speech communication and cyber-physical systems will be introduced. On this platform, we can expect novel applications harnessing mobile speech data management, such as knowledge discovery form speech log data, situation awareness in real-world human communication, hands-free interaction using head-mounted display with speech input augmented by linguistic and sensory data. In this workshop we aim to provide a venue for academic and industrial discussions on “cross-cutting” technologies and open problems on speech data management and their applications for mobile devices.

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The Biometric group at the Idiap Research Institute is organizing the second competition on speaker recognition in mobile environment using MOBIO database for the 2013 International Conference on Biometrics (ICB-2013) to be held in Madrid, Spain on June 4-7, 2013. You are highly invited to participate to this competition.
For more information about the database (MOBIO) and the registration procedure, please visit the following link: http://www.beat-eu.org/evaluations/icb-2013-speaker-recognition-mobio
or please read the attached PDF file.
Please feel free to contact us if you need any additional detail.
Important dates:

Contacts:
    Elie.Khoury@idiap.ch
    Sebastien.Marcel@idiap.ch
   

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CALL FOR PAPERS

C B M I 2013
11th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing
17-19 June 2013, Veszprem, Hungary

http://cbmi2013.mik.uni-pannon.hu/
******************************************************************************

The 11th International Content Based Multimedia Indexing Workshop is to bring together the various
communities involved in all aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing and
presentation. Following the ten successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001,
Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania 2009, Grenoble 2010, Madrid 2011, and
Annecy 2012), the University of Pannonia, Hungary organizes the 11th Context Based Multimedia Indexing
Workshop on June 17-19 2013 in the historical town of Veszprém, Hungary, near the spectacular Lake Balaton.
The workshop will host invited keynote talks and regular, special and demo sessions with contributed
research papers.

Paper submission: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length and special session papers
of 6 pages and demo papers in 4 pages. All accepted and registered papers will be published in the
CBMI 2013 workshop proceedings which will be indexed and distributed by the IEEE xploreTM. Therefore
authors must prepare manuscript in an IEEE Xplore-compatible PDF version. The submissions are not blind,
the working language of the workshop is English.
Selected papers will appear, after extension and peer-review, in a special issue of Multimedia Tools
and Applications.

* Important dates:
Submission of full papers and demos: February 18, 2013
Notification of acceptance: April 1, 2013
Submission of camera-ready papers: April 20, 2013

Submission of special session proposals: January 13, 2013
Notification of session acceptance: January 20, 2013
Submission of papers: March 25, 2013
Notification of paper acceptance: April 12, 2013
Submission of final papers: April 22, 2013


* Topics of interest 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
* Multimedia fusion
* 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
* Summarization, 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.

* Organizing Committee:
General Chair: László Czúni, Univ. Pannonia, Hungary
Technical Program Chairs: Klaus Schöffmann, Univ. Klagenfurt, Austria
Tamás Szirányi, MTA-SZTAKI, Hungary
Demo Chair: Levente Kovács, MTA-SZTAKI, Hungary

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Call for Participation

    NTCIR-10 IR for Spoken Documents Task (SpokenDoc-2)
    http://www.cl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~sdpwg/index.php?ntcir10

== INTRODUCTION

The growth of the internet and the decrease of the storage costs are
resulting in the rapid increase of multimedia contents today. For
retrieving these contents, available text-based tag information is
limited. Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is a promising technology for
retrieving these contents using the speech data included in them.
Following the NTCIR-9 SpokenDoc task, we will continue to evaluate the
SDR based on a realistic ASR condition, where the target documents are
spontaneous speech data with high word error rate and high
out-of-vocabulary rate.

== TASK OVERVIEW

The new speech data, the recordings of the first to sixth annual
Spoken Document Processing Workshop, are going to be used as the
target document in SpokenDoc-2. The larger speech data, spoken
lectures in Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ), are also used as in
the last SpokenDoc-1. The task organizers are going to provide
reference automatic transcriptions for these speech data. These
enabled researchers interested in SDR, but without access to their own
ASR system to participate in the tasks. They also enabled comparisons
of the IR methods based on the same underlying ASR performance.

Targeting these documents, two subtasks will be conducted.

Spoken Term Detection: 
  Within spoken documents, find the occurrence positions of a queried
  term. The evaluation should be conducted by both the efficiency
  (search time) and the effectiveness (precision and recall).

Spoken Content Retrieval: 
  Among spoken documents, find the segments including the relevant
  information related to the query, where a segment is either a
  document (resulting in document retrieval task) or a passage
  (passage retrieval task). This is like an ad-hoc text retrieval
  task, except that the target documents are speech data.
  
== FOR MORE DETAILS

Please visit
http://www.cl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~sdpwg/index.php?ntcir10
A link to the NTCIR-10 task participants registration page
is now available from this page.

Please note that the registration deadline is Jun 30, 2012 (for
all NTCIR-10 tasks).

== ORGANIZERS

Kiyoaki Aikawa (Tokyo University of Technology)
Tomoyosi Akiba (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Xinhui Hu (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Yoshiaki Itoh (Iwate Iwate Prefectural University)
Tatsuya Kawahara (Kyoto University)
Seiichi Nakagawa (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Hiroaki Nanjo (Ryukoku University)
Hiromitsu Nishizaki (University of Yamanashi)
Yoichi Yamashita Ritsumeikan University)

If you have any questions, please send e-mails to the task
organizers mailing list: ntcadm-spokendoc2@nlp.cs.tut.ac.jp

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

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The 3^rd Annual World Congress of U-Homes - 2013

Theme: All About Your Smart Life

Date: June 20-22, 2013

Venue: Dalian, China

Website: www.bitconferences.com/u-home2013

We are pleased to announcethe 3rd Annual World Congress of U-Homes-2013 will be held in Dalian, China during June 20-22, 2013.Hereby we cordially and politely welcome you to join this grand and interesting event and give an oral presentation.

The program is dedicated to highlight some recent breakthrough stories and successes in 10 major topics.

Forum 1: Smart Home Technology

Forum 2: Smart Home Network & Communication

Forum 3: Smart Home Multimedia Entertainment

Forum 4: Smart Electronic Appliance, Utilities

Forum 5: New Energy for Smart Home

Forum 6: Smart Grid and Smart Meters

Forum 7: Smart Home Security Systems

Forum 8: Smart Health Telematics

Forum 9: Building Automation, Control and Management

Forum 10: Smart Home Standard, Marketing, and Business Development

Detailed program is available via our website: http://www.bitconferences.com/u-home2013/program.asp

It is worthmentioning that there are some other concurrent events that you can participate at the same time: 2013 China International Software & Information Service Fair（CISIS-2013）, WCEIT-2013, U-World-2013 and Cloud Con-2013, where you will be able to enjoy both scientific program sessions and exhibitions in large scale.

As a famous IT event, CISIS has gained attentions from various levels of people in IT area. There are over 40 events during the same period and around 800 enterprises attending the exhibition. The overseas delegates will be from over 30 countries and regions. The total number of participants and visitors is expected to reach 30,000.

Some honored guests will include ministerial-level officials from Department of Commerce, Department of Science and Technology and other departments, as well as high-level officials and industry association leaders from Japan, India and other countries; SVPs with Intel, IBM, Deloitte, Wipro and other multinational corporations as well as CEOs with some IT leading enterprises in China will participate in this event and give appealing speeches.

Kevin Guo

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

Program Coordinator

BIT’s 3rd Annual World Congress of U-Homes (U-Homes-2013)

Dalian, China

Tel:0086-411-84799609-842

Email:kevin@bit-uworld.com

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Call for Papers

2013 Afeka Speech Processing Conference!

Organized by the Afeka Center for Language Processing (ACLP), the 2013 Afeka Speech Processing Conference will be held at the Afeka Academic College of Engineering in Tel Aviv on July 1-2, 2013.

http://fogeli.co.il/afeka/divurim/2013/divur_2801/index_server.html

All interested parties are invited to submit an abstract in a general call for papers for the 3rd annual Speech Processing Conference at Afeka. Authors of selected abstracts will submit a full paper to be presented during the main conference, on Wednesday, July 1, 2013.

The main theme of the 2013 conference will be short and long term research and development directions in speech processing technologies for multi-modal natural user interfaces and speech analytics applications that support the growing needs of the market. Paper proposals from researchers, vendors, developers and providers of speech processing technologies can cover, but are not limited to, any of the following topics:

Speech Recognition

Speaker Identification/Verification/Diarization

Speech Transcription

Speech Analytics

Keyword Spotting

Speech Enhancement

Voice-User Interface

Human-Machine Interaction

Multimodal Interaction

Text-to-Speech

Speech Technology Integration with other technologies such as NLP and AI

Other... (if no appropriate category)

Abstracts can describe research, products, services and/or case studies relevant to any of the speech

processing related topics listed above.
Abstracts and final papers will be submitted via a secure online submission form.

Abstracts should be 300-500 words.

  Final papers should be 3-4 pages and submitted online by June 1.

  All abstracts, final papers and presentations must be in English.

Abstract submission deadline: February 15, 2013.

Acceptance notifications: March 15, 2013.

Paper submission deadline: June 1, 2013.

Presentation submission deadline: June 20, 2013.

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CALL FOR PAPERS French Phonology Network Meeting 2013 (RFP 2013)

After the conferences organized in Orléans 2010, Tours 2011 and Paris 2012, the French Phonology Network (Réseau Français de Phonologie) is launching a call  for papers for a new meeting in the same spirit that will take place in Nantes from July, 1^st to 3^rd, 2013 thanks to the LLing (EA3827, Université de Nantes), FoReLL (Université de Poitiers) and MSH-Ange Guépin. Invited speakers  * Phillip Backley (Tohoku Gakuin University, Sendai, Japon). * Didier Demolin (GIPSA Grenoble / UMR 5216 , France). * Andrew Nevins (University College London, Royaume-Uni) * Bert Vaux (King’s College Cambridge, Royaume-Uni). * Sophie Wauquier (Université de Paris 8 / UMR 7023, France). * Leo Wetzels (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Pays-Bas).

Main session Phonologists of every school or background are warmly welcome to participate. Issues at stake may be in the field of general phonology or of the phonological analysis of a linguistic phenomenon of a specific language. Submissions that will be taken into consideration will be those dealing with signal processing, perception, acquisition, diachrony, dialectology, formalism, epistemology and all issues which explicitly file under the field of phonology and its interfaces.
Thematic sessions This year we’d like to draw your attention to the fact that thematic sessions will be organized around 'Acquisition' and 'Harmony'.

Thematic session 1 : Acquisition

This thematic session aims at addressing the latest issues in the field of phonological acquisition of a first or second language. It will bring forward data which are unattested in adult’s languages and challenge phonological theories.

Submissions dealing with any aspect/level of phonological acquisition are welcome. They may be concerned with minimal units in phonology (features, elements, segments), the syllable, prosody, processes (in production or perception) among other topics. Contributions may be couched in any theoretical framework, and may be concerned with the acquisition of a single language or adopt a cross-linguistic/typological perspective.

Thematic session 2 : Harmony Harmony is a wide-spread process among the world’s languages. It may be defined as a syntagmatic change whereby a given segment absorbs some of the properties of another segment in the same phonological domain. When it is perceived as some kind of long-distance assimilation, harmony -which may be local (strict contiguity) or extended to a given domain (syllable, foot, word, phonological phrase)- may target vowels (vowel harmony) or consonants (consonant harmony). If locality seems to play a crucial role in its definition, harmony is also sensitive to directionality. Intervening segments (within the domain within which harmony applies) may prevent harmony to take place or be transparent: are these really invisible or are they somehow involved in the harmony process? Are harmony processes due to phonetic (e.g. phonologization of a coarticulation process) or to strictly phonological principles (e.g. computation of a restricted set of principles)?

This thematic session aims at bringing together people who are concerned with harmony in general phonology as well as with harmonic relations in speech perception and production, prosody, acquisition, development, the structuring of the lexicon, automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis (this list, of course, should not be interpreted as being exhaustive).

Submission format and selection Abstracts will be written either in French or in English and will not exceed two pages in length, (A4 format, Times font, size 12), including examples and references, and will be submitted through Easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rfp2013. The abstract must be completely anonymous and do not contain any information that identifies the authors. Submissions will then be forwarded to two peers for assessment and the final selection will be carried out by a board meeting.
Important dates * Call for papers: December 15, 2012 * Deadline for submission: March 1st, 2013 * Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2013 * Conference: July 1^st to 3^rd, 2013.
Organization  Talks will last 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes’ debate.
Reviewers J.-P. Angoujard (U. de Nantes), S. Bendjaballah (U. Paris 7), G. Bergounioux (U. d’Orléans), J. Brandao de Carvalho (U. Paris 8), Ph. Carr (U. de Montpellier), C. Dugua (U. d’Orléans), J. Durand (U. de Toulouse), S. Ferré (U. de Tours), J.-M. Fournier (U. de Tours), S. Herment, (U. d’Aix-Marseille), M. D’Imperio (Aix-Marseille), M. Lahrouchi (U. Paris 8), B. Laks (U. Paris 10), J.-L. Léonard (U. Paris 3), J. Lowenstamm (U. Paris 7), N. Nguyen (U. d’Aix-Marseille), R. Noske (U. de Lille), C. Patin (U. de Lille), A. Rialland (U. Paris 3), R. Ridouane (U. Paris 3), M. Russo (U. Paris 8) , P. Sauzet (U. Toulouse), T. Scheer (U. Nice), Ph. Ségéral (U. Paris 7), A. Tifrit (U. de Nantes), N. Vallée (U. de Grenoble), S. Wauquier (U. Paris 8).
Organizing committee J.-M. Beltzung, E. Caratini, O. Crouzet, A. Tifrit

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Colloque organisé par l’Unité de   Recherche 1339

                                                               Linguistique, Langues, Parole   (LiLPa)

                                                                  Université de Strasbourg – Unistra

                                                                                    3 – 5 juillet 2013

                                                                                 Strasbourg - France

CorpORA and Tools in Linguistics,  Languages and Speech:

                                                                        Status, Uses and Misuse

          Conference  organised by the  Research Unit 1339 Linguistics, Languages and Speech (LiLPa)

                                                              University  of Strasbourg – UNISTRA

                                                                                  3 – 5 July 2013

                                                                            Strasbourg - France

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The 9th International Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces;

July 15th - August 9th 2013; Lisbon (Portugal) *

After the previous workshops, held in Mons (Belgium), Dubrovnik (Croatia), Istanbul (Turkey), Paris (France), Genova (Italy), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Plzen (Czech Republic) and Metz (France) which had an impressive success record and had proven the viability and usefulness of this original workshop, the 9th edition will take place in the New University of Lisbon (Portugal). eNTERFACE workshops aim at establishing a tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place, a team of senior project leaders in multimodal interfaces, researchers, and (undergraduate) students, to work on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4 weeks. Participants are organized in teams, attached to specific projects, working on free software. Each week will typically consist of working sessions by the teams on their respective projects plus a tutorial given by an invited senior researcher and a presentation of the results achieved by each project group. The last week will be devoted to writing an article on the results obtained by the teams plus a big session where all the groups will present their achievements. Proceedings are expected to be published by Springer, IFIP AICT series (indexed in Web of Science).
The eNTERFACE'13 committee now invites researchers to submit project proposals that will be evaluated by the scientific committee. All the information asked to submit a project is available on the website of the workshop (http://eventos.fct.unl.pt/enterface13). The proposals should contain a full description of the project's objectives, required hardwares/softwares and relevant literatures. When submitting a project proposal, a list of potential candidates can be proposed by the authors. Although not exhaustive, the submitted projects can cover one or several of the topics listed below. A special focus of this year is on assistive, rehabilitation and educational technologies.
Topics:

- Presence and telepresence - Teleoperation and telerobotics - Assistive and rehabilitation technologies - Human-robot and human-environments interactions in smart environments - Game and serious game applications - Multimodal interfaces for collaborative systems - Multimodal signal analysis and synthesis - Signal-level and meaning-level data fusion - Usability in ubiquitous computing - Intuitive interfaces and personalized systems in real and virtual environments - User, context and semantics aware self-learning and adapting systems - Applications of multimodal interfaces
Important dates:

* January 12th, 2013: Reception of a 1 page Notification of Interest, with a summary of project goals, work-packages and deliverables;

* February 2nd, 2013: Reception of the complete project proposal in the format provided by the Author’s kit;

* February 17th, 2013: Notification of project acceptance; publication of the Call for Participation;

* April 1st, 2013: Closing of the Call for Participation;

* April 15th, 2013: Publication of teams;

* July 15th – August 9th, 2013: eNTERFACE’13 Workshop.
Website of the workshop: http://eventos.fct.unl.pt/enterface13

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format to: yr@uninova.pt

The organizing committee of eNTERFACE'13 is looking forward for your submissions.

-- Prof. Yves Rybarczyk Departamento de Engenharia Electrotécnica Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia Universidade Nova de Lisboa Campus da Caparica 2829-516 Caparica PORTUGAL Tel: +351 917691175 Email: y.rybarczyk@fct.unl.pt Site: https://sites.google.com/a/uninova.pt/yr/

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1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL

LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING

SLSP 2013

Tarragona, Spain

July 29-31, 2013

Organised by:

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili   University

Research Institute for Information and Language Processing (RIILP)

University of Wolverhampton

http://grammars.grlmc.com/SLSP2013/

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

AIMS:

SLSP is the first event in a series to host and promote research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large, well-known conferences including papers in any of these fields, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between areas and people will hopefully happen. SLSP will reserve significant space for young scholars at the beginning of their careers.

VENUE:

SLSP 2013 will take place in Tarragona, 100 km. to the south of Barcelona.

SCOPE:

The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical methods (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. The list below is indicative and not exhaustive:

- phonology, morphology

- syntax, semantics

- discourse, dialogue, pragmatics

- statistical models for natural language processing

- supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods applied to natural language, including speech

- statistical methods, including biologically-inspired methods

- similarity

- alignment

- language resources

- part-of-speech tagging

- parsing

- semantic role labelling

- natural language generation

- anaphora and coreference resolution

- speech recognition

- speaker identification/verification

- speech transcription

- text-to-speech synthesis

- machine translation

- translation technology

- text summarisation

- information retrieval

- text categorisation

- information extraction

- term extraction

- spelling correction

- text and web mining

- opinion mining and sentiment analysis

- spoken dialogue systems

- author identification, plagiarism and spam filtering

STRUCTURE:

SLSP 2013 will consist of:

‐ invited talks

‐ invited tutorials

‐ peer-reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Yoshua Bengio (Montréal), tutorial Learning Deep Representations

Christof Monz (Amsterdam), Challenges and Opportunities of Multilingual Information Access

Tanja Schultz (Karlsruhe Tech), Multilingual Speech Processing with a special emphasis on Rapid Language Adaptation

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, Co-Chair)

Ruslan Mitkov (Wolverhampton, Co-Chair)

Jerome Bellegarda (Apple Inc., Cupertino)

Robert C. Berwick (MIT)

Laurent Besacier (LIG, Grenoble)

Bill Byrne (Cambridge)

Jen-Tzung Chien (National Chiao Tung U, Hsinchu)

Kenneth Church (IBM Research)

Koby Crammer (Technion)

Renato De Mori (McGill & Avignon)

Thierry Dutoit (U Mons)

Marcello Federico (Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento)

Katherine Forbes-Riley (Pittsburgh)

Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Tech)

Yuqing Gao (IBM Thomas J. Watson)

Ralp Grishman (New York U)

Dilek Hakkani-Tür (Microsoft Research, Mountain View)

Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd., Brighton)

Dietrich Klakow (Saarbrücken)

Philipp Koehn (Edinburgh)

Mikko Kurimo (Aalto)

Lori Lamel (CNRS-LIMSI, Orsay)

Philippe Langlais (Montréal)

Haizhou Li (Institute for Infocomm    Research, Singapore)

Qun Liu (Dublin   City)

Daniel Marcu (SDL)

Manuel Montes-y-Gómez (INAOEP, Puebla)

Masaaki Nagata (NTT, Kyoto)

Joakim Nivre (Uppsala)

Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Doha)

Miles Osborne (Edinburgh)

Manny Rayner (Geneva)

Giuseppe Riccardi (U Trento)

José A. Rodríguez Fonollosa (Technical U Catalonia, Barcelona)

Paolo Rosso (Technical U Valencia)

Mark Steedman (Edinburgh)

Tomek Strzalkowski (Albany)

Gökhan Tür (Microsoft Research, Redmond)

Stephan Vogel (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha)

Kuansan Wang (Microsoft Research, Redmond)

Dekai Wu (HKUST, Hong Kong)

Min Zhang (Institute for Infocomm    Research, Singapore)

Yunxin Zhao (U Missouri, Columbia)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)

Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, Co-Chair)

Ruslan Mitkov (Wolverhampton, Co-Chair)

Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg)

Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single‐spaced pages (including eventual appendices) and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNAI series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Submissions are to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp2013

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI topical subseries of the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from November 30, 2012 to July 29, 2013. The registration form can be found at:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/SLSP2013/Registration

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: March 5, 2013 (23:59h, CET)

Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: April 9, 2013

Final version of the paper for the LNAI proceedings: April 17, 2013

Early registration: April 24, 2013

Late registration: July 19, 2013

Submission to the post-conference journal special issue: October 31, 2013

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

SLSP 2013

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

University of Wolverhampton

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We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the fourth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), to be co-located with Interspeech 2013 in Grenoble in August, 2013. The deadline for submission of papers and demo proposals is 17 May and 31 May, respectively. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline and formatting of regular papers is here:

       http://slpat.org/slpat2013

This 2-day workshop will bring together researchers from all areas of speech and language technology with a common interest in making everyday life more accessible for people with physical, cognitive, sensory, emotional, or developmental disabilities. This workshop will provide an opportunity for individuals from both research communities, and the individuals with whom they are working, to assist to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress. General topics include but are not limited to:

                • Automated processing of sign language

                • Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments

                • Speech transformation for improved intelligibility

                • Speech and Language Technologies for Assisted Living

                • Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language

                • Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC/AT applications

                • Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech

                • Silent speech: speech technology based on sensors without audio

                • Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication

                • Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies

                • Multimodal user interfaces and dialogue systems adapted to assistive technologies

                • NLP for cognitive assistance applications

                • Presentation of graphical information for people with visual impairments

                • Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications

                • Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications

                • Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies

                • Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology

                • Web accessibility; text simplification, summarization, and adapted presentation modes such as speech, signs or symbols

                • Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field

                • Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes

                • Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology

                • Anything included in this year's special topic

                • Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

This year we are introducing a special topic, which is Smart Homes and ambient intelligent technology applied to augmentative communication. Relevant research topics would include (but are not limited to):

                • Automatic Speech recognition in multi-source environments

                • Distant speech recognition

                • Understanding, modelling or recognition of aged speech

                • Speech analysis in the case of elderly with impairments, early recognition of speech capability loss

                • Assistive speech technology

                • Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR)

                • Multimodal emotion recognition

                • Audio scene and smart home context analysis

                • Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living

Please contact the conference organizers at slpat2013.workshop@gmail.com with any questions.

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Phonetics, Phonology and language contact

 The conference PPLC 13 'Phonetics, Phonology and language contact' is a satellite event of Interspeech 2013 (http://www.interspeech2013.org/) which aims to bring together students and researchers working in the field of language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact situations.  It distinguishes itself from other conferences addressing these issues by wanting to provide a forum for dialogue and exchange between researchers working on second language acquisition, on the one hand, and researchers interested in multilingualism or in language varieties used in contact situations (for example, English or French spoken in Africa) on the other hand.  The possibility of comparing the characteristics of varieties emerging from language contact with the characteristics of varieties used by language learners will allow us to gain new insights on a range of linguistic questions, including among others: Which linguistic elements are acquired most easily, which elements are the ones most likely to disappear in contact situations or in cases of attrition, how to evaluate the complexity of the languages of the world, what impact can this knowledge have for teaching foreign languages?

 The conference will be held at the General Wallonia-Brussels Delegation in Paris (274, Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75007 Paris), and will take place from Wednesday, August 21, 2013 (2:00 p.m.) to Friday, August 23, 2013. The conference will include several oral and poster sessions as well as a half-day tutorial focusing on topics related to the development of resources for working on the phonology and phonetics in language contact situations (tools, transcription systems, construction of corpora, etc.).

The keynote speakers of the conference are:

- Catherine BEST,  University of Western Sydney

-  Ulrike GUT, University of Münster

- Paul IVERSON, University College London

-  Sabine ZERBIAN, University of Potsdam

We invite submissions that deal with the following topics (non-exhaustive list):

- second language acquisition and second language learning (description and error analysis, perception and production of foreign languages, factors that influence variation between learners, learning tools and techniques)

- linguistic description of language contact varieties

- multilingualism 

- linguistic development in contact situations

- attrition, etc.

 We invite submissions of abstracts for 30 minute oral (including questions) and poster presentations.  Abstracts should be submitted by March 5th, 2013, in PDF format using the following Easychair submission site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pplc2013.

 Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than two pages of A4-format (with an additional page for figures and references), single-spaced and in an easy to read 12pt font (like Times). Proposals will be evaluated anonymously by at least two reviewers. Abstracts should be submitted in English or French, the official languages of the symposium will be English and French.

 Soon after the conference, keynote speakers and selected authors will be invited to submit a revised and extended version of their presentation for publication in an edited volume (Peter Lang or CIPA).

Important dates:

First call for papers / opening for abstract submission: December, 2012 Submission deadline of abstracts: March 5th, 2013 Notification of acceptance: April 15th, 2013 Conference: August, 21^st-13^th, 2013

Contact: Further information can be found on the conference website: https://sites.google.com/site/ppcpinterspeech2013/home,

or by email: mailto:pplc2013.sat@gmail.com

Organizing committee

The PPLC 13 is being organized conjointly by members of the Labex ‘Empirical Foundations of Linguistics’ (Sorbonne Paris Cité) and members of the University of Mons and the Free University of Brussels.

Elisabeth DELAIS-ROUSSARIE, UMR 7110 – Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS/Paris Diderot University

Barbara KÜHNERT, Institut du Monde Anglophone & UMR 7018 - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, CNRS/University of Paris 3

Claire PILLOT-LOISEAU, ILPGA & UMR 7018 - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, CNRS/University of Paris 3

Mathieu AVANZI, UMR 7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS/Paris Diderot University & University of Neuchâtel

Véronique DELVAUX, Laboratoire de Phonétique, & Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Langage, University of Mons

Bernard HARMEGNIES, Laboratoire de Phonétique & Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Langage, University of Mons

Kathy HUET, Laboratoire de Phonétique, & Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Langage, University of Mons

Myriam PICCALUGA, Laboratoire de Phonétique, & Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Langage, University of Mons

Dan VAN RAEMDONCK, Centre de Linguistique, ULB-Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgique.

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Call for papers

     FIRST WORKSHOP ON SPEECH, LANGUAGE AND AUDIO IN MULTIMEDIA

                           Organized by
             ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia
         IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing for Multimedia

               as a satellite event of Interspeech 2013

                 Aug. 22—23, 2013, Marseille, France

                   http://slam2013.lif.univ-mrs.fr

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The first Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM)
aims at bringing together researchers working in speech, language and
audio processing to analyze, index and access multimedia data.
Multimedia data are now available in very large amounts with a wide
variety of formats and qualities, from professional content to
user-generated ones: Lectures, meetings, interviews, debates,
conversational broadcast, podcasts, social videos on the Web, etc. Such
data, along with the associated use scenarios, raise specific
challenges: Robustness facing the high variability in quality;
Efficiency to handle very large amount of data; Semantics shared across
modalities; Potentially high error rates in transcription; etc.
Worldwide, several national and international research projects are
focusing on audio analysis of multimedia data. Similarly, various
benchmark initiatives have been initiated such as TRECVID MED,
MediaEval, or ETAPE and REPERE in France.

The SLAM workshop intends to bring together players from the field to
share recent research results, discuss ongoing and future projects,
benchmarking initiatives and applications. We expect communications on
research work, project description, evaluation initiative,
demonstrations and applications dealing with speech and/or language
and/or audio on any type of multimedia material. The list of topics of
interest includes (but is not limited to):

Audio event detection and audio classification
Speech and speaker recognition on multimedia material
Audio-aware genre analysis and classification
Multimodal speaker identification and clustering
Multimedia spoken term detection and content retrieval
Speech and audio aware content segmentation and structuring
Audio indexing and fingerprinting
Robust feature extraction and processing
Natural language processing for multimedia
Metadata extraction : Entity extraction, keyword extraction, etc.
Summarization and hyperlink generation
Multimodal fusion and integration involving audio
Generation of descriptive text for multimedia
Speech and audio multimedia applications and services
Databases and benchmarks
Large scale speech and audio analysis
Navigation in multimedia audio content

applied to any media such as:

Professional broadcasts – TV, radio, podcasts, newsfeeds, synopsis, etc. Social media – YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Voice Social
Network, etc.
Audiovisual archives – Lectures and conferences, meetings, etc.
Music – Music catalogs, music collections, etc.

The workshop is organized in conjunction with Interspeech 2013 over 1.5
days, starting Thu. 22, 2013 at mid-day and ending Fri. 23, 2013
afternoon, right before the main conference. Marseille is conveniently
connected by high-speed train to Lyon where the Interspeech conference
will take place. The format of the workshop will include an invited
talk, oral presentations of scientific work and a poster session for
project and benchmark presentations.

Prospective authors should submit a manuscript following instructions on
the web site. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least two
reviewers. Proceedings will be published online in open access and a
special issue in a dedicated journal is targeted.

*Important dates*
full paper submission deadline: April 15, 2013
notification of acceptance: May 17, 2013
camera ready paper: June 28, 2013
workshop: August 22-23, 2013
Interspeech conference: August 25-30, 2013

The first SLAM workshop is jointly organized by the newly created ISCA
SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia and by the IEEE SIG on Audio
and Speech Processing in Multimedia. This first edition is intended as
the first of a series of workshop.

General Chairs:
Frédéric Bechet (LIF-CNRS, Aix Marseille Université)
Guillaume Gravier (IRISA, CNRS)

Scientific committee:
Xavier Anguera (Telefónica)
Frédéric Bechet (Aix Marseille Université)
Delphine Charlet (Orange Labs)
Gerald Friedland (ICSI)
Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Guillaume Gravier (CNRS)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)
Martha Larson (TU Delft)
Lin-Shan Lee (National Taiwan University)
Georges Linarès (Université d'Avignon)
Florian Metze (CMU)

Organizing committee:
Hervé Bredin (LIMSI, CNRS)
Benoît Favre (LIF-CNRS, Aix Marseille Université)
Sylvain Meigner (LIUM, Université du Maine)
Christian Raymond (IRISA, INSA Rennes)

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**** Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals ****

                             WASSS’2013

                                Grenoble

                              22-23 august 2013

                                  1^st call for papers

                       wasss-2013.imag.fr

a satellite of Interspeech 2013 http://www.interspeech2013.org/

The WASSSS workshop will take place at the University of Grenoble, approximately 1.5 hour by train, bus or car from Lyon. It will be held over 2 days: the Thursday and Friday before Interspeech.).

This workshop will provide a meeting place for the different communities interested into why, how and when speech is used by humans for signalling socio-affective functions. It will be dedicated to building interdisciplinary research and cross-fertilization between the different scientific communities All areas related to human communication are concerned: language and speech computing, robotics or virtual agents, as well as linguistics, phonetics, pragmatics, didactics, sociology, psychology, neuropsychology, ethology, biology, etc. The organisation of affect is complex – from low-level emotion automatic or reflexive processing to higher cognitive levels , culture-dependent, language-organized, controlled processing. Speech can signal some very rich social and emotional cues, reflecting personality, social role, the cultural/language specificities in all human interactions and more broadly in human communication.

This workshop will be especially the place where “social emotions” will be debated from different points of view, with different meanings depending on the domain.

--- The intended contributions can be related, but not limited to:

- social emotions, social affect: theories or models, how and why signalled

- social affect signals (e.g. expressions of automatic emotions and more social emotions, attitudes, intentions, mental states, cognitive processing, feelings...): corpus, description, annotation, etc

- the cultural contrast of affective social speech

- psychological/neuropsychological models and cues for social affect processing

- social and anthropological models for analysing affective processing and

emotions expressions

- social affect in Human Machine Interaction and dialog

- multimodality of the social signals in face to face speech interactions

- the place of social speech affect in L2 learning

- the challenge of social signals for robots and embodied virtual agents

- social affect in speech technologies: speech synthesis, recognition or translation

- speech social affect within personality, social rule and culture

- lexicon of social affect in speech

- sentiment analysis/opinion mining in speech

- etc

******* Important dates:

paper submission: 22 april 2103

acceptation notification: 17 june 2013

final submission: 22 july 2013

early registration: 27 june 2013

late registration: 20 july 2013

---- WASSS overlaps 1 day with SLPAT at the same place: it will be possible to register WASSS together with SLPAT http://www.slpat.org/slpat2013/ (decreased fees)

--- submission
Papers should be a maximum of 4 pages Interspeech format (see submission guidelines on Interspeech site

Every paper will be reviewed by at least 2 members of the scientific committee (extension of the program committee). The workshop contributions be followed by a special publication of selected papers.

Program Commitee

Aubergé V, LIG CNRS, Grenoble, France

Campbell N, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Grandjean D., Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland

Mac K D, MICA, Hanoi, Vietnam

De Meo A, L2 Linguistics and Audio-Visual Center, Italy

de Moraes JA, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sagisaka Y, Waseda University, Japan

Wichman A, School of Literature, Language and International Studies, University of Central Lancashire, UK.

Pettorino M., L’Orientale University, Napoli, Italy

Rilliard A, LIMSI, Paris, France

Shochi T, Université Bordeaux, France

Tutin, A, Lidilem, Grenoble, France

Organization Committee

Aubergé V, LIG, Grenoble, France, chair

Adam Carole, LIG, Grenoble, France

Rossato Solange, LIG, Grenoble, France Sasa Y., LIG, Grenoble, France

Vacher M, LIG, Grenoble, France

Vaufreydaz Dominique, INRIA/LIG, Grenoble, France

Antunes L., UFOP, Minais Gerais, Brazil

Rousset I., Lidilem, Grenoble France

Zampa V., Lidilem, Grenoble, France

Henrich N, Gipsa Lab, Grenoble, France

Lu Y, Gipsa Lab, Grenoble, France

Vallée N., Gipsa Lab, Grenoble, France

--
Véronique Aubergé Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble - UMR CNRS 5217 Département d'Informatique Pédagogique de l'Université Stendhal +33 4 76 51 44 86 / +33 6 80 70 85 66

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AVSP 2013 The 12th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing August 29 - September 1, 2013.
Annecy - France 

http://avsp2013.loria.fr

The 12th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
(AVSP2013) will be held in Annecy, France, from August 29th to September
1st, 2013. AVSP is a satellite workshop of INTERSPEECH 2013, one of the
largest conferences on speech communication.

Annecy is a charming town in South-eastern France, known for its lake,
'Europe's cleanest lake'. Annecy is about 35km/22miles south of Geneva.

AVSP is a uniquely interdisciplinary conference, focusing on the effects
of auditory and visual speech information on human perception, machine
recognition, and human-machine interaction. AVSP conferences attract
many researchers from various fields, such as psychology, computer
engineering, neuroscience, linguistics, and robotic engineering.

** Conference Topics

Submission of papers are invited in all areas of auditory-visual speech
processing including but not limited to:

- Human recognition of audio-visual speech
- Machine recognition of audio-visual speech
- Human and machine models of multimodal integration
- Multimodal processing of spoken events
- Cross-linguistic studies
- Developmental studies
- Role of gestures accompanying speech
- Modeling, synthesis and recognition of facial gestures
- Audio-visual speech synthesis
- Prosody
- Neuropsychology and neurophysiology of audio-visual speech processing
- Scene analysis using audio and visual speech information

** Important Dates 

- Paper Submission Deadline: May 5, 2013
- Notification of Acceptance: June 8, 2013
- Camera-ready Paper: June 15, 2013
- Early registration deadline: June 28, 2013
- Registration deadline: July 31, 2013
- Conference Dates: Aug 29 - Sep 1, 2013


For the latest information, please check the conference web page:
http://avsp2013.loria.fr

and feel free to contact us: avsp2013@loria.fr

The organizing committee of AVSP 2013 is looking forward for your submissions.



Slim Ouni (LORIA - Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France)
Frederic Berthommier (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France)
Alexandra Jesse (University of Mass. Amherst, MA, USA)

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SLaTE-2013 (Speech  and Language Technology in Education) will be held in Grenoble, France,

on August 30-31 & September 1st, 2013, just  after Interspeech 2013 in Lyon.
     
      Official conference website: www.slate2013.org.
     
      SLaTE-2013 mailing list: email to 'sympa@gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr'       with subject 'sub slate2013-info'.
     
      SLaTE-2013         wellcomes all topics related to speech and language technology         for education (SLaTE). This includes, but is not         limited to, the following topics:
      • Speech technology for first         and second language learning and acquisition
      • Natural language processing         for education
      • Spoken dialogue systems for         education
      • Applications using speech         and/or natural language processing for education
      • Intelligent tutoring         systems using speech and natural language
      • Development of language         resources for SLaTE applications
      • Assessment and user studies         of SLaTE methods and applications
      • Research on first and         second language
      • Theoretical and         methodological issues in SLaTE
      • Pronunciation pedagogy and         phonetic correction
      • Use of speech synthesis for         language learning
      • Serious games in SLaTE      
      • Language learning and         disability
      • Speech and Language         Technology for STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths)

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                   TSD 2013 - PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT
**************************************************************************

Sixteenth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2013)
            Plzen (Pilsen), Czech Republic, 1-5 September 2013
                       http://www.tsdconference.org


TSD NEWS

The TSD conference fee was significantly reduced. It is organized in
parallel with SPECOM. 

ABOUT CONFERENCE

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University
of West Bohemia, Pilsen, and the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno. This year the conference is organized in parallel with
the 15th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM). The
conference is supported by International Speech Communication Association
(ISCA). 

Venue: Plzen (Pilsen), angelo Hotel (city center), Czech Republic

TSD SERIES

TSD series have 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. The TSD
proceedings are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters Conference
Proceedings Citation Index. LNAI series are listed in all major citation
databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, or COMPENDEX.


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
    (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)


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event will be English. However, 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
        Darja Fiser, Slovenia
        Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
        Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
        Louise Guthrie, GB
        Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
        Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
        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
        Fabio Pianesi, Italy
        Maciej Piasecki, Poland
        Jan Pomikalek, Czech Republic
        Adam Przepiorkowski, Poland
        Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
        James Pustejovsky, USA
        Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
        Milan Rusko, Slovakia
        Stefan Steidl, Germany
        Pavel Skrelin, Russia
        Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
        Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
        Georg Stemmer, Germany
        Marko Tadic, Croatia
        Tamas Varadi, Hungary
        Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
        Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine
        Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands
        Yorick Wilks, GB
        Victor Zakharov, Russia


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.One day of the  conference
will be dedicated to tutorials and workshops.  

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Pilsen will allow
additional informal interactions. Details about the social event will be
available on the web page.


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 on the presentation format will be
based upon the recommendation of three independent reviewers. The authors
are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission form
accessible from the conference web site.

Papers submitted to TSD 2013 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 the reviewing is blind, the paper should not include authors'
name 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 determined to be rejected without review.

The authors are strongly encouraged to write their papers in TeX (plain)
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 MS Word-compatible software for the final version must use the
LNCS template for MS Word and within the submit process ask the
Proceedings Editors to convert the paper to the LaTeX format. For this
service a service-and-license fee of CZK 1500 will be levied
automatically.

The paper format for the review has to be either the PDF or PostScript
file with all required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance,
speakers will receive further information on submitting their camera-ready
and electronic sources (for detailed instructions on the final paper
format see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Authors are also invited to present actual projects, a developed software
or interesting materials relevant to the topics of the conference.
Speakers who have prepared a demonstration should provide an abstract not
exceeding one page. The demonstration abstracts will not appear in the
conference proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 31, 2013 ............ Submission of full papers
May 12, 2013 .............. Notification of acceptance
June 9, 2013 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration

September 1-5, 2013 ....... Conference date

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

CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your status. It
includes one copy of the conference proceedings, refreshments/coffee
breaks, opening dinner, welcome party, mid-conference social event
admissions, and organizing costs. In order to lower the fee as much as
possible, meals during the conference, the accommodation, and the
conference trip are not included. 

Full participant:
early registration by June 9, 2013 - CZK 8.200 (approx. 320 EUR)
late registration by August 1, 2013 - CZK 9.400 (approx. 370 EUR)
on-site registration - CZK 10.000 (approx. 390 EUR)

Student (reduced): 
early registration by June 9, 2013 - CZK 7.000 (approx. 280 EUR)
late registration by August 1, 2013 - CZK 8.400 (approx. 330 EUR)
on-site registration - CZK 8.900 (approx. 350 EUR)

The payment may be refunded up until August 15, at the cost of CZK 1.500.
No refund is possible after this date. All costs are in Czech Crowns
(Czech Koruna, CZK), see e.g. http://www.xe.com/ucc/ for the current
exchange rate. 

At least one of the authors has to register and pay the registration fee
by June 9, 2013 for their paper to be included in the conference
proceedings. Only one paper of up to 8 pages is included in the regular
registration fee. The additional paper and page charge is CZK 1000 per
page. Any additional paper is treated as extra pages. An extra page charge
is CZK 1000 per page. An author with more than one paper pays the
additional paper rates unless a co-author has also registered and paid the
full registration fee. In the case of uncertainty, feel free to contact
the organising committee for clarification. As in previous years, we will
do our best to ensure grants for the prospective TSD participants from
economically less powerful countries, especially the countries of the
former Soviet Union and its satellites. By now we are negotiating with our
partner supporting organisations about the form and amount of the grants.


LOCATION

The city of Plzen (Pilsen) is situated in Western Bohemia at the
confluence of four rivers. With its 170,000 inhabitants it is the fourth
largest city in the Czech Republic and an important industrial,
commercial, and administrative centre. It is also the capital of the
Pilsen Region. In addition, it has been selected as the European capital
of culture for 2015 by the Council of the European Union.

Pilsen is well-known for its brewing tradition. The trademark
Pilsner-Urquell has a good reputation all over the world thanks to the
traditional recipe, high quality hops and good groundwater. Beer lovers
will also appreciate a visit to the Brewery Museum or the Brewery itself.

Apart from its delicious beer, Pilsen hides lots of treasures in its core.
The city can boast the second largest synagogue in Europe. The dominant of
the old part of the city center is definitely the 13th-century Gothic
cathedral featuring the highest tower in Bohemia (102.34 m). It is
possible to go up  and admire the view of the city. Not far from the
cathedral is the splendid Renaissance Town Hall from 1558 and plenty of
pleasant cafes and pubs are situated on and around the main square.

There is also the beautiful Pilsen Historical Underground - under the city
center, a complex network of passageways and cellars can be found. They
are about 14 km long and visitors can see the most beautiful part of this
labyrinth during the tour. It is recommended to visit the City Zoological
Garden, having the second largest space for bears in Europe and keeping
several Komodo dragons, large lizards which exist only in a few zoos in
the world.

The University of West Bohemia in Pilsen provides a variety of courses for
both Czech and international students. It is the only institution of
higher education in this part of the country which prepares students for
careers in engineering (electrical and mechanical), science (computer
science, applied mathematics, physics, and mechanics), education (both
primary and secondary), economics, philosophy, politics, archeology,
anthropology, foreign languages, law and public administration, art and
design.

GETTING THERE

The city has access from the D5 motorway connecting Prague (Praha) with
Germany. Pilsen has very good bus and train connections with the capital
of Prague (it takes about 1 - 1.5 hour to get from Prague to Pilsen).
>From Vaclav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) you can reach Pilsen by frequent
public transport in 1.5 - 2 hours.

ACCOMMODATION

The organising committee has arranged accommodation for reasonable prices
in the angelo Hotel Pilsen, which is situated in the city center in
walking distance from the main railway station and opposite to the
historical entrance of the Pilsner Urquell Brewery. There are a lot of
restaurants in hotel neighbourhood offering specialities of national and
foreign cuisine. Student halls of residence will be also available at the
time of conference. 

ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:
Ms  Anna  Habernalova, TSD 2013 Conference Secretary
E-mail: tsd2013@tsdconference.org
Phone: +420 722 375 005
Fax: +420 377 632 402 - Please, mark the faxed material with capitals
                        'TSD' on top.
TSD 2013 conference web site: http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2013

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 SPECOM 2013 - FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS *********************************************************

15th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2013) Venue: Plzen (Pilsen), Czech Republic, 1-5 September 2013 WWW: http://specom.zcu.cz

SPECOM NEWS

SPECOM this year is organized in parallel with TSD (in the same time at the same place). Participants will be able to attend both conferences for a single fee.

ABOUT CONFERENCE

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia (UWB), Pilsen, Czech Republic in cooperation with St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation). Venue: Plzen (Pilsen), angelo Hotel (city center), Czech Republic

TOPICS

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

Signal processing and feature extraction Multichannel signal processing Speech recognition and understanding Spoken language processing Spoken dialogue systems Speaker identification and diarization Speech forensics and security Language identification Text-to-speech systems Speech perception and speech disorders Multimodal analysis and synthesis Audio-visual speech processing Multimedia processing Speech and language resources Applications for human-computer interaction

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event will be English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

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 on the presentation format will be based upon the recommendation of three independent reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission form accessible from the conference web site.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 31, 2013 ............ Submission of full papers May 12, 2013 .............. Notification of acceptance June 9, 2013 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration

September 1-5, 2013 ....... Conference date

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

CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your status. It includes one copy of the conference proceedings, refreshments/coffee breaks, opening dinner, welcome party, mid-conference social event admissions, and organizing costs.

Full participant: early registration by June 9, 2013 – CZK 8.200 (approx. 320 EU

late registration by August 1, 2013 – CZK 9.400 (approx. 370 EU

on-site registration – CZK 10.000 (approx. 390 EU

Student (reduced): early registration by June 9, 2013 – CZK 7.000 (approx. 280 EU

late registration by August 1, 2013 – CZK 8.400 (approx. 330 EU

on-site registration – CZK 8.900 (approx. 350 EU

At least one of the authors has to register and pay the registration fee by June 9, 2013 for their paper to be included in the conference proceedings. Only one paper of up to 8 pages is included in the regular registration fee. The additional paper and page charge is CZK 1000 per page. Any additional paper is treated as extra pages. An extra page charge is CZK 1000 per page. An author with more than one paper pays the additional paper rates unless a co-author has also registered and paid the full registration fee. In the case of uncertainty, feel free to contact the organising committee for clarification.

LOCATION

The city of Plzen (Pilsen) is situated in Western Bohemia at the confluence of four rivers. With its 170,000 inhabitants it is the fourth largest city in the Czech Republic and an important industrial, commercial, and administrative centre. It is also the capital of the Pilsen Region. In addition, it has been selected as the European capital of culture for 2015 by the Council of European Union.

The city has access from the D5 motorway connecting Prague (Praha) with Germany. Pilsen has very good bus and train connections with the capital of Prague (it takes about 1 – 1.5 hour to get from Prague to Pilsen). Fr m Vaclav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) you can reach Pilsen by frequent public transport in 1.5 – 2 hour

ACCOMMODATION

The organising committee has arranged accommodation for reasonable prices in the angelo Hotel Pilsen, which is situated in the city center in walking distance from the main railway station and opposite to the historical entrance of the Pilsen brewery. There are a lot of restaurants in hotel neighbourhood offering specialities of national and foreign cuisine. Student halls of residence will be also available at the time of conference.

ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to: Dr. Milos Zelezny E-mail: zelezny@kky.zcu.cz Phone: +420 377 632 548 Fax: +420 377 632 502 — Please, designate the faxed material with capita s 'SPECOM' on top. SPECOM 2013 conference web site: http://specom.zcu.cz

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PROSLI - Prosody for self-learning instruction
Workshop at ICNAAM
26-27 September 2013, Rodos Palace Hotel, Rhodes, Greece
http://www.icnaam.org/

Prosody addresses fundamental components of speech communication - such as intonation and rhythm - which must be mastered by language learners in order to understand and make themselves understood properly in the target language. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) almost never incorporates such components. As a result, speech technologies for self-learning instructions (SLI) are unable to offer feedback to learners as to their prosodic skills. In most cases, prosody is made object of specific separate tools.
The workshop will try to cover the whole spectrum of topics both theoretical and practical, that deal with prosody and self-learning instructions. It will include demonstration and state of the art of such tools, their effectiveness in self-learning contexts. It will address prosodic issues in language learning from both the analysis and the perception viewpoint and their accountability in real world applications. In particular, of interest to the workshop will also be ASR systems for languages like Chinese, which naturally incorporate tone level parameters in their language models; or like Japanese which need to account for durational differences at phonemic and subphonemic level.

Submission: look for formatting details in the main conference website, and then send a 4 pages extended abstract with your affiliation to this address, delmont@unive.it.

Deadlines
   •    Early-bird registration: April 20, 2013
   •    Paper submission: May 30, 2013
   •    Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2013
   •    Submission of camera ready paper: July 28, 2013
   •    Conference days: September 26-27, 2013

Program Committee
Björn Granström, KTH, Center Speech Technology
Daniel Hirst, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université
Philippe Martin, Université Paris Diderot
Ruediger Hoffmann - Technische Universität Dresden
Helmer Strik, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Anton Batliner, University of Munich
Barbara Gili Favela, Università di Lecce
Fabio Tamburini, Università di Bologna
Jared Bernstein, Pearson Knowledge Technologies
Brigitte Bigi, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université
Anne Bonneau, LORIA, France
Uwe Reichel, University of Munich
Rodolfo Delmonte, Ca' Foscari University Venice

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The 4th summer school on 'Speech Production and Perception: Speaker-Specific Behavior”

will be hold in Aix-en-Provence from 30.9.2013 to 4.10.2013.

Speakers show phonetic differences while producing the very same utterance. These speaker-specific differences occur at various linguistic levels and they can be realized phonetically by many parameters such as voice quality, speech rate, loudness, fundamental frequency, breathing, articulatory behavior, etc. At the same time, listeners can vary in the way they exploit such cues for the purpose of speech perception and understanding.

Speaker-specific behavior has long been regarded irrelevant for linguistic theories and is generally treated as noise in the data. Methodologically, speaker-specific variation has often been ignored in the statistical modelling of speech production and perception data.

However, there are numerous recent studies showing that speaker-specific variation allows for new insights into learning processes, speech planning and speech motor control strategies, processing of linguistic and paralinguistic information, among others. We seek to link findings from different disciplines by asking the following questions: 

• Which speaker-specific behaviors are crucial for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying speech production and perception and which are less important? What can it tell us? Why?

• Does information about the speaker help listeners to extract meaning?

• Do physical and cognitive differences among individuals matter for native language acquisition?

• How do we deal with speaker-specific behavior statistically?

The invited international scholars have been chosen to address these issues.

This summer school is mainly intended for graduate students, post-docs or researchers who work in the field of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction. We expect about 50 participants. One of the aims of the summer school is to provide a forum for exchanges between students, junior and senior researchers and encourage all participants to contribute to the dialog. Please send a letter of motivation and an abstract (no longer than 1 page) of your prospective contribution till to the 15^th of May 2013.

http://summerschool13.sciencesconf.org/

Confirmed invited speakers:

• Alejandrina Cristia (MPI, Nijmegen): Speech acquisition

• Rodger Mundry (MPI, Leipzig): Statistics

• Pascal Perrier (GIPSA-lab, Grenoble): Biomechanics

• Benjamin Swets (Grand Valley State University, Allendale): Psycholinguistics

• Melanie Weirich (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena): Articulation 

• Rachel Smith (University of Glasgow): Speech perception and fine phonetic detail

Organizing committee (in alphabetical order)

Susanne Fuchs (ZAS Berlin, Germany)

Caroline Magister (ZAS Berlin, Germany)

Daniel Pape (IEETA + UA Aveiro, Portugal)

Caterina Petrone (LPL-CNRS Aix-en-Provence, France)

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 5^ème Journées de Phonétique Clinique (JPhC) qui auront lieu à Liège les 23, 24, 25 octobre 2013.        

Ces journées ont vu le jour à Paris en 2005 (www.cavi.univ-paris3.fr/ilpga/JPC-2005/). En 2007, elles se sont déroulées à Grenoble, en 2009 à Aix-en-Provence (aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~jpc3/) et en 2011 à Strasbourg (journees-phonetique-clinique.u-strasbg.fr/). Elles ont lieu tous les deux ans. L’année 2013 sera Liégeoise (Belgique). En effet, elles  seront organisées par le service de Logopédie de la Voix de l'Université de Liège de psychologie: cognition et comportement) en étroite             collaboration avec le Laboratoires  d'Images, Signaux et Dispositifs de Télécommunications de l’Université Libre de               Bruxelles.

La phonétique réunit principalement des chercheurs, enseignants-chercheurs, ingénieurs, médecins et orthophoniste / logopèdes ;   différentes corps de métiers complémentaires qui poursuivent le même objectif : une meilleure connaissance des processus d'acquisition, de  développement et de dégénérescence du langage, de la parole et de la voix. Cette approche           interdisciplinaire vise à optimiser les connaissances  fondamentales relatives à la communication parlée, dans le but de mieux comprendre,  évaluer, et remédier aux troubles de la parole et de la  voix chez le sujet pathologique.         

Dans ce contexte, cette série de colloques internationaux  sur la production et la perception de la parole, chez le sujet           pathologique, représente une opportunité pour des professionnels, des chercheurs confirmés etdes jeu nes chercheurs de formations différentes de présenter des résultats expérimentaux nouveaux et d’échanger des idées de diverses           perspectives. Les communications porteront sur les études de la parole et de la voix pathologiques, chez l’adulte et chez l’enfant.

Nous espérons vous  voir nombreux à ces 5^ème  Journées   de Phonétique Clinique. Vous trouverez plus  d’informations en visitant  le site à l’adresse suivante : https://w3.fapse.ulg.ac.be/conferences/JPhC5/index.php
         
         

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Deadline for IEEE GlobalSIP Symposia Proposals: November 15, 2012.

GlobalSIP:  http://www.ieeeglobalsip.org/
Austin, TX. December 3-5, 2013.

IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing is a new
flagship IEEE Signal Processing Society conference. It will focus on
signal and information processing and up-and-coming signal processing
themes.

GlobalSIP comprises symposia selected based on responses to the
call-for-symposia proposals. We are inviting symposia submissions on hot
topics related to signal and information processing. Examples of potential
topics include:

Computational photography
Camera networks and analytics
Computational manufacturing
Information systems for Big Data Processing
Bio signal processing
Machine learning
Emerging sensing modalities
Signal processing, learning and decision making in networks
Green communications
Data and processing for energy management
Sparsity in information processing

Proposals may be focused on a specific mathematical tool, or on a
particular application. Successful symposia may be repeated from year to
year.

We are currently soliciting symposium proposals. For more information on
the preparation of a symposium proposal, please refer to:

http://www.ieeeglobalsip.org/SymposiaGuidelines.pdf

Symposia proposals may be submitted to any one of the technical program
chairs.

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Speech Prosody 2014 in Dublin.

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                Carnegie Mellon University


Carnegie Mellon University announces a new Master of Science in
Intelligent Information Systems (MIIS) professional degree.  The MIIS
degree provides advanced study and practical experience in areas of
Computer Science focused on the processing and analysis of
unstructured and semi-structured information, for example, text,
image, video, speech, and audio information. It is a practice-oriented professional degree designed for students who want to rapidly master
advanced content-analysis, mining, and intelligent information
technologies prior to beginning or resuming leadership careers in
industry and government.

Just over half of the curriculum consists of graduate courses. The
remainder provides direct, hands-on, project-oriented experience
working closely with CMU faculty to build systems and solve problems
using state-of-the-art algorithms, techniques, tools, and datasets.

A typical MIIS student completes the program in one year (12 months)
of full-time study at the Pittsburgh campus.  Part-time and distance
education options are available to students employed at affiliated
companies.

The application deadline for the Fall 2013 term is December 14, 2012.

For more information about the program, please visit
http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/education/msiis/overview.shtml

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Call for Bids -

                                                   SLT-2014

Following on the tremendous success of SLT 2012, the SPS-SLTC invites proposals to host the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT-2014). Past SLT workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact and learn.
The proposal should include the information outlined below.
* Workshop location and practicalities     o Geographical location     o Workshop venue (facilities, meeting rooms, network access      during the workshop, audio/visual equipment)     o Accommodation -- hotel availability and pricing
   o Meals     o Transportation options -- major airports, logistics, visas     o Climate
* Approximate workshop dates     o Previous workshops have been held in the month of December.
* Rough budget and expected sponsorship.     o Approximately how much will participants need to pay to attend,     including accommodation and meals as well as registration.     o Estimated budget for e.g. 100/150 participants and expected     sponsorships. This should include venue costs, administration,    banquet, coffee breaks, publication costs, etc.(Note, unlike  larger conferences such as ICASSP, Interspeech, smaller workshops
    do not have sufficient registration fees to cover the total workshop costs. The IEEE Signal Processing Society is particularly
    motivated to see that both workshop and conference costs are held      to levels which allow the diverse membership equal opportunities      to participate without registration costs being a major barrier).
* Technical committee
* Local arrangements.     o Who will be in charge of organizing the workshop, and how      will finances be handled (e.g., will participants be able to      pay by credit card)?
* Tentative schedule.     o Paper submission, notification of acceptance, proposals for      demonstrations, early registration
   o Reception, talks, posters, demo session, banquet, etc.

If you would like to be the organizer(s) of SLT-2014, please send the Workshop Sub-Committee a draft proposal before April 1, 2013. (Point of contact:gsaon@us.ibm.com). Proposals will be evaluated by the SPS SLTC, with a decision expected in June.
The organizers of the ASRU workshop do not have to be SLTC members, and we encourage submissions from all potential organizers. So we encourage you to distribute this call for proposals far and wide to invite members of the speech and language community at large to submit a proposal to organize the next SLT workshop.
For more information on the most recent workshops, please see:
*http://www.slt2012.org/for information about SLT-2012 in Miami, Florida
*http://www.slt2010.org/for information about SLT-2010 in Berkeley, California
*http://www.slt2008.org/for information about SLT-2008 in Goa, India
SPS-SLTC Workshop Sub-Committee Nick Campbell George Saon Geoffrey Zweig

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Call for Participation

INTERSPEECH 2013 ComParE:COMPUTATIONAL PARALINGUISTICS CHALLENGE

  Social Signals, Conflict, Emotion, Autism

Fourth Sub-Challenge now open – obtain the data:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS13-Challenge-Agreements-SC2.pdf

After four consecutive Challenges at INTERSPEECH, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant paralinguistic phenomena. In the last instalments, we focused on single speakers. With a new task, we now want to broaden to analysing discussion of multiple speakers in the Conflict Sub-Challenge. A further novelty is introduced by the Social Signals Sub-Challenge: For the first time, non-linguistic events have to be classified and localised – laughter and fillers. In the Emotion Sub-Challenge we are literally “going back to the roots”. However, by intention, we use acted material for the first time to fuel the ever on-going discussion on differences between naturalistic and acted material and hope to highlight the differences. Finally, the Autism Sub-Challenge picks up on Autism Spectrum Condition in children’s speech in this year. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain and surveillance. The Challenge corpora feature rich annotation such as speaker meta-data, orthographic transcript, phonemic transcript, and segmentation. All four are given with distinct definitions of test, development, and training partitions, incorporating speaker independence as needed in most real-life settings. Benchmark results of the most popular approaches will be provided as in the years before. In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2013 COMPUTATIONAL PARALINGUISTICS CHALLENGE (ComParE) shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results.

In summary, four Sub-Challenges are addressed:

•             In the Social Signals Sub-Challenge, non-linguistic events – laughter and fillers – of a speaker have to be classified and localised based on acoustics.

•             In the Conflict Sub-Challenge, group discussions have to be automatically evaluated aiming at retrieving conflicts.

•             In the Emotion Sub-Challenge, the emotion of a speaker’s voice has to be determined by a suited learning algorithm and acoustic features.

•             In the Autism Sub-Challenge, the type of pathology of a speaker has to be determined by a suited classification algorithm and acoustic features.

The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Area Under receiver operating Curve and Recall. 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 for (but not limited to):

•             Participation in a Sub-Challenge

•             Contributions focussing on Computational Paralinguistics centred around the Challenge topics

The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2013 in Lyon, France. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in INTERSPEECH 2013 ComParE, 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/is13-compare

Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)

Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)

Anton Batliner (TUM, Germany)

Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)

Klaus Scherer (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Switzerland)

Fabien Ringeval (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

Mohamed Chetouani (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France)

Paper Submission            18 March             2013

Final Result Upload         24 May                 2013

Camera-ready Paper      29 May                 2013

HUMAINE Association                   (http://emotion-research.net/)

SSPNet                                                 (http://sspnet.eu/)

ASC-Inclusion                                    (http://www.asc-inclusion.eu/)

___________________________________________

PD Dr. habil. DI Björn W. Schuller

Head Machine Intelligence & Signal Processing Group

Institute for Human-Machine Communication

Technische Universität München

D-80333 München

Germany

+49-(0)89-289-28548

schuller@tum.de

www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch

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