Call for Papers Special Issue of COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE on Next Generation 

Paralinguistics __________________________________ 

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-speech-and-language/call-for-papers/next-generation-computational-paralinguistics/ Computational Paralinguistics recently reached a level of maturity allowing for their first real-life 

applications in interaction, coaching, media retrieval, robotics, surveillance, and manifold further 

domains. In particular, an increasing level of realism is recently faced by coping with speaker 

independent analysis of highly naturalistic data in narrow-bandwidth, noisy, or reverberated 

conditions. At the same time, the richness of the range of speaker states and traits analysed 

computationally is increasingly widening up. This includes in particular also the degree of 

subjectivity faced with tasks such as perceived speaker personality, likability, or intelligibility,

 to name a few. Both these aspects require additional experience on the interplay of states 

and traits in speech, singing, and language. Further, with the integration in applications, 

novel aspects arise such as efficiency, reliability, self-learning, mobility, multi-cultural and 

multi-lingual aspects, handling groups of speaker or singers, standardisation, and user 

experience with such systems. This Special Issue thus aims at shaping the Next Generation Computational Paralinguistics. 

It will focus on technical issues for highly improved and reliable state and trait analysis in spoke

this topic. Original, previously unpublished submissions are encouraged within the following n,

 sung, and written language and provide a forum for some of the very best experimental work 

scope: +Analysis of States and Traits in Spoken, Sung, and Written Language +Subjectivity in Computational Paralinguistics (e.g., perceived states and traits) +Interdependence of States and Traits +Intelligibility of Language Varieties and Deviant Speech +Efficiency (low energy and memory consumption, fast adaptation, active learning, etc.) +Reliability (e.g., confidence measures, robustness against regulation and feigning, overlap) +Self-learning (unsupervised, partially supervised, reinforced, and deep learning) +Mobility (client/server distribution, package loss, coding artefacts, privacy preservation, etc.) +Multicultural and Multilingual Issues +Speaker / Singer Group Characterisation +Standardisation (output encoding, feature encoding, etc.) +Application (interaction, voice and writing coaching, retrieval, robotics, surveillance, etc.) +User Experience of Computational Paralinguistics Systems Important Dates __________________________________ Submission Deadline 1 April 2013 First Notification 1 July 2013 Final Version of Manuscripts 1 November 2013 Tentative Publication Date January 2014 Guest Editors __________________________________ Björn Schuller, Technische Universität München, Germany, schuller@IEEE.org Stefan Steidl, FAU, Germany, stefan.steidl@fau.de Anton Batliner, Technische Universität München, Germany, Anton.Batliner@lrz.uni-muenchen.de Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow / IDIAP, UK, alessandro.vinciarelli@glasgow.ac.uk Felix Burkhardt, Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany, Felix.Burkhardt@telekom.de Rob van Son, University of Amsterdam / Netherlands Cancer Institute, NL , r.v.son@nki.nl

Submission Procedure __________________________________ Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Computer Speech and 

Language Journal for electronic submission (http://ees.elsevier.com/csl). During submission 

authors must select for this Special Issue (short name 'NextGen Paralinguistics'). 

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CFP: International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval Special Issue on Cross-Media Analysis http://www.fortune.binghamton.edu/CFP_CMA_IJMIR2013.html Cross-media analysis is a new, emerging, and important research area in current multimedia research. Cross-media analysis exploits the data available on diverse sources of rich multimedia content simultaneously and synergistically. It is beneficial for many applications in data mining, causal inference, machine learning, multimedia, and public security. For more details, please see the special issue webpage above or contact one of the guest editors. Duedate for submissions: July 15th, 2013 Submissions Webpage: http://www.editorialmanager.com/mmir/default.asp Guest Editors: Zhongfei (Mark) Zhang SUNY Binghamton, USA zhongfei@cs.binghamton.edu Yueting Zhuang Zhejiang University, China yzhuang@cs.zju.edu.cn Ramesh Jain University of California, Irvine, USA jain@ics.uci.edu Jia-Yu (Tim) Pan Google, USA jypan@google.com 

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Manuscript due: Nov. 1, 2013  Journal: EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing Description: This special issue originates from a special session at the international conference Interspeech, which was held in September 2010 at Chiba, Japan. It will publish some key contributions presented at the conference describing different aspects of models of speech, from the analyisis or representation point of view. Topics of interest include: * Hidden Markov Models * Kernel Methods * Deep Neural Networks * Linear Predicitve Analysis Lead Guest Editor: * Hansjörg Mixdorff, Beuth University, Berlin, Germany Guest Editor: * Hideki Kawahara, Wakayama University, Wakayama, Japan For more information about this special issue, please visit: http://si.eurasip.org/issues/14/models-of-speech-in-search-of-better/

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Manuscript due: Feb. 1, 2014 Journal: EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing Description: With speech processing technology becoming more and more present in our every-day lives, it has become increasingly important to include all types of voices, speaking situations, and styles from all parts of our society, i.e., to move beyond the “typical”. Examples of such less typical patterns may include speaking while eating, during physical exercise, singing, as well as a wide range of pathological effects or speech generated by special aged groups (children, elderly). In fact, recent advances in the field of Computational Paralinguistics allow for automatic recognition, analysis, and synthesis of an ever-increasing range of “atypical” phenomena. At the same time, deeper analysis methods have opened doors to new assistive technologies, such as coaching systems, serious games, and tutoring systems, as well as diagnostic aids (e.g., for early detection of autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases). Tutoring systems, for example, have opened up new opportunities for voice professionals, such as public speakers, singers, and teachers, providing them with feedback on prosodic aspects, vibrato parameters, “presence” or quality. Further, methods of speech/voice enhancement and conversion have enabled improvements in intelligibility of spoken content, as well as socio-emotional communication skills of e.g., speakers on the autism spectrum. In this light and given the steadily growing research activities and their importance, we openly invite papers describing various aspects of analysis and synthesis of atypical speech and voices as well as their successful applications. Submissions must not have been previously published and must have specific connection to audio, speech, and music processing. Topics of interest include: * Automatic Recognition of Atypical Speech & Voice Patterns * Analysis of Atypical Speech, Singing & Voices * Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition against Atypical Phenomena * Synthesis of Atypical Speech, Singing & Voices * Enhancement and Conversion for Intelligibility Improvement of Atypical Speech & Voices * Resources of Atypical Speech, Singing or Voice Patterns * Multimodal Integration for Atypical Speech & Voice Processing (e.g., videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI, etc.) * Tutoring Systems for Atypical Speech & Voice * Serious Gaming Approaches in Atypical Speech & Voices * Relationship Between Atypical Speech & Voices and Neurological Conditions Lead Guest Editor: * Björn W. Schuller, Imperial College London, London, U.K. & TUM, Munich, Germany Guest Editors: * Tiago H. Falk, INRS-EMT, Montreal, Canada * Vijay Parsa, University of Western Canada, London, Canada * Elmar Nöth, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany & King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia For more information about this special issue, please visit: http://si.eurasip.org/issues/16/atypical-speech-voices-corpora-classification/

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Call for Papers - Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) On

Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology

Guest Editors: François Portet, Frank Rudzicz, Jan Alexandersson, Heidi Christensen

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Many assistive technologies involve providing universal access, such as modifications to televisions or telephones to make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An important sub-discipline within this community is Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which has its focus on communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with some aspect of human communication, including spoken or written modalities. Another important sub-discipline is Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) which facilitates independent living; these technologies break down the barriers faced by people with physical or cognitive impairments and support their relatives and caregivers. These technologies are expected to improve quality-of-life of users and promote independence, accessibility, learning, and social connectivity.

Speech and natural language processing (NLP) can be used in AT/AAC in a variety of ways including, improving the intelligibility of unintelligible speech, and providing communicative assistance for frail individuals or those with severe motor impairments. The range of applications and technologies in AAL that can rely on speech and NLP technologies is very large, and the number of individuals actively working within these research communities is growing, as evidenced by the successful INTERSPEECH 2013 satellite workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT). In particular, one of the greatest challenges in AAL is to design smart spaces (e.g., at home, work, hospital) and intelligent companions that anticipate user needs and enable them to interact with and in their daily environment and provide ways to communicate with others. This technology can benefit each of visually-, physically-, speech- or cognitively- impaired persons.

Topics of interest for submission to this special issue include (but are not limited to):

• Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces designed for people with physical or cognitive impairments
• Applications of speech and NLP technology (automatic speech recognition, synthesis, dialogue, natural language generation) for AT applications
• Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AT applications
• Long-term adaptation of speech/NLP based AT system to user's change
• User studies, overview of speech/NLP technology for AT: understanding the user's needs and future speech and language based technologies.
• Understanding, modeling and recognition of aged or disordered speech
• Speech analysis and diagnosis: automatic recognition and detection of speech pathologies and speech capability loss
• Speech-based distress recognition
• Automated processing of symbol languages, sign language and nonverbal communication including translation systems.
• Text and audio processing for improved comprehension and intelligibility, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech
• Evaluation methodology of systems and components in the lab and in the wild.
• Resources; corpora and annotation schemes
• Other topics in AAC, AAL, and AT

Submission process

Contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere, although substantial extensions of conference or workshop papers will be considered. as long as they adhere to ACM's minimum standards regarding prior publication (http://www.acm.org/pubs/sim_submissions.html). Studies involving experimentations with real target users will be appreciated. All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at http://www.rit.edu/gccis/taccess/. 

Submissions should follow the journal's suggested writing format (http://www.gccis.rit.edu/taccess/authors.html) and should be submitted through Manuscript Central http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taccess , indicating that the paper is intended for the Special Issue. All papers will be subject to the peer review process and final decisions regarding publication will be based on this review.

Important dates:

◦   Full paper submission: 31^st March 2014

◦   Response to authors: 30^th June 2014

◦   Revised submission deadline: 31^st August 2014

◦   Notification of acceptance: 31^st October 2014

◦   Final manuscripts due: 30^th November 2014

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