EACL 2014 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

26 April 2014 Gothenburg, Sweden 

https://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2014/

 Extended Deadline for paper submission: Feb. 3, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12)

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL)

The human ability to acquire and process language has long attracted interest and generated much debate due to the apparent ease with which such a complex and dynamic system is learnt and used on the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. This subject raises many questions ranging from the nature vs. nurture debate of how much needs to be innate and how much needs to be learned for acquisition to be successful, to the mechanisms involved in this process (general vs specific) and their representations in the human brain. There are also developmental issues related to the different stages consistently found during acquisition (e.g. one word vs. two words) and possible organizations of this knowledge. These have been discussed in the context of first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, with cross linguistic studies shedding light on the influence of the language and the environment. The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the application of statistical and machine learning methods to natural language processing (NLP). This work has yielded impressive results in numerous speech and language processing tasks, including e.g. speech recognition, morphological analysis, parsing, lexical acquisition, semantic interpretation, and dialogue management. The good results have generally been viewed as engineering achievements. Recently researchers have begun to investigate the relevance of computational learning methods for research on human language acquisition and change. The use of computational modeling is a relatively recent trend boosted by advances in machine learning techniques, and the availability of resources like corpora of child and child-directed sentences, and data from psycholinguistic tasks by normal and pathological groups. Many of the existing computational models attempt to study language tasks under cognitively plausible criteria (such as memory and processing limitations that humans face), and to explain the developmental stages observed in the acquisition and evolution of the language abilities. In doing so, computational modeling provides insight into the plausible mechanisms involved in human language processes, and inspires the development of better language models and techniques. These investigations are very important since if computational techniques can be used to improve our understanding of human language acquisition and change, these will not only benefit cognitive sciences in general but will reflect back to NLP and place us in a better position to develop useful language models. Success in this type of research requires close collaboration between the NLP, linguistics, psychology and cognitive science communities. The workshop is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding first, second and bilingual language acquisition and language change in normal and clinical conditions. Long and short papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: *Computational learning theory and analysis of language learning and organization *Computational models of first, second and bilingual language acquisition *Computational models of language changes in clinical conditions *Computational models and analysis of factors that influence language acquisition and use in different age groups and cultures *Computational models of various aspects of language and their interaction effect in acquisition, processing and change *Computational models of the evolution of language *Data resources and tools for investigating computational models of human language processes *Empirical and theoretical comparisons of the learning environment and its impact on language processes *Cognitively oriented Bayesian models of language processes *Computational methods for acquiring various linguistic information (related to e.g. speech, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and discourse) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition *Investigations and comparisons of supervised, unsupervised and weakly-supervised methods for learning (e.g. machine learning, statistical, symbolic, biologically-inspired, active learning, various hybrid models) from a cognitive perspective

SUBMISSIONS

We invite three different submission modalities: * Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references): Long papers should report on original, solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques. * Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references): Short papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion. * System demonstration (2 pages): System demonstration papers should describe and document the demonstrated system or resources. We encourage the demonstration of both early research prototypes and mature systems, that will be presented in a separate demo session. All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the EACL 2014 formatting requirements (available at http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip). We strongly advise the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template files. For long and short papers, the reported research should be substantially original. The papers will be presented orally or as posters. The decision as to which paper will be presented orally and which as poster will be made by the program committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where no distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as posters. Submission and reviewing will be electronic, managed by the START system: https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/CogACLL/ Submissions must be uploaded onto the START system by the submission deadline: January 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12 hours) Please choose the appropriate submission type from the START submission page, according to the category of your paper. --------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES Jan 23, 2014 Long and Short Paper submission deadline Feb 05, 2014 System Demonstrations submission deadline Feb 20, 2014 Notification of acceptance Mar 03, 2014 Camera-ready deadline Apr 26, 2014 Workshop

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Afra Alishahi Tilburg University (Netherlands) Colin J Bannard University of Texas at Austin (USA) Marco Baroni University of Trento (Italy) Robert Berwick Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Philippe Blache LPL, CNRS (France) Jim Blevins University of Cambridge (UK) Antal van den Bosch Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) Chris Brew Nuance Communications (USA) Ted Briscoe University of Cambridge (UK) Alexander Clark Royal Holloway, University of London (UK) Robin Clark University of Pennsylvania (USA) Stephen Clark University of Cambridge (UK) Matthew W. Crocker Saarland University (Germany) Walter Daelemans University of Antwerp (Belgium) Dan Dediu Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (The Netherlands) Barry Devereux University of Cambridge (UK) Benjamin Fagard Lattice-CNRS (France) Jeroen Geertzen University of Cambridge (UK) Ted Gibson Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Henriette Hendriks University of Cambridge (UK) Marco Idiart Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Mark Johnson Brown University (USA) Aravind Joshi University of Pennsylvania (USA) Gianluca Lebani University of Pisa (Italy) Igor Malioutov Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Marie-Catherine de Marneffe The Ohio State University (USA) Maria Alice Parente Federal University of ABC (Brazil) Massimo Poesio University of Trento (Italy) Brechtje Post University of Cambridge (UK) Ari Rappoport The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Anne Reboul L2C2-CNRS (France) Kenji Sagae University of Southern California (USA) Sabine Schulte im Walde University of Stuttgart (Germany) Ekaterina Shutova University of California, Berkeley (USA) Maity Siqueira Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Mark Steedman University of Edinburgh (UK) Suzanne Stevenson University of Toronto (Canada) Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (France) Shuly Wintner University of Haifa (Israel) Charles Yang University of Pennsylvania (USA) Beracah Yankama Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Menno van Zaanen Tilburg University (Netherlands) Alessandra Zarcone University of Stuttgart (Germany)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy) Muntsa Padró (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE-CNRS, France) Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to cognitive2014@gmail.com

Back

Top

CHI 2014 Workshop on

Designing Speech and Language Interactions

Toronto, Canada

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/dsli2014

 

Submission of position papers: 17 January 2014

Notification of acceptance: 10 February 2014

Workshop: 26 April 2014

 

 

Speech and natural language remain our most natural forms of interaction;
yet the HCI community have been very timid about focusing their attention on
designing and developing spoken language interaction techniques. While
significant efforts are spent and progress made in speech recognition,
synthesis, and natural language processing, there is now sufficient evidence
that many real-life applications using speech technologies do not require
100% accuracy to be useful. This is particularly true if such systems are
designed with complementary modalities that better support their users or
enhance the systems' usability. Many recent commercial applications,
especially in the mobile space, are already tapping the increased interest
in and need for natural user interfaces by enabling speech interaction in
their products.

 

This multidisciplinary, one-day workshop will bring together interaction
designers, usability researchers, and general HCI practitioners to analyze
the opportunities and directions to take in designing more natural
interactions based on spoken language, and to look at how we can leverage
recent advances in speech processing in order to gain widespread acceptance
of speech and natural language interaction. Our goal is to create, through
an interdisciplinary dialogue, momentum for increased research and
collaboration in:

 

* Formally framing the challenges to the widespread adoption of speech and
natural language interaction,

 

* Taking concrete steps toward developing a framework of user-centric design
guidelines for speech- and language-based interactive systems, grounded in
good usability practices, and

 

* Establishing directions to take and identifying further research
opportunities in designing more natural interactions that make use of speech
and natural language

 

We invite the submission of position papers demonstrating research, design,
practice, or interest in, but not limited to, areas such as:

 

- Human factors and usability issues of imperfect speech- and language-based
systems

 

- Meaningful evaluations of speech-based systems such as speech
summarization, machine translation, synthetic speech, etc.

 

- Designing natural language-based mobile interfaces, such as embodied
conversational agents or applications for facilitating access to large
multimedia repositories (e.g. meetings, video archives).

 

- Improved accessibility through speech and language processing

 

- Multimodal interfaces that combine speech with other input modalities for
increased usability and robustness

 

- Speech applications that go beyond lexical recognition in novel ways (e.g.
signal analysis for health diagnostics, learning analytics)

 

- Speech as an interface tool for building usable applications for
illiterate or semi-literate populations

 

- Pervasive, augmented reality, or mixed-reality immersive systems enhanced
with audio interactions

 

Position papers should be no more than 4 pages long, in the ACM SIGCHI
Archival format, and include a brief statement from the author(s) justifying
the interest in the workshop's topic. Summaries of research already
presented are welcome if they contribute to the multidisciplinary goals of
the workshop (e.g. a speech processing research in clear need of HCI
expertise). Submissions will be reviewed according to:

 

- Fit with the workshop topic

 

- Potential to contribute to the workshop goals

 

- A demonstrated track of research in the workshop area (HCI or speech
processing, with an interest in both areas).

 

Please submit workshop papers to: dsli2014-submissions@cs.toronto.edu . For
all other enquiries about the workshop, please contact us at:
dsli2014@cs.toronto.edu .

 

 

We're looking forward to seeing you in Toronto!

 

 

The DSLI 2014 Organizing Committee:

 

Cosmin Munteanu

National Research Council Canada and

University of Toronto

 

Matt Jones

Swansea University

 

Steve Whittaker

University of California at Santa Cruz

 

Sharon Oviatt

Incaa Designs

 

Mathhew Aylett

CereProc Inc.

 

Gerald Penn

University of Toronto

 

Stephen Brewster

University of Glasgow

 

Nicolas d'Alessandro

University of Mons

 

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

 

 

--

Dr. Cosmin Munteanu

Research Officer

    People-Centred Technologies | Agent de recherche, Technologies axées sur
les gens

    National Research Council Canada | Conseil national de recherches du
Canada

Adjunct Professor

    Department of Computer Science | University of Toronto

46 Dineen Drive | 46, promenade Dineen | Fredericton, NB, E3B 9W4, Canada

Tel. | Tél. +1 (506) 444-0527 | Fax | Télécopieur +1 (506) 444-6114

 

Back

Top

Third Call for Papers (Apologies for multiple postings)

*******************************************************************************
Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality
(2nd edition)

April 27, 2014

Co-located with EACL 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden

++ Submission deadline: January 23, 2014 ++

https://sites.google.com/site/cvscworkshop2014

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

The dead line is in two weeks and the submission site will open soon


INVITED SPEAKERS

The workshop will showcase presentations from two invited speakers :
Geoffrey Zweig (Microsoft Research) and Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam).


AIMS AND SCOPE

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in algorithms that learn and use continuous representations for words, phrases, or documents in many natural language processing applications. Among many others, influential proposals that illustrate this trend include latent Dirichlet allocation, neural network based language models and spectral methods. These approaches are motivated by improving the generalization power of the discrete standard models, by dealing with the data sparsity issue and by efficiently handling a wide context.  Despite the success of single word vector space models, they are limited since they do not capture compositionality. This prevents them from gaining a deeper understanding of the semantics of longer phrases or sentences.


With the growing popularity of these neural and probabilistic methods of language processing, the scope of this second workshop is extended to theoretical and conceptual questions regarding:

* their relation to unsupervised distributional representations,

* the encompassing of the compositional aspects of formal models of
  semantics,

* the role of linguistic theory in the design and development of these
  methods.


Some such pertinent questions include: Should phrase representations and word representations be of the same sort ? Could different linguistic levels require different modeling approaches ? Is compositionality determined by syntax, and if so, how do we learn/define it? Should word representations be fixed and obtained distributionally, or should the encoding be variable?  Should word representations be task-specific, or should they be general?

In this workshop, we invite submissions of papers on continuous vector space models for natural language processing. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* learning algorithms for continuous vector space models,

* their compositionality,

* their use in NLP applications,

* spectral learning for NLP,

* neural networks for NLP,

* phrase, sentence, and document-level distributional representations,

* tensor models,

* distributed semantic representations,

* the role of syntax in compositional models,

* formal and distributional semantic models.


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Authors should submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF
format, with up to 2 additional pages for references. The reported
research should be substantially original. The papers will be presented
orally or as posters. All submissions must be in PDF format and must
follow the EACL 2014 formatting requirements
(http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip ). Reviewing will be
double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the
papers; self-reference should be avoided as well.  Submissions must be
made through the Softconf website set up for this workshop:

https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/CVSC/


Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where no
distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as posters.


IMPORTANT DATES

23 January 2014      : Submission deadline
20 February 2014    : Notification of acceptance
3 March 2014          : Camera-ready deadline
27 April 2014          : Workshop


ORGANIZERS

Alexandre Allauzen (LIMSI-CNRS/Université Paris-Sud, France)
Raffaella Bernardi (University of Trento, Italy)
Edward Grefenstette (University of Oxford, UK)
Hugo Larochelle (Université de de Sherbrooke, Canada)
Christopher Manning (Stanford University, USA)
Scott Wen-tau Yih (Microsoft Research, USA)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Nicholas Asher (IRIT-Toulouse)
Marco Baroni (University of Trento)
Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal)
Gemma Boleda (University of Texas)
Antoine Bordes (Université Technologique de Compiègne)
Johan Bos (University of Groningen)
Léon Bottou (Microsoft Research)
Xavier Carreras (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
Lucas Champollion (New-York University)
Stephen Clark (University of Cambridge)
Shay Cohen (Columbia University)
Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University)
Ronan Collobert (IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland)
Pino Di Fabbrizio (Amazon)
Georgiana Dinu (University of Trento)
Kevin Duh (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
Dean Foster (University of Pennsylvania)
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa)
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Fabio Massimo Zanzotto (Università degli Studi di Roma)
Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh)
Andriy Mnih (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit)
Larry Moss (Indiana University)
Diarmuid Ó Seaghdha (University of Cambridge)
Sebastian Pado (Universität Stuttgart)
Martha Palmer (University of Colorado)
John Platt (Microsoft Research)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam)
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (University of London)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh)
Chung-chieh Shan (Indiana University)
Peter Turney (NRC)
Jason Weston (Google)
Guillaume Wisniewski (LIMSI-CNRS/Université Paris-Sud)

Back

Top

1st Call for Papers

THIRD WORKSHOP ON HYBRID APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION (HyTra 2014)

Co-located with EACL 2014 http://eacl2014.org/

Gothenburg, Sweden

April 27, 2014

DEADLINE EXTENSION TO FEBRUARY 7, 2014

http://sites.google.com/site/hytra2014

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

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The aim of the HyTra workshop series is to bring together researchers developing and applying statistical, example-based, or rule-based translation systems, and those enhancing MT systems by combining elements from different approaches, to promote discussion and sharing of ideas among them. Hereby one relevant focus is on effectively combining linguistic and data driven approaches (rule-based and statistical MT). Another focus is on hybridization in the context of human translation.

The 3rd Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra-3) intends to continue developing and empowering the research agenda in the area of Hybrid Translation already started at its first and second editions. The previous two editions (see http://www-lium.univ-lemans.fr/esirmt-hytra/ and http://hytra.barcelonamedia.org/hytra2013/) were co-located with EACL 2012 in Avignon and with ACL 2013 in Sofia, and the proceedings were published on the ACL Anthology.

TOPICS

We solicit contributions including but not limited to the following topics:

- ways and techniques of hybridization - architectures for the rapid development of hybrid MT systems - applications of hybrid systems - hybrid systems dealing with under-resourced languages - hybrid systems dealing with morphologically rich languages - using linguistic information (morphology, syntax, semantics) to enhance statistical MT   (e.g. with hierarchical or factored models) - using contextual information to enhance statistical MT - bootstrapping rule-based systems from corpora - hybrid methods in spoken language translation - extraction of dictionaries and other large-scale resources for MT from parallel and comparable corpora - induction of morphological, grammatical, and translation rules from corpora - machine learning techniques for hybrid MT - describing structural mappings between languages (e.g. tree-structures using   synchronous/transduction grammars) - heuristics for limiting the search space in hybrid MT - alternative methods for the fair evaluation of the output of different types of MT systems   (e.g. relying on linguistic criteria) - system combination approaches such as multi-engine MT (parallel) or automatic post-editing (sequential) - open source tools and free language resources for hybrid MT

SUBMISSIONS

Contributions can be short or long papers. Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work without exceeding five pages of content plus one extra page for references. Characteristics of short papers include: a small, focused contribution; work in progress; a negative result; an opinion piece; an interesting application nugget. Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work without exceeding eight pages of content plus two extra pages for references. Submissions will be judged according to the criteria of the main conference (EACL 2014).

Authors are invited to submit papers on original and previously unpublished work. Formatting should be according to EACL 2014 specifications using LaTeX or MS-Word style files, see section 'submission format' at http://eacl2014.org/call-for-papers. Reviewing of papers will be double-blind, so the submissions should not reveal the authors' identity.

Submission is electronic in PDF format using the START submission system at the URL to be provided on the Workshop Website.

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or publications is possible but must be immediately notified to the workshop contact person (see below). If accepted, withdrawals are only possible within two days after notification.

For an accepted paper to appear in the proceedings, at least one author must register for the workshop and actually present the paper. The papers will be published in the workshop proceedings which will be made available via the ACL Anthology.

BEST PAPERS

Authors of selected papers will be invited to contribute extended versions of their papers as book chapters for an edited volume on hybrid MT.

IMPORTANT DATES

January 23, 2014: Deadline for paper submission February 20, 2014: Notification of acceptance March 3, 2014: Camera ready papers due April 27, 2014: Workshop in Gothenburg

ORGANIZERS

Rafael E. Banchs (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) Marta R. Costa-jussa (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) Reinhard Rapp (Universities of Aix-Marseille and Mainz) Patrik Lambert (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) Kurt Eberle (Lingenio GmbH, Heidelberg) Bogdan Babych (University of Leeds)

CONTACT PERSON

Rafael E. Banchs: rembanchs (at) i2r (dot) a-star (dot) edu (dot) sg

Back

Top

ICASSP 2014
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
“Fortezza da Basso” Convention and Exhibition Centre
May 4-9, 2014 - Florence, Italy
www.icassp2014.org
========================================================
Deadline for the submission of Regular Papers: OCTOBER 27, 2013
========================================================


The 39th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held in Florence, Italy, at the Fortezza da Basso Convention and Exhibition Centre on May 4-9, 2014 (www.firenzefiera.it). 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 thematic workshops. 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
•    Biological and Biomedical Signal Processing


Place: Florence is one of the most renowned cities in the world, not only due to its location in the heart of Tuscany, but also because of its connection to the evolution of art, culture, and scientific thought. It is in this area that Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei made their groundbreaking discoveries during the Renaissance, paving the way to modern science. Now that signal processing has become the science behind a wide range of application areas, from wireless communications to speech processing, from bioinformatics to multimedia, it seems only right to hold the 2014 edition of ICASSP in this city of Culture.

Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers of up to four pages of technical content (including figures and references), with a possible extension to a 5th page containing only references. The selection of the best papers will be made by the ICASSP 2014 committee based on recommendations from the Technical Committees.

Notice: The IEEE Signal Processing Society enforces a 'no-show' policy. Any accepted paper included in the final program is expected to have at least one author or qualified proxy attend and present the paper at the conference. Authors of the accepted papers included in the final program who do not attend the conference will be subscribed to a 'No-Show List', compiled by the Society. The 'no-show' papers will not be published by IEEE on IEEEXplore or other public access forums, but these papers will be distributed as part of the on-site electronic proceedings and the copyright of these papers will belong to the IEEE.

Tutorial and Special Sessions Proposals: Tutorials will be held on May 4 and 5, 2014. Brief tutorial proposals should include title, outline, contact information, biography and selected publications for the presenter(s), and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants. Special session proposals should include title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited papers. Please refer to the ICASSP 2014 website www.icassp2014.org for additional information.

Show & Tell: The 2014 edition of ICASSP is proud to bring back the S&T sessions. S&T offers the perfect stage for showcasing innovative ideas in all technical areas of interest of ICASSP. S&T sessions are expected to be highly interactive, involving, and very visible. Please refer to the ICASSP 2014 website www.icassp2014.org for additional information.

GENERAL CHAIRS
Fulvio Gini, University of Pisa, Italy
Marco Luise, University of Pisa, Italy
TECHNICAL PROGRAM CHAIRS
Abdelhak Zoubir, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Mauro Barni, University of Siena, Italy
FINANCE CHAIR
Petar Djuric, Stony Brook University, NY, USA
ADVISORY BOARD
Enrico Del Re, University of Florence, Italy
Carlo Regazzoni, University of Genova, Italy
PUBLICITY CHAIRS
G. Tong Zhou, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Filippo Giannetti, University of Pisa, Italy
PUBLICATION CHAIRS
Maria S. Greco, University of Pisa, Italy
Alessandro Piva, University of Florence, Italy
SPECIAL SESSIONS CHAIRS
Sergio Barbarossa, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
Ananthram Swami, ARL, Adelphi MD, USA
TUTORIALS CHAIRS
Ercan E. Kuruoglu, CNR, Pisa, Italy
Antonio Napolitano, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Italy
PLENARIES CHAIRS
Ezio Biglieri, Italy
Ali H. Sayed, UCLA, California, USA
STUDENT PAPER CONTEST CHAIRS
Alberto Carini, University of Urbino, Italy
Antonio De Maio, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy
SHOW AND TELL CHAIR
Augusto Sarti, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
EXHIBIT CHAIRS
Luca Sanguinetti, University of Pisa, Italy
Giacomo Bacci, University of Pisa, Italy
WEB MASTER CHAIRS
Pietro Stinco, University of Pisa, Italy
Stefano Fortunati, University of Pisa, Italy
LOCAL ARRANGEMENT CHAIR
Fabrizio Argenti, University of Florence, Italy
LOCAL LIAISON
Marco Moretti, University of Pisa, Italy
US LIAISON
Georgios B. Giannakis, University of Minnesota, USA
FAR EAST LIAISONS
H.C. So, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Giuseppe A. Fabrizio, DSTO, Australia
INDUSTRY LIAISON
Alfonso Farina, SELEX-ES, Rome, Italy
CONFERENCE MANAGEMENT
Graciela Stiavetti, DGMP srl, Pisa, Italy

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:
Special Session and Tutorial Proposals: August 30, 2013
Notification of Special Session and Tutorial Acceptance: September 30, 2013
Submission of Regular Papers: October 27, 2013
Signal Processing Letters Due: January 7, 2014
Notification of Paper Acceptance: January 27, 2014
Show and Tell Proposal Deadline: February 14, 2014
Revised Paper Upload Deadline: March 7, 2014
Author’s Registration Deadline: March 14, 2014

https://twitter.com/icassp2014
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ICASSP-2014/279577105503957
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ICASSP-2014-4815619

Back

Top

10^th International Seminar on Speech Production – ISSP 2014

We are pleased to announce the 10th International Speech Production Seminar, which will take place in Cologne from 5th to 8th May 2014. This international meeting was launched in 1988 in Grenoble, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for  researchers working on all aspects of speech production from fields as diverse as phonology, phonetics, prosody, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neuroscience, computer science and human interaction. At this meeting we shall be celebrating the tenth anniversary of this series.

Topics of interest for ISSP 2014 include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Perception-action control

• Intra- and inter-speaker variability

• Articulatory synthesis

• Mapping between articulatory and acoustic events

• Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

• Connected speech processes

• Convergence and human interaction

• Coarticulation

• Prosody

• Rhythm and timing

• Biomechanical modeling

• Models of motor control

• Audiovisual synthesis

• Aerodynamic models

• Cerebral organization and neural correlates of speech

• Disorders of speech motor control

• Instrumental techniques

• Speech and language acquisition

• Audio-visual speech perception

• Plasticity of speech production and perception

Invited speakers:

Christian Kell (Brain Imaging Center, Frankfurt, Germany) Oscillatory signatures of speech preparation and production

D. Robert Ladd (University of Edinburgh, UK) (title to be announced)

Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (MIT, USA) The role of prosody in speech production planning

Michael J. Richardson (University of Cincinnati, USA) Behavioural dynamics of social coordination and speech production

Caroline Palmer (McGill University, CA) Auditory-motor integration in ensemble music performance

Further information is provided here:

http://www.issp2014.uni-koeln.de/

To contact the organizers, please send an email to:

issp-2014@uni-koeln.de

Important dates:

1st October 2013: Two page paper submission         

15th December 2013: Notification of acceptance   

15th January 2014: Online registration open

25th February 2014: Revised version of four page paper

15th March: Deadline for early bird registration     

5th May - 8th May 2014 : ISSP 2014

The organizers:

Susanne Fuchs, Martine Grice, Anne Hermes, Leonardo Lancia, Doris Muecke

Back

Top

 Road Map for Conversational Interaction Technologies ====================================================== http://groupspaces.com/ROCKIT CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The FP7 ICT CSA ROCKIT Consortium invites experts and young researchers to take part in the project roadmapping workshop organised at the ICASSP venue in Florence, on the 5th of May from 14:00 to about 17:00. The ROCKIT project is developing a European Strategic Research and Innovation Roadmap in the area of natural spoken and multimodal interaction, which integrates the vision and innovation agendas of relevant organisations and leading experts in the field. The resulting roadmap shall set the European research priorities in the area of natural spoken and multimodal interaction for years to come and help the European Commission in defining its funding strategy with regards to the area in question. YOUR contribution will be invaluable for serving this ambitious goal. Eight research areas will be discussed: 1. Speech recognition 2. Speaker localisation and multi-speaker environments 3. Development frameworks 4. Multimodal fusion 5. Machine learning 6. Multimodal synthesis (fission) 7. Dialogue modelling and management 8. Natural language interpretation and generation Please contact us by sending an email to rockit_expert_icassp14@lsv.uni-saarland.de stating briefly your interest and relevance of your work to 2 areas from the list above and/or what role you have. Please express your interest before 15th of April 2014. If selected you will receive the consortium’s invitation with the detailed agenda. We look forward to seeing you! Best regards, Steve Renals and Dietrich Klakow, behalf of the ROCKIT team 

Back

Top

 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication
            and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA 2014)

              May 12-14, 2014, Nancy, France

                http://hscma2014.inria.fr/
      ----------------------------------------------


*News*
Registration is open: http://hscma2014.inria.fr/registration/
Travel & accomodation information: https://hscma2014.inria.fr/venue/
List of accepted papers: https://hscma2014.inria.fr/program/


*Late-Breaking Session*
HSCMA will feature a Late-Breaking Session dedicated to the presentation of recent results, ideas, and demos.

To submit, send a 1-page pdf to hscma2014-chairs@inria.fr including:
- a title
- the nature of the proposal: poster or demo
- the names and affiliations of all authors
- a 150-250 word abstract

Demo stands will consist of a table, a power plug, and a poster board. In case you would need anything else, please mention it.

There is a maximum of 10 slots available. Submissions will be reviewed for a 'sanity check' and accepted on a first-come first-served basis. Accepted proposals will be given a poster or a demo slot, but will not be published in the conference proceedings.

At least one author must register to the conference at the student rate or at the full rate by April 4, 2014. Each registration can cover only one late-breaking presentation and it cannot cover both a late-breaking presentation and a paper in the main program.


*Keynotes*
The workshop will feature three keynotes:
- Marc Moonen (KU Leuven, Belgium): Distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation in wireless acoustic sensor networks
- Steve Renals (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom): Neural networks for distant speech recognition
- Volker Hohmann (University of Oldenburg, Germany): Modeling auditory processing of complex sounds


*Important Dates*
April 4, 2014: Early registration deadline – Submission of camera-ready papers & demos – Submission of late-breaking proposals
May 5, 2014: Late registration deadline
May 12-14, 2014: Workshop


*Organizing Committee*
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria, France)
Dietrich Klakow (Saarland University, Germany)
Hiroshi Saruwatari (Nara Institute of Technology, Japan)
Mike Seltzer (Microsoft Research, USA)
Bhiksha Raj (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) HSCMA 2014

Back

Top

The Fourth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014) will be held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on 13-16 May 2014. The symposium, which follows the successful TAL 2012 in Nanjing, is held on a vibrant campus, which boasts three highly visible academic institutions whose research is relevant to the topic of the symposium: the Centre for Language Studies, the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, both part of Radboud University Nijmegen, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Nijmegen (by Maarten Takens)

TAL 2014 is held in the week before the International Conference on Speech Prosody 2014, which is held in Dublin from 21 to 25 May 2014 and like that conference enjoys the support of ISCA SProSig and ISCA SIG-CSLP.

The symposium continues the tradition of the previous three symposia of focusing on tone languages, aiming to present state-of-the–art research on the typological, phonetic, phonological, psycholinguistic, acquisitional and technological aspects of tonal contrasts, but will also welcome contributions on non-tone languages and art forms like songs and poetry.

Important dates

Submission of full papers

15 February 2014 (this date will not be postponed)

Notification of acceptance

20 March 2014

Camera-ready paper due

15 June 2014

Registration deadline

30 April 2014

Registration desk open

13 May 2014, 2 p.m.

Conference meeting

14-16 May 2014

Tutorial Speech Analysis

13 May 2014, 4 p.m.

Final versions paper due

15 June 2014

Back

Top

The 7^th Speech Prosody Conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland, May 20-23, 2014, at Trinity College Dublin, directly preceding LREC, the Linguistic Resources and Evaluation Conference.

The special theme is social prosody, but we invite papers addressing any aspect of the science and technology of prosody, speaking styles, and voice quality.  Papers are due December 15th.

Topics of interest include: communicative situation and speaking style, dynamics of register and style, l2 prosody, phonology and phonetics of prosody, pitch accent, prosody and spoken language systems, prosody and the sounds of language, prosody development in first language acquisition, prosody for forensic applications, prosody in face-to-face interaction: audiovisual modeling and analysis, prosody in neurological disorders, prosody in speech synthesis, recognition and understanding; prosody models and theoretical issues, prosody of sign language, prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects; psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural correlates of prosody; signal processing; voice quality, phonation, and vocal dynamics, and prosodic characteristics of individuals; and as special review areas, the prosody of nonverbal vocalisations, speech-gesture interaction, and joint/choral speech.

More information is available at http://www.speechprosody2014.org/ .

Back

Top

For info: s2g.conference@gmail.com      

Back

Top

ELRA and the LREC Programme Committee are very pleased to announce that the

LREC 2012 Proceedings have been accepted for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings

Citation Index of Thomson Reuters. The CPCI is searchable through the

Web of Science

platform and will provide authors with unprecedented recognition.

LREC 2010 proceedings are currently under review, and chances that they will be

accepted are high! Once published, the proceedings of LREC 2014 will be submitted for

inclusion in the CPCI.

Schedule of all the LREC 2014 Workshops and Tutorials is now online at http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/conference-programme/workshops-and-tutorials.
On this web page you will find a link to each Workshop Call for Papers and each Tutorial Outline, when available.
Don't hesitate to contact Workshop and/or Tutorial organisers if you have specific questions on their event.

For general LREC 2014 matters, please contact us at http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/contact/

 

ELRA is glad to announce the 9th edition of LREC, organised with the support of a wide range of international organisations.

The online registration to the Main conference, the workshops and tutorials is now open @ http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/registration/.
Contact: registration@lrec-conf.org

CONFERENCE AIMS

LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language

Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new

R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their

applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, on-going and planned activities, industrial

uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to policy

issues and to scientific/technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across

a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and

promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language

sciences, progress in language technologies (LT) and development of corresponding products,

services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, multimodality

* Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability

* Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation

* Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge

* Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation

* LRs and Semantic Web

* LRs and Crowdsourcing

* Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications

* Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication

* LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval,

audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided

Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation,

speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing,

reasoning, etc.

* Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and

multimodal/multisensorial interactions,

* Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-culture, ehealth,

e-participation, mobile applications, digital humanities, etc.

* Industrial LRs requirements, user needs

Issues in LT evaluation

* LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures

* Validation and quality assurance of LRs

* Benchmarking of systems and products

* Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems

* User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation

* International and national activities, projects and collaboration

* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs

* Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages

* Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures

* Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues.

LREC 2014 HOT TOPICS

Big Data, Linked Open Data, LRs and HLT

The ever-increasing quantities of large and complex digital datasets, structured or

unstructured, multilingual, multimodal or multimedia, pose new challenges but at the same

time open up new opportunities for HLT and related fields. Ubiquitous data and information

capturing devices, social media and networks, the web at large with its big data / knowledge

bases and other information capturing / aggregating / publishing platforms are providing

useful information and/or knowledge for a wide range of LT applications.

LREC 2014 puts a strong emphasis on the synergies of the big Linked Open Data and LRs/LT

communities and their complementarity in cracking LT problems and developing useful

applications and services.

LRs in the Collaborative Age

The amount of collaboratively generated and used language data is constantly increasing and

it is therefore time to open a wide discussion on such LRs at LREC. There is a need to discuss

the types of LRs that can be collaboratively generated and used.

Are lexicons, dictionaries, corpora, ontologies (of language data), grammars, tagsets, data

categories, all possible fields in which a collaborative approach can be applied? Can

collaboratively generated LRs be standardised/harmonised? And how can quality control be

applied to collaboratively generated LRs? How can a collaborative approach ensure that lessresourced

languages receive the same digital dignity as mainstream languages?

There is also a need to discuss legal aspects related to collaboratively generated LRs. And last

but not least: are there different types of collaborative approaches, or is the Wikimedia style

the best approach to collaborative generation and use of LRs?

LREC 2014 SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT

Share your LRs!

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission

procedure of many conferences – LREC 2014 recognises that the time is ripe to launch

another important initiative, the LREC Repository of shared LRs!

When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools,

web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC META-SHARE repository set up by

ELRA.

Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be reused,

compared, analysed, …

This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new

'regular' feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common

repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo

presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio

Zampolli Prize.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo)

papers: 15 October 2013

Abstracts should consist of about 1500-2000 words, will be submitted through START @

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/main/

and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 15 October 2013

Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website (

click Submission

from the Home page

) and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.

There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the

appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the

paper will be considered.

In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa -

Italy (Conference chair)

Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France

Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany

Hrafn Loftsson – School of Computer Science, Reykjavík University - Iceland

Bente Maegaard – CST, University of Copenhagen - Denmark

Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, Orsay - France

Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain

Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands

Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece

voice-activated services, etc.

Back

Top

WILDRE2- 2nd Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation

Date: Tuesday, 27th May 2014     

Venue: Harpa Conference Centre, Reykjavik, Iceland (Organized in under the platform of LREC2014 (26-31 May 2014))   

Website:

• main website - http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/wildre2
• submit papers on - http://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/WILDRE/

  WILDRE – the 2nd workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation is being organized in Reykjavik, Iceland on 27th May, 2014 under the LREC platform.  India has a huge linguistic diversity and has seen concerted efforts from the Indian government and industry towards developing language resources. European Language Resource Association (ELRA) and its associate organizations have been very active and successful in addressing the challenges and opportunities related to language resource creation and evaluation. It is therefore a great opportunity for resource creators of Indian languages to showcase their work on this platform and also to interact and learn from those involved in similar initiatives all over the world.
  The broader objectives of the WILDRE will be

  • To map the status of Indian Language Resources
  • To investigate challenges related to creating and sharing various levels of language resources
  • To promote a dialogue between language resource developers and users
  • To provide opportunity for researchers from India to collaborate with researchers from other parts of the world

DATES      

February 17, 2014 Paper submissions due     
March 10, 2014 Paper notification of acceptance     
April 4, 2014 Camera-ready papers due     
May 27, 2014 Workshop

SUBMISSIONS     

Papers must describe original, completed or in progress, and  unpublished work. Each submission will be reviewed by two program committee members.     

Accepted papers will be given up to 10 pages (for full papers) 5 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and will be presented oral presentation or poster.     

Papers should be formatted according to the style-sheet, which will be provided on the LREC 2014 website (lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/).   

Please submit papers in PDF/doc format to the LREC website

We are seeking submissions under the following category

• Full papers (10 pages)
• Short papers (work in progress – 5 pages)
• Posters (innovative ideas/proposals, research proposal of students)
• Demo (of working online/standalone systems)  

Though our area of interest covers all NLP/language technology related activity for Indian languages, we would like to focus on the resource creation in the following areas-

• Text corpora
• Speech corpora
• Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries
• Ontologies
• Grammars
• Annotation of corpora
• Language resources for basic NLP, IR and Speech Technology tasks, tools and
• Infrastructure for constructing and sharing language resources
• Standards or specifications for language resources  applications
• Licensing and copyright issues

Both submission and review processes will handled electronically using the Start interface of the LREC website. The workshop website will provide the submission guidelines and the link for the electronic submission.

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.), to enable their reuse, replicability of experiments, including evaluation ones, etc...

For further information on this initiative, please refer to http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/.

Conference Chairs

• Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India Lab, Bangalore
• Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai

Program Committee (to be updated)

• A. Kumaran, Microsoft Research, India
• Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, India
• Ashwani Sharma, Google India
• Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania
• Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
• Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
• Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
• Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University, Germany
• Indranil Datta, English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India
• Jopseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Jyoti Pawar, Goa University, India
• Kalika Bali, MSRI, Bangalore, India
• Karunesh Arora, CDAC Noida, India
• Khalid Choukri, ELRA, France
• L Ramamoorthy, LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore, India
• Malhar Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, India
• Monojit Choudhary, Microsoft Research, India
• Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Niladri Shekhar Dash, ISI Kolkata, India
• Panchanan Mohanty, University of Hyderabad, India
• Pushpak Bhattacharya, IIT Bombay, India
• Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai, India
• Umamaheshwar Rao, University of Hyderabad, India
• Vikram Dendi, Microsoft Research, USA
• Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

Workshop contact:

Esha Banerjee, Sr Linguist, ILCI project @JNU  esha.jnu@gmail.com

Back

Top

LREC 2014 Workshop Language Technology Service Platforms: Synergies, Standards, Sharing - May 31, 2014, Reykjavik
Contact: lrec-infra@lrec-conf.org

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Motivation and background
Increasingly, Human Language Technology (HLT) requires sophisticated infrastructures to support research, development, innovation, collaboration and deployment as services ready for production use. To address this need, several supporting infrastructures have been established over the past few years, and others are being built or planned.
The LREC 2014 Workshop on Language Technology Service Platforms brings together major infrastructural/coordination initiatives from all over the world. The overall goal is to explore means by which these and other infrastructure projects can best collaborate and interoperate in order to avoid duplication of effort, fragmentation, and above all, to facilitate the use and reuse of technologies and resources distributed throughout the world.

Focus
Web services are an increasingly common means to provide access to language technologies and resources. These services typically work in combination with repositories of language resources and workflow managers. This development brings with it its own set of issues in relation to collaboration and interoperability, including:
interoperability of input to and output from language technologies deployed as web services;
means to provide services for evaluation/replicability of results and iterative development;
means to support multi-site collaborative work;
licensing and cataloguing of language technologies and resources;     
sharing and access mechanisms to language technologies and resources;
quality assessment and sustainability of language technologies and resources.

Aims
This workshop aims to foster discussion on these (and related) issues in order to arrive at a set of concrete plans for future collaboration and cooperation as well as immediate next steps.
General discussions will focus on the following questions: How can the various infrastructures collaborate, in both the near and long-term future? What are the steps needed in order to share both language technologies and resources? How can the projects and initiatives (including not only those involved in the workshop, but also others) join forces in order to eventually create a global infrastructure for Human Language Technologies?

The goal is to leave the workshop with a resolution that 1. lists all active infrastructure and platform initiatives, 2. describes the consensus of all initiatives involved in the workshop, 3. outlines the requirements for collaboration and 4. proposes solutions.

Researchers and technologists interested in platforms, services, sharing of language resources etc. are encouraged to participate in the workshop in order to make sure that their voice is heard. As described above, the consensus and outcome of the workshop will be put down in writing in a short resolution document meant to be used by the whole community for public relation and dissemination purposes, especially with regard to discussions with journalists, administrators, politicians and funding agencies.

Preliminary program plan
The first session will provide short introductions to the infrastructural/coordination initiatives involved in the organisation.
In order to outline some concrete next steps for the immediate future, there will be sessions devoted to surveying two to four currently implemented solutions to crucial problems, with an eye toward assessing and comparing the various solutions in order to determine immediate action items. These sessions will address topics such as:
interoperability and the use of standards, for example, syntax and semantics used to exchange information between web services and/or technologies that may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., that do not necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.) 
implemented means to provide evaluation/replicability and means to enable multi-site collaboration
licensing for data and tools shared over networks and services.
  
Contribute to an overview of the Language Resources and Technologies landscape!
In order to facilitate the discussion we ask workshop participants to answer the following questions and to send their answers to the organisers (see Contact mail below) at the beginning of May. A summary of the responses will be provided at the workshop to inform and to focus the discussion.
(1) Access – How do you make information about your tools and/or resources available to the world? How and where do you find information on tools and resources you would like to use?
(2) Obstacles to Data and Technology Exchange – What do you see as the major obstacle(s) to the exchange of data between technologies?
(3) Data or Technology Gaps – Are there tools, technologies or resources that do not exist at this time that are required to answer your research or development questions?
(4) Interoperability and Standards – What syntax and semantics do you use to exchange information between web services and/or tools that may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., do not necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.)?  
(5) Evaluation – What have you implemented to provide evaluation/replicability?  
(6) Licensing – How are you handling licensing for data shared over networks and services?
(7) Collaboration – How would you propose to promote collaboration among the various infrastructure projects located around the world? 

We also welcome any additional comments or views that you wish to express.

We look forward to welcoming you in Reykjavik!

Organising Initiatives
COCOSDA
ELRA – European Language Resource Association
FLaReNet
Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid
Language Grid
META-NET
MLi – Towards a MultiLingual Data & Services infrastructure
MUSE FP7 – ClowdFlows initiative
Research Data Alliance

Organisers
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Italy and ELRA, France)
Khalid Choukri (ELRA, France)
Christopher Cieri (LDC, USA)
Tomaž Erjavec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
Oleksandr Kolomiyets (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS and IMMI, France)
Yohei Murakami (Kyoto University, Japan)
Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Senja Pollak (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, USA)
Georg Rehm (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Herman Stehouwer (Max Planck, Germany)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Andrejs Vasiļjevs (Tilde, Latvia)
Peter Wittenburg (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands)

     

Back

Top

eNTERFACE 2014 - 10th SUMMER WORKSHOP ON MULTIMODAL INTERFACES
Bilbao, Spain, June 9th – July 5th, 2014
==============================================================

http://aholab.ehu.es/eNTERFACE14


CALL FOR PROJECTS

Aholab Signal Processing research group, Faculty of Engineering of the University of the 
Basque Country, in Bilbao (Spain), invites project proposals for eNTERFACE’14.

Following the tremendous success of the previous eNTERFACE workshops (www.enterface.net), eNTERFACE’14 aims at continuing and enhancing the tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place, leading researchers in multimodal interfaces and students to work on specific projects for 4 complete weeks.

eNTERFACE’14 will encompass presentation sessions, including tutorial state-of-the-art surveys on several aspects of design of multimodal interfaces, given by invited senior researchers, and periodical presentations of the results achieved by each project group. The ultimate goal is to make this event a unique opportunity for students and experts all over the world to meet and effectively work together, so as to foster the development of tomorrow’s multimodal research community. The results of the projects are expected to be published in the Workshop proceedings.


THEMES (not exhaustive list):

- Multimodal signal analysis and synthesis 
- Intuitive interfaces and personalized systems in real and virtual environments 
- Assistive technologies for education and social inclusion 
- Assistive and rehabilitation technologies 
- Search in multimedia and multilingual documents 
- Affective and social signal processing 
- Multimodality for biometrics and security 
- Innovative musical interfaces 
- Augmented reality 
- Embodied agents 
- Human-robot and human-environment interactions in smart environments 
- Multimodal conversational systems 
- Self-learning and adapting systems 
- Innovative modalities and modalities conversion 
- Applications of Multimodal interfaces 
- Performing arts applications 
- Teleoperation and telerobotics


IMPORTANT DATES

November 30th, 2013
Reception of a 1-page Notification of Interest, with a summary of projects goals, temptative workpackages, and deliverables.

December 15th, 2013
Reception of the Full Project Proposal.

January 10th, 2014
Notification of acceptance to project leaders. Start Call for Participation.

February 28th, 2014 
End Call for Participation. Team building.

March 28th, 2014
Notification of acceptance to participants.


IMPORTANT NOTES

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format to enterface14@aholab.ehu.es.

The proposals will be evaluated by the Scientic Committee with respect to suitability to the workshop goals and format. A call for PhD students and researchers participation will then be launched on January 10th, 2014. Authors of the accepted proposals will then be invited to build their teams.

There is no registration fee for participants. Participants are expected to pay for their own lodging and meals (see http://aholab.ehu.es/eNTERFACE14 for information about facilities and prices). Some grants for students will be offered in due course.


CONTACT

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us: enterface14@aholab.ehu.es.

Back

Top

ODYSSEY 2014: 
             THE SPEAKER AND LANGUAGE RECOGNITION WORKSHOP 
                   June 16-19, 2014, Joensuu, Finland 
 
                     http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 
 
IMPORTANT DATES: 
 
NIST i-vector challenge 
- Challenge opened:                       November 2013 
- Challenge papers due:                   February 10, 2014 
- Submissions without a paper:            April 7, 2014 
 
- Regular paper submission:               February 10, 2014 (EXTENDED!) 
- Industry submissions + demos:           February 10, 2014 
- Notifications:                          April 10, 2014 
- Final papers:                           April 25, 2014 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
KEYNOTE TALKERS: 
 
Dr. Samy Bengio, Google Research 
http://research.google.com/pubs/bengio.html 
'Large scale learning of a joint embedding space' 
 
Prof. Martin Cooke, University of the Basque Country 
http://laslab.org/martin 
'Speaking in adverse conditions: from behavioural observations to 
intelligibility-enhancing speech modifications' 
 
Dr. Joseph P. Campbell, MIT Lincoln Lab 
http://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/cybersec/HLT/biographies/campbell-bio.html 
'Speaker Recognition for Forensic Applications' 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
CONFERENCE TOPICS: 
 
The general themes of the conference include speaker  and 
language  recognition and characterization. The specific topics 
include, but are not limited to, the following: 
 
o Speaker characterization and adaptation 
o Features for speaker and language recognition 
o Multi-speaker training, detection and diarization 
o Robustness in channels and environment 
o Robust classification and fusion 
o Speaker recognition corpora and evaluation 
o Speaker recognition with speech recognition 
o Forensics, multimodality, and multimedia speaker recognition 
o Speaker and language confidence estimation 
o Language, dialect, and accent recognition 
o Speaker synthesis and transformation 
o Human recognition of speaker and language 
o Analysis and countermeasures against spoofing attacks 
o Commercial applications 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
REGULAR PAPER SUBMISSIONS: 
 
All regular submissions (max 8 pages) will be reviewed by at least 
three members of the scientific review committee. The regular 
submissions must include scientific or methodological novelty; the 
paper has to review the relevant prior work and state clearly the 
novelty in the Introduction part. The accepted papers will appear in 
electronic proceedings. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
INDUSTRY TRACK AND DEMOS: 
 
Odyssey committee recognizes a large gap between theoretical research 
results and real-world deployment of the methods. To foster closer 
collaboration across industry and academia, Odyssey 2014 features an 
industry submission track. This can include a description of your 
target application, a product, a demonstrator, or any combination. In 
addition to voice biometrics providers, we encourage submissions from 
companies who are in need for speaker or language recognition 
technology. The industry paper submissions do NOT have to present 
methodological novelty, but the submission MUST address one or all of 
the following aspects: 
 
- Description of the application, role of speaker/language recognition 
- Research results and methods that worked well in your application 
- Negative research results that have NOT worked in practice 
- Unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention 
 
The industry submissions will NOT undergo full peer review 
nor will be included to the proceedings. All the industry track 
submissions can be presented as a posters. The organizing committee 
may select a few most interesting ones for oral presentation. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
NIST SPECIAL SESSIONS: I-VECTOR CHALLENGE & NIST SRE-2012 FOLLOW-UP 
 
In addition to regular and industry paper submissions, Odyssey 2014 
features two special sessions co-organized with National Institute of 
Standards and Technologies (NIST). NIST SRE-2012 special session 
focuses on extended analyses on the latest, NIST 2012 speaker 
recognition evaluation (SRE) benchmark, and is targeted for the 
participants of NIST SRE 2012. 
 
The i-vector challenge is a new type of challenge targeted for anyone 
interested for a 'quick start-up' in speaker recognition. Building 
modern speaker and language recognition systems requires a lot of 
preprocessing, corpus engineering and computations, making it 
challenging for newcomers to enter the field. This prohibits piloting 
of possibly promising modeling ideas developed outside of speaker 
recognition community (e.g. machine learning and image processing 
communities). To bridge this gap, NIST organizes a new type of 
benchmark, i-vector challenge, synchronized with Odyssey 2014. 
 
Preliminary due-date for paper submissions to both special sessions is 
February 2014. Submissions by this deadline will undergo review both 
by NIST and by the scientific review committee, and will be included 
to the conference proceedings if accepted. Late challenge submissions 
(without a paper) are also encouraged; they can be presented as 
posters, but will not undergo peer review nor will be included to the 
conference proceedings. 
 
To ensure smooth organization, early (non-binding) preliminary sign-up 
is required. More details and registration for the i-vector challenge 
will be available in November 2013. 
 
See https://ivectorchallenge.nist.gov/ for more info about the i-vector 
challenge. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
AWARDS: 
 
Odyssey 2014 features three awards: 
 
- A best paper award 
- A best student paper award 
- Free registration for 1 to 2 top-performers in the i-vector challenge 
 
All regular and special session papers submitted in time are 
candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review 
reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student 
paper award, the first author must be a student (does not yet hold a 
PhD degree) at the time of paper submission. 
 
Best 1 to 2 teams (max 1 person per site) in i-vector challenge are 
provided FREE REGISTRATION to the full Odyssey 2014 workshop. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: 
 
Tomi Kinnunen, chair        University of Eastern Finland, Finland 
Pasi Franti, co-chair       University of Eastern Finland, Finland 
Jean-Francois Bonastre      University of Avignon, France 
Niko Brummer                Agnitio, South Africa 
Lukas Burget                Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 
Joseph Campbell             MIT Lincoln Lab, USA 
Jan 'Honza' Cernocky        Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 
Haizhou Li                  Inst. Infocomm Research, Singapore 
Alvin Martin                NIST, USA 
Douglas Reynolds            MIT Lincoln Lab, USA 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
SCIENTIFIC REVIEW COMMITTEE: 
 
Eliathamby Ambikairajah     Univ. New South Wales, Australia 
Tim Anderson                Air Force Research Lab, USA 
Walt Andrews                BBN, USA 
Hagai Aronowitz             IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel 
Roland Auckenthaler         NMS Comm., USA 
Claude Barras               LIMSI, France 
Kay Berkling                Inline, Intern. Online Dienste GmbH, Germany 
Jean-Francois Bonastre      Univ. Avignon, France 
Hynek Boril                 Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Niko Brummer                AGNITIO, South Africa 
Lukas Burget                Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Joseph Campbell             MITLL, USA 
Bill Campbell               MITLL, USA 
Jan 'Honza' Cernocky        Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Nancy Chen                  I2R, Singapore 
Sandro Cumani               Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Najim Dehak                 MIT, USA 
George Doddington           US. Gov. Consultant, USA 
Nicholas Evans              EURECOM, France 
Mauro Falcone               Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy 
Kevin Farrell               Nuance, USA 
Benoit Fauve                Validsoft, UK 
Daniel Garcia-Romero        Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Ondrej Glembek              Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Joaquin Gonzalez-Rodriguez  Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Craig Greenberg             NIST, USA 
Cemal Hanilci               Uludag Univ., Turkey 
John H.L. Hansen            Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Taufiq Hasan                Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Ville Hautamaki             Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Hynek Hermansky             Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Chien-Lin Huang             National Inst. Inf. and Comm. Tech., Japan 
Michael Jessen              Bundeskriminalamt, Germany 
Patrick Kenny               CRIM, Canada 
Tomi Kinnunen               Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Tina Kohler                 DoD, USA 
Pietro Laface               Politecnico di Torino, Italy 
Anthony Larcher             I2R, Singapore 
Kong Aik Lee                I2R, Singapore 
Yun Lei                     SRI International, USA 
Cheung-Chi Leung            I2R, Singapore 
Haizhou Li                  I2R, Singapore 
Ming Li                     Sun Yat-sen Univ, China 
Bin Ma                      I2R, Singapore 
Dave Marks                  Sandia, DoE National Labs, USA 
Alvin Martin                NIST, USA 
David Martinez              Univ. Zaragoza, Spain 
John Mason                  Swansea Univ, UK 
Pavel Matejka               Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Driss Matrouf               Univ. Avignon, France 
Tomoko Matsui               Inst. Stat. Math, Japan 
Yuri Matveev                ITMO University, Russia 
Alan McCree                 Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Pejman Mowlaee              Graz Univ. Tech., Austria 
Jiri Navratil               IBM Research, USA 
Raymond W.M. Ng             Univ. Sheffield, UK 
Javier Ortega-Garcia        Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Jason Pelecanos             IBM Research, USA 
Oldrich Plchot              Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Padmanabhan Rajan           Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Daniel Ramos                Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Douglas Reynolds            MITLL, USA 
Fred Richardson             MITLL, USA 
Rahim Saeidi                Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Nicolas Scheffer            SRI International, USA 
Jan Silovsky                TU Liberec, Czech Republic 
Themos Stafylakis           CRIM, Canada 
Doug Sturim                 MITLL, USA 
Rong Tong                   I2R, Singapore 
Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo   MITLL, USA 
Michael Wagner              Univ. Canberra, Australia 
David van Leeuwen           Radboud Univ. Nijmegen, The Netherlands 
Jesus Villalba              Univ. Zaragoza, Spain 
Changhuai You               I2R, Singapore 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
VENUE AND TRAVEL: 
 
Odyssey 2014 will be hosted by School of Computing of the University of 
Eastern Finland (UEF). Joensuu is a small town of 75,000 inhabitants 
in the lakeside Finland -- the capital of green. It is famous for its 
peaceful nature, excellent outdoor opportunities as well as many saunas. 
 
Joensuu can be easily reached from Helsinki (50 min flight), which can 
be reached via direct flights from several European, North American 
and Asian cities. 
 
For more details: 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 
 
Email: odyssey@cs.uef.fi 

Back

Top

We are  pleased to announce the 10th Oxford Dysfluency Conference (ODC) is to be held  at St Catherine's College Oxford from 17 - 20 July, 2014.

ODC has a reputation as one of the leading international scientific  conferences in the field of dysfluency. The conference brings together researchers and clinicians, providing a showcase and forum for discussion and  collegial debate about the most current and innovative research and clinical  practices.  Throughout the history of ODC, the primary aim has been to bridge the gap between research and clinical practice.                           

The conference seeks  to promote research that informs management, with interventions that are  supported by sound theory and which inform future research.

In 2014, the  goal of the Oxford Dysfluency Conference is to lead a challenging international  debate about the latest research in disorders of fluency and its clinical  applications. The 2014 conference will enable delegates to:

                   
• Present the latest research developments and       findings
                   
• Explore issues relating to the nature of       stuttering and its treatment
                   
• Develop knowledge and clinical skills working       with children and adults who stutter
                   
• Consider ways to integrate research into       clinical practice
                   
• Support and encourage new researchers in the       field
                   
• Develop collaborations with researchers       working in dysfluency
                   
• Provide informal opportunities to meet and       discuss ideas with leading experts in the field in a friendly environment
                   
• Advance research in the field of dysfluency
                 

Conference Co-Chairs                    

David Rowley, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, De Montfort University, UK
                    Sharon Millard, The Michael Palin Centre, UK                  

Back

Top

   CALL FOR PAPERS 
        Extended paper submission deadline:  February 28, 2014

        C B M I    2014
        12th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing
        18-20 June 2014, Klagenfurt, Austria

        http://cbmi2014.itec.aau.at/
        in cooperation with IEEE CSS and ACM SIGMM
******************************************************************************

The 12th International Content Based Multimedia Indexing Workshop aims
to bring together the various communities involved in all aspects of
content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing and presentation.
Following the eleven successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999,
Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania
2009, Grenoble 2010, Madrid 2011, Annecy 2012, and Veszprem 2013), CBMI
2014 will take place in Klagenfurt, in the very south of Austria from
June 18th to June 20th 2014. CBMI 2014 is organized in cooperation with
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and ACM SIG Multimedia. Topics of the
workshop include but are not limited to visual indexing, audio and
multi-modal indexing, multimedia information retrieval, and multimedia
browsing and presentation. Additional special sessions are planned in
the fields of endoscopic videos and images and multimedia metadata.


Paper submission: Authors are invited to submit full-length and special
session papers of 6 pages and short (poster) and demo papers of 4 pages
maximum. All peer-reviewed, accepted and registered papers will be
published in the CBMI 2014 workshop proceedings to be indexed and
distributed by the IEEE Xplore. The submissions are peer reviewed in
single blind process, the language of the workshop is English. Selected
papers of the conference will be invited to submit extended versions of
their contributions to a special issue of Multimedia Tools and
Applications journal (MTAP).


* Important dates:
   Paper submission deadline:    February 16, 2014
   Notification of acceptance:   March 30, 2014
   Camera-ready papers due:      April 14, 2014
   Author registration:          April 14, 2014
   Early registration:           May 25, 2014

* 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

* Contact
For more information please visit http://cbmi2014.itec.aau.at/ and for
additional questions, remarks, or clarifications please contact
cbmi2014@itec.aau.at 

Back

Top

The REAL Challenge – Call for Participation

The Dialog Research Center at Carnegie Mellon (DialRC) is organizing the REAL Challenge. The goal of the REAL Challenge (dialrc.org/realchallenge) is to build speech systems that are used regularly by real users to accomplish real tasks. These systems will give the speech and spoken dialog communities steady streams of research data as well as platforms they can use to carry out studies. It will engage both seasoned researchers and high school and undergrad students in an effort to find the next great speech applications.

Why have a REAL Challenge?

Humans greatly rely on spoken language to communicate, so it seems natural that we would be likely to communicate with objects via speech as well. Some speech interfaces do exist and they show promise, demonstrating that smart engineering can palliate indeterminate recognition. Yet the general public has not yet picked up this means of communication as easily as they have the tiny keyboards. About two decades ago, many researchers were using the internet, mostly to send and receive email. They were aware of the potential that it held and waited to see when and how the general public would adopt it. Practically a decade later, thanks to providers such as AmericaOnline, who had found how to create easy access, everyday people started to use the internet. And this has dramatically changed our lives. In the same way, we all know that speech will eventually replace the keyboard in many situations when we want to speak to objects. The big question is what is the interface or application that will bring us into that era.

Why hasn’t speech become a more prevalent interface? Most of today’s speech applications have been devised by researchers in the speech domain. While they certainly know what types of systems are “doable”, they may not be the best at determining which speech applications would be universally acceptable.

We believe that students who have not yet had their vision limited by knowledge of the speech and spoken dialog domains and who have grown up with computers as a given, are the ones that will find new, compelling and universally appealing speech applications. Along with the good ideas, they will need some guidance to gain focus. Having a mentor, attending webinars and participating in a research team can provide this guidance.

The REAL challenge will combine the talents of these two very different groups. First it will call upon the speech research community who know what it takes to implement real applications. Second, it will advertise to and encourage participation from high school students and college undergrads who love to hack and have novel ideas about using speech.

How can we combine these two types of talent?

The REAL Challenge is starting with a widely-advertised call for proposals. Students can propose an application. Researchers can propose to create systems or to provide tools. A proposal can target any type of application in any language. The proposals will be lightly filtered and the successful proposers will be invited to a workshop on June 21, 2014 to show what they are proposing and to team up. The idea is for students to meet researchers and for the latter to take one or more students on their team. Students will present their ideas and have time for discussion with researchers. A year later, a second workshop will assemble all who were at the first workshop to show the resulting systems, measure success and award prizes.

Student travel will be taken care of by DialRC through grants.

Preparing students

Students will have help from DialRC and from researchers as they formulate their proposals. DialRC will provide webinars on such topics as speech processing tool basics and how to present a poster. Students will also be assigned mentors. Researchers in speech and spoken dialog can volunteer to be a one-on-one mentor to a student. This consists of being in touch either in person or virtually. Mentors can tell the students about what our field consists of, what the state of the art is, and what it is like to work in research. They can answer questions about how the student can talk about their ideas. If you are a researcher in speech and/or spoken dialog and you would like to be a mentor, please let us know at realchallenge@speechinfo.org

What is an entry?

The groups will create entries. Here are the characteristics of a successful entry:

• there is a stateful interaction (not stateless, not on-off)

• the interaction is sustained over multiple turns

• language is central to the entry – it is the primary medium of exchange (not necessarily the only medium, but it is not peripheral to the main use of the entry)

• the entry makes a meaningful contribution to the interaction (so, it does not just pass messages)

• the entry must do some meaningful processing (not just passing messages like an email router). It has to make meaningful contributions to the interaction.

How can we assess success?

Success will be judged on the basis of originality, amount of regular users and of data and on other criteria to be agreed upon by the Challenge scientific committee and the participants.

Possible prize areas for an entry include:

• how much usage it gets

• how engaging it is / how novel is the interaction

• how good it is as a platform for future research – a platform is defined here as the output/result of an entry that would be of use for the research community. A platform is not just a computer program toolkit. It could, for example, be used the following year as the basis for a competition (like best ASR or best belief tracking)

Details of the measures of success will be refined at the workshop with input from the participants.

Timeline

The REAL Challenge was announced at several major conferences during the summer of 2013: SIGDIAL, Interspeech, ACL. It is also being announced to younger participants through their schools and hacker websites.

March 20, 2014 : Proposals due

April 20, 2014: Feedback on proposals and invitations to attend the workshop sent out.

June 21, 2014 : Workshop in Baltimore Maryland USA.

Early summer of 2015 : Resulting systems are presented a year after the first workshop.

What advantage is there for a student to participate?

For students, participation in the REAL Challenge will present several unique opportunities:

• the chance to work in a group with real researchers, on a real world problem

• the chance to see how ideas are turned into reality

• the chance to make something that works and that people actually use

• the chance to learn about new technology and use it to solve new problems

• the chance to observe what careers in technology are like and to be in contact with possible future employers

What does this Challenge contribute to the speech community?

For researchers, participation reaps several benefits:

• the number and type of speech applications will be greatly expanded

• there will be more datasets available for research

• there will be more platforms to run studies on and to use in speech and spoken dialog classes

• the enrichment that comes from mentoring

Why should industrial research groups be interested in the Challenge?

Industrial research groups should be interested to see:

• which types of applications actually appeal to the general public and which ones fail, which could be revenue-generating

• how students learn to apply the latest speech technologies in novel directions and which of these students could become future collaborators

Organization

This Challenge is run by the Dialog Research Center at Carnegie Mellon (DialRC)

REAL Challenge Scientific Committee

Alan W Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Helen Hastie, Heriot Watt University, Scotland

Gary Geunbae Lee, Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea

Sungjin Lee, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Santoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Elmar Noeth, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Antoine Raux, Lenovo, USA

David Traum, University of Southern California, USA

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

Contact information:

Website : http://dialrc.org/realchallenge

Email : realchallenge@speechinfo.org

Back

Top

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Conference of young researchers in Language Didactics and Linguistics

Multidisciplinary conference on the study of language

24 juin – 27 juin 2014

LIDILEM laboratory Stendhal University, Grenoble, France

http://cedil2014.u-grenoble3.fr

In line with the areas of research of our laboratory, this multidisciplinary conference’s objective is to allow the community of PhD

students and young researchers to submit their research topics in the fields of language, its teaching and or literacy, psychology,

education sciences, ethnology, neurolinguistics, human-machine communication.

RESEARCH THEMES

·

Linguistics

·

Psycholinguistics

·

Linguistic development

·

Sociolinguistics

·

Multilingualism

·

Language didactics,

·

Natural Language Processing (NLP),

·

Digital Humanities.

CALENDAR

·

Submission deadline : 15th November 2013 29th November 2013

·

Announcement of acceptances : March 3rd, 2013

·

Preliminary program : May, 2014

·

Reception of final articles : June 2nd, 2014

·

Conference dates : Tuesday, 24 June (afternoon) to Friday, 27 June 2014

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Laurent BESACIER (Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, France), Jacqueline BILLIEZ (Université

Stendhal de Grenoble, France), Annette BOUDREAU (Université de Moncton, Canada), Gabrièle BUDACH (University of

Southampton, England) , Cécile CANUT (Université Paris-Descartes, France), Jean-Pierre CHEVROT (Université Stendhal de

Grenoble, France), Jean-Louis CHISS (Université Paris 3, France), Jean-François de PIETRO (Université de Neuchâtel, Institut de

Recherche et de Documentation Pédagogique, Switzerland), Jean-Marc DEWAELE (Birbeck, University of London, England),

Cécile FABRE (ERSS, Université de Toulouse, France), Isabel GONZALEZ REY (Université St Jacques de Compostelle, Spain),

Heather HILTON (Université Paris 8, France), Alexandra JAFFE (California State University Long Beach, United-States), Sophie

KERN (Université de Lyon 3, France), Marinette MATTHEY (Université Stendhal de Grenoble, France), Christophe PARISSE

(Université de Paris 10, France), Ludovic TANGUY (ERSS, Université de Toulouse, France).

LANGUAGES

The languages used during the conference will be French or English.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

This conference addresses only young researchers (PhD students and recent doctors). Abstracts must be in French or in English.

The abstract should not be more than 2 pages long, including references.

Deadline for submission : 15

th November 2013 29th November 2013

For more information refer to the instructions indicated on the conference site:

http://cedil2014.u-grenoble3.fr

MODALITIES OF COMMUNICATION

Presentations and posters of young researchers will follow one another and will be accompanied with plenary conferences of

renowned lecturers and researchers stemming from different disciplinary fields.

Communication in workshops (20 minutes presentation and an additional 10 minutes for discussion).

Presentation of posters.

PUBLICATION OF ACTS

The abstracts accepted for oral or displayed may be published in the form of articles (8-10 pages) to be submitted before June 2

nd,

2014. Articles will be subjected and selected to a proofreading committee with the possibility of being published in the University

Press of Grenoble (PUG) at the beginning of 2015.

CONTACT

For any further information about submissions or registrations, please email to:

cedil2014@gmail.com

Back

Top

We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the fifth annual workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), to be co-located with ACL 2014 in Baltimore in June 2014. The deadline for submission of papers and demo proposals is 21 March. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline, and formatting of regular papers can be found here here:

       http://www.slpat.org/slpat2014

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

Please contact the conference organizers at slpat2014-workshop@googlegroups.com with any questions.

Important dates:

21 March: Paper/demo submissions due

11 April: Notification of acceptance

28 April: Camera-ready papers due

26 - 27 June: SLPAT workshop

We look forward to seeing you!

The organizing committee of SLPAT 2014,

Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany

Dimitra Anastasiou, University of Bremen, Gernany

Cui Jian, SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, University of Bremen, Germany

Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Rupal Patel, Northeastern University, USA

Frank Rudzicz, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and University of Toronto, Canada

Annalu Waller, University of Dundee, Scotland

Desislava Zhekova, University of Munich, Germany

Back

Top

CALL FOR PAPERS

                               TALN-2014

             21st Conference on Natural Language Processing

                        http://www.taln2014.org

                             July 1-4 2014

                           Marseille, FRANCE

IMPORTANT DATES

==========

1. Long paper

    - Extended submission deadline : February 27, 2014

    - Notification : March 29, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 2, 2014

2. Short paper

    - Paper submission deadline : April 12, 2014

    - Notification : May 10, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 26, 2014

3. Demonstrations

    - Submission deadline : April 21, 2014

    - Notification : May 10, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 26, 2014

PRÉSENTATION

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

Organized by the LPL (Laboratoire Parole et Langage) and the LIF

(Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale), the 21st Conference on

Natural Language Processing (TALN) will take place from 1st to the

4th July at Faculté Saint Charles, Marseille (France).

TALN'2014 is organised under the aegis of ATALA (Association pour

le Traitement Automatique des Langues) and will be held jointly with

RECITAL'2014, the conference for young researchers (separated call

for papers).

TALN'2014 will include oral presentations of research and position

papers, posters, invited speakers and demonstrations. The official

language is French. English presentations and papers are accepted for

non-French-speaking authors.

TYPES OF COMMUNICATIONS

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

Two communication formats are proposed: long papers (from 12 to 14 pages)

and short papers (from 6 to 8 pages).

Authors are invited to submit two types of communications:

  - original research work

  - position paper on the current state of the research work

Papers should present original works, with substantial new material when

comparing to previous publications of the same author(s). Translation of

previously published papers are not

There will be two presentation formats: Oral for long papers and Poster

for short papers.

All topics of NLP are eligible for a submission.

SELECTION CRITERIA

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

Submissions will be reviewed by at least two experts of the domain. For research

papers, decisions will be based on the following criteria:

 - relevance to the conference topics

- importance and originality of the paper

- scientific and technical soundness

- comparison of the results obtained with those found in relevant works

- situation of the research in comparison with international work

- clarity of the presentation

For position papers, decisions will be based on the following criteria:

 - originality of the point of view presented

- breadth of view and the taking into account of the state-of-the-art

The selected communications will be published in the conference proceedings.

The program committee will select one paper (TALN Best Paper) among the

accepted papers which will be recommended for publication (extended form) in

the journal 'Traitement Automatique des Langues' (T.A.L.).

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

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

Papers will be written in French for French-speaking authors or English for non-French-speaking authors.

A LaTeX style file and a Word template will be made available on the

conference website: http://wwwtaln2014.org

ORGANIZING COMMITEE

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

                Philippe Blache (Président)

                Carine André                    Frédéric Béchet

                Sébastien Bermond       Brigitte Bigi

                Nadéra Bureau                Cyril Deniaud

                Stéphanie Desous          Benoît Favre

                Nuria Gala                          Joëlle Lavaud

                Grégoire Montcheuil     Alexis Nasr

                Catherine Perrot             Klim Peshkov

                Laurent Prévot                 Carlos Ramisch

                Stéphane Rauzy              Claudia Starke

CONTACTS

========

  philippe.blache[arobas]lpl-aix.fr

  nadera.bureau[arobas]lpl-aix.fr

Back

Top

Special Session on Computational Intelligence Algorithms for Digital Audio Applications WCCI 2014 Special Session - Call for Papers 2014 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2014) Beijing, China, 

July 6-11 2014. 

 www.ieee-wcci2014.org Theme and Scope of the Session ___________________________________________ Computational Intelligence (CI) is widely used to face complex modelling, prediction, and recognition tasks, and is largely addressed in different research fields. One of these, characterized by a mature orientation to market for many years already, is represented by Digital Audio, which finds application in diverse contexts like entertainment, security, and health. Scientists and technicians worldwide actively cooperate to develop new solutions and propose them for commercial exploitation, and, from this perspective, the employment of advanced CI techniques, in combination with suitable Digital Signal Processing algorithms, surely constitutes a plus. In particular, this is typically accomplished with the aim of extracting and manipulating useful information from the audio stream to pilot the execution of automatized services, also in an interactive fashion. This often happens in conjunction with data coming from other media, like textual and visual, for which specific and application-driven fusion techniques are needed (which also require the involvement of advanced CI algorithms). Several are the Digital Audio topics touched by such a paradigm. In digital music applications we have music transcription, onset detection, genre recognition, just to name a few. Then, moving to speech processing, speech/speaker recognition, speaker diarization, and source separation are surely representative subjects with a florid literature already. Furthermore, auditory scene analysis, acoustic monitoring and sound detection and identification have lately encountered a certain success in the scientific community and can be thus included in this illustrative list. In dealing with the problems correlated to these different topics, the adoption of data-driven learning systems is often a ``must''. This is not, however, immune to technological issues. Indeed, big amount of data frequently needs to be managed and processed, data which features can change over time due to the time-varying characteristics of the audio stream and of the acoustic environment. Moreover, in many applicative scenarios hard real-time processing constraints must be taken into account. It is indeed of great interest for the scientific community to understand how and to what extent novel CI techniques can be efficiently employed in Digital Audio, in the light of all aforementioned aspects. The aim of this session is therefore to offer a CI oriented look at the large variety of Digital Audio research topics and applications and to discuss the most recent technological efforts from this perspective. Topics ___________________________________________ Intelligent Audio Analysis Audio Information Retrieval Music Content Analysis and Understanding Speech and Speaker Analysis and Classification Cross-domain Audio Analysis Sound Detection and Identification Computational Auditory Scene Analysis Acoustic Monitoring Context-aware Audio Source Separation Intelligent Audio Interfaces Important Dates ___________________________________________ •20 December 2013: Due date for paper submission •15 March 2014: Notification to authors •15 April 2014: Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers •6-11 July 2013: Conference Days Organisers ___________________________________________ Stefano Squartini Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy) s.squartini@univpm.it Aurelio Uncini Università La Sapienza (Italy) aurel@ieee.org Francesco Piazza Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy) f.piazza@univpm.it Björn Schuller Imperial College London (UK), TUM (Germany) schuller@tum.de 

Back

Top

ICALIP2014 CALL FOR PAPERS

2014 International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing

July 7-9, 2014, Shanghai, China

Website: http://www.icalip2014.org/

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

As the flagship conference and the most import event in the region, the 4th International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing (ICALIP2014) will continue the great success of its three previous editions (ICALIP 2008, ICALIP2010 and ICALIP2012) with aiming to provide a unique forum for researchers, engineers and educators interested in audio, language and image processing to learn about recent progresses, to address related challenges and to develop new methods, applications and systems. The conference, to be held on July 7-9, 2014 in Shanghai, the largest city of China, is technically sponsored by IEEE CIS Shanghai Chapter and is co-organized by IET Shanghai Local Network, Shanghai University, Tongji University, Fudan University and Shanghai JiaoTong University. The conference proceedings including all the accepted papers will be published by IEEE (IEEE catalog number: No. CFP1450D-PRT and ISBN: 978-1-4799-3902-2) and submitted to both EI Compendex and ISTP which has indexed all accepted papers of previous three conferences. Best Paper Awards will be granted to the authors of those outstanding papers determined by the International Program Committee of the conference and also the expanded version of the selected papers will be published in four SCI-E indexed IET Research Journals.

IMPORTANT DATES

2 The Submission Deadline       March 25, 2014

2 Notification of Acceptance     May 10, 2014

2 Camera-ready Copy                 May 30, 2014

Topics

Conference topics include, but are not limited to:

A.  Audio and Music Processing:  

• Compression and Coding, 3D and Surround Sounds, Digital Rights and Watermarking
• Music Information Retrieval, Internet Audio, Audio Beam Loudspeaker, Hearing Aids
• Echo Cancellation, Noise Reduction, Beamforming, Audio Gesture System, Binaural Hearing
• Crosstalk Cancellation, Voice Processing in Cochlear Implants

B. Language and Speech Processing:

• Language Acquisition and Reproduction, Human Language Understanding and Learning
• Machine Translation, Speech Recognition and Understanding
• Speech Enhancement, Spoken Document Retrieval

C.  Image Processing:  

• Image Coding, Image Filtering and Enhancement, Image Segmentation and Understanding
• Image Representation and Modeling, Feature Extraction and Analysis
• Image Storage and Retrieval, Image Authentication and Watermarking, DSP/FPGA Implementations

D.  Computer Graphic and Virtual Reality:

• Computational Geometry, Modeling, Rendering, Visualization
• Animation and Simulation, Interactive Environments, Immersive Virtual Reality
•  Virtual environments, Applications of Virtual Reality

E. Bio-informatics:

• Biomedical Image Processing & Visualization, Bio-signal Processing and Analysis
• Biomedical Engineering, Medical and Biomedical Applications
• Health Monitoring Systems, Health Informatics

F.  Remote Sensing and GIS:

• Mobile and Wireless GIS, Geospatial Information Visualization and Service
• Multi-dimensional GIS (3D GIS), Indoor and Outdoor Location
• Remote Sensing Image Preprocessing, Multisensor and Multisource Data Fusion
• GPS Technology, Remote Sensing and GIS Application

G.  Multimedia SOC Design:

• Reconfigurable Processor for Multimedia, Multimedia system-on-a-chip
• Multi-core Technology for Multimedia Processing, GPU-based Multimedia Processing
• Novel Architecture for Multimedia Computing

H.  Big Data and Cloud Processing:

• Big Data Acquisition and Preprocessing, Big Data Storage and Cloud Storage and Management
• Modeling Technology and System for Big Date and Cloud, Big Data Analysis
• Big Data Intelligent Computing,  Big Data Mining, Big Data Visualization, Big Data and Cloud Applications

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to send full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the conference website (http://www.icalip2014.org/) following the Instructions for Authors. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Check the conference website for update.

Back

Top

Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014

Organisé par l’

Institut de Linguistique Française (CNRS – FR 2393)

du 19 au 23 juillet 2014,

à l’Université Libre de Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin)

APPEL A COMMUNICATIONS

Dates

: 19 au 23 juillet 2014

Lieu

: Université Libre de Berlin

Site web

: http://www.ilf.cnrs.fr/, rubrique Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française

Contact

: cmlf2014@ling.cnrs.fr

Intérêt scientifique

Le quatrième Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française est organisé par l’Institut de

Linguistique Française (ILF), Fédération de Recherche du CNRS (FR 2393) qui est sous la

tutelle de cet organisme et du Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche.

L’ILF regroupe dix-sept laboratoires de recherche, qui sont les co-organisateurs de ce

congrès en partenariat avec de nombreuses associations nationales et internationales. Une

telle organisation, conjointement prise en charge par dix-sept unités de recherche, est

exceptionnelle par son ampleur et la volonté de partenariat scientifique qu’elle révèle.

Le premier Congrès Mondial a été organisé à Paris par l’ILF en 2008, le deuxième à La

Nouvelle-Orléans, le troisième à Lyon en 2012. Chacun de ces trois congrès a attiré plus de

300 participants et les résultats ont fait l’objet d’une publication en ligne immédiate

accompagnée par un volume de résumés et un CD-ROM d’actes.

Ce congrès est organisé sans aucun privilège d'école ou d'orientation et sans exclusive

théorique ou conceptuelle. Chaque domaine ou sous-domaine, chaque type d'objet, chaque

type de questionnement et chaque problématique portant sur le français peut y trouver sa

place.

Le CMLF est organisé en 15 sessions, lesquelles soulignent le fait que la linguistique

française n’est pas limitée à tel ou tel domaine érigé en modèle pour les autres sousdisciplines

du champ. Quatorze thématiques ont été retenues, qui permettent de balayer la

plus grande partie du champ scientifique : (1) Histoire du français : perspectives

diachronique et synchronique, (2) Linguistique et Didactique (français langue première,

français langue seconde), (3) Discours, Pragmatique et Interaction, (4) Francophonie, (5)

Histoire, Épistémologie, Réflexivité, (6) Lexique(s), (7) Linguistique de l’écrit, Linguistique

du texte, Sémiotique, Stylistique, (8) Morphologie, (9) Phonétique, Phonologie et

Interfaces, (10) Psycholinguistique et Acquisition, (11) Sémantique, (12)

Sociolinguistique, Dialectologies et Écologie des langues, (13) Syntaxe, (14) Ressources

et Outils pour l’analyse linguistique. A ces quatorze thématiques a été ajoutée une quinzième

session « pluri-thématique », laissant ouverte la possibilité de travailler dans plusieurs

domaines, voire en marge des territoires disciplinaires traditionnels.

Chaque thématique est pilotée par un Président et coordonnée par un Vice-président

(membre du Comité directeur de l’ILF, ou bien choisi par ce comité). Les comités

scientifiques comportent une proportion équilibrée de spécialistes français et étrangers. Un

soin particulier a été accordé à la sélection des comités afin de s’assurer qu’ils présenteraient

les plus grandes garanties scientifiques pour le succès du congrès. On trouve donc dans

chaque comité des linguistes connu(e)s mondialement pour leur contribution au domaine. Le

rôle de ces comités est de sélectionner les propositions de communications.

Les soumissions se feront sous la forme de brefs articles de 10 à 15 pages.

Toutes les communications (y compris les conférences plénières) seront publiées sous la

forme d'un article de 10 à 15 pages dans les actes du congrès (sous forme de CD-ROM

accompagnant un livret des titres et des résumés des communications) et maintenues sous

forme électronique sur le site du CMLF. L'archive électronique restera accessible après le

congrès.

Rappel du calendrier

•

15 mai 2013 : Ouverture de la plateforme de dépôt des propositions de communications

•

30 novembre 2013 : Date limite de réception des propositions de communication

•

25 février 2014 : Notification de l'acceptation ou du refus et directives pour la version

définitive

•

25 mars 2014 : Réception de la version définitive des articles

•

Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française : du 19 au 23 juillet 2014

Back

Top

The 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 14) will be held from 25 to 27 July at the National Institute for Japanese Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan. For more details, see its official website, which is now open: http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/labphon14/

Back

Top

Summer school on “Tools & Techniques in Geolinguistics”

Dealing with methods and techniques in geolinguistics, an international summer school will take place at the University of Kiel (Germany) 17-27 August 2014. In this new and interdisciplinary research paradigm, regional varieties will be analysed with respect to their linguistic, geographical, social, perceptual and spatial characteristics. With its many Low German dialects and the endangered Frisian language, Northern Germany is a very dynamic language area right on Kiel’s doorstep, and the summer school will take advantage of this. In the case of Low German, students will learn how to collect speech data in the laboratory and in the field, how to compile a text corpus and how to analyse the material multifactorially from a geolinguistic perspective.

The summer school does not only address students and graduates of (German) dialectology and geolinguistics but also provides new insights for everyone interested in speech documentation, field research, phonetics, corpus linguistics, perceptual dialectology, sociolinguistics and typology. International experts in dialectology and geolinguistics will offer a wide range of lectures, interactive workshops and practical exercises. Additionally, participants will be supported by student mentors.

The summer school is addressed to about 50 national and international students. Applicants will be postgraduates holding a bachelor degree (or higher) in linguistics, phonetics, language documentation/typology, German studies or a similar field. Please send the following documents (preferably in pdf format) by email to contact@geoling.uni-kiel.de

- relevant academic achievements, i.e. certificates and complementary proofs of qualification

- curriculum vitae, including experiences in statistics and speech processing software

- letter of motivation briefly summarizing the linguistic expertise and outlining personal research interests and future aims

- recommendation letter of a supervising academic teacher

We offer up to 30 full scholarships that cover all costs for travel and accommodation. Please note in your application whether or not you apply for a scholarship. If possible, all successful applicants from outside Kiel will receive a scholarship. The expenses will be reimbursed after the summer school, but other financial arrangements can be made as well, if necessary.

Applications should be sent by email to contact@geoling.uni-kiel.de by 28 February 2014. For further information, please visit our web site on http://www.geoling.uni-kiel.de/en/home

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the summer school is organised by Prof Dr Oliver Niebuhr, Dr Christina A Anders as well as Dr Uwe Vosberg and hosted by the Institute for Scandinavian studies, Frisian and General Linguistics along with a research centre on “The areality and sociality of language” (http://www.arealitaet.uni-kiel.de) at the University of Kiel.

Back

Top

Invited speaker: Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome)

For more information, see : http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html
(Beware though that this page is still under construction)

==============================================================
GOAL

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers involved in the construction and application of electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications of existing resources in line with the users' needs, thereby fully exploiting the advantages of the digital form. Given the breadth of the questions, we welcome reports on work from many perspectives, including but not limited to: computational lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, language learning and ergonomics.


MOTIVATION

The way we look at dictionaries (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. While being considered as an appendix to grammar in the past, by now they have moved to centre stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without them. Also, rather than being static entities (data-base view), dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, i.e. graphs, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines (society, economy, human brain) also apply to dictionaries: everything is linked, hence accessible, and everything is evolving. Given these similarities, one may wonder what we can learn from these disciplines.

In this 4th edition of the CogALex workshop we therefore also invite scientists working in these fields, with the goal to broaden the picture, i.e. to gain a better understanding concerning the mental lexicon and to integrate these findings into our dictionaries in order to support navigation. Given recent advances in neurosciences, it appears timely to seek inspiration from neuroscientists studying the human brain. There is also a lot to be learned from other fields studying graphs and networks, even if their object of study is something else than language, for example biology, economy or society.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and electronic dictionaries. To perform the groundwork for the next generation of such resources we invite researchers involved in the building of such tools. The idea is to discuss modifications of existing resources by taking the users’ needs and knowledge states into account, and to capitalize on the advantages of the digital media. For this workshop we solicit papers including but not limited to the following topics, each of which can be considered from various points of view: linguistics, neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip of the tongue problem, associations), network related sciences (sociology, economy, biology), mathematics (vector-based approaches, graph theory, small-world problem), etc.


1) Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

• What does a language producer start from (bag of words)?
• What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and looking for a word?
• What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the desired output (target word)?

2) The meaning of words

• Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
• Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
• Revelation of hidden information (distributional semantics, latent semantics, vector-based approaches: LSA/HAL)
• Neural models, neurosemantics, neurocomputational theories of content representation.

3) Structure of the lexicon

• Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of view (clustering, topical structure)
• Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations (reading between the lines, subliminal communication);
• Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
• Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information concerning words, organisation of words)

4) Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

• Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and indexes (crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.)
• Impact and use of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) for building dictionaries, for organizing and indexing the data (clustering of words), and for allowing to track navigational strategies, etc.
• (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym, hypernym, meronym, association, collocation, ...)
• Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to words, their uses, combinations and associations

5) Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies, interface issues,...)

• Search based on sound, meaning or associations
• Search (simple query vs multiple words)
• Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
• Recovery
• Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used by people)
• Interface problems, data-visualisation

6) Dictionary applications

• Methods supporting vocabulary learning (for example, creation of data-bases showing words in various contexts)
• Tools for supporting Human translation

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for paper submissions: May 25, 2014
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2014
Camera-ready papers due: July 7, 2014
Workshop date: August 23, 2014


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers should follow the COLING main conference formatting details (http://www.coling-2014.org/call-for-papers.php) and should be submitted as a PDF-file via the START workshop manager at https://www.softconf.com/coling2014/WS-1/ (you must register first). 

Contributions can be short or long papers. Short paper submission must describe original and unpublished work without exceeding six (6) pages (references included). Characteristics of short papers include: a small, focused contribution; work in progress; a negative result; a piece of opinion; an interesting application nugget. Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work without exceeding twelve (12) pages (references included).

Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

For further details see: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html

SHARED TASK

We invite participation in a shared task devoted to the problem of lexical access in language production, with the aim of providing a quantitative comparison between different systems.

Motivation of shared task

The quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on the accessibility of the information. That is, a crucial point is dictionary access. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the very moment of consultation (words, concepts, speech sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

To bring some structure into this multitude of possibilities, the shared task will concentrate on a crucial subtask, namely multiword association.  we will organize a novel type of shared task which will allow quantitative comparisons between different systems. The task chosen is multiword association.

What we mean by this in the context of this workshop is the following. Suppose, we were looking for a word expressing the following ideas: ísuperior dark coffee made of beans from Arabiaí, but could not remember the intended word mocha. Since people always remember something concerning the elusive word, it would be nice to have a system accepting this kind of input, to propose then a number of candidates for the target word. Given the above example, we might enter dark, coffee, beans, and Arabia, and the system would be supposed to come up with lists of associated words such as mocha, espresso, or cappuccino.


Procedure

The participants will receive lists of five given words (primes) such as 'circus', 'funny', 'nose', 'fool', and 'fun' and are supposed to compute the word which is most closely associated to all of them. In this case, the word 'clown' would be the expected answer. Here are some more examples:

We will provide a training set of 2000 sets of five input words (multiword stimuli), together with the expected target words (associative response). The participants will have several weeks to train their systems on this data. After the the training phase, we will release a test set containing another 2000 sets of five input words, but without providing the expected target words.

Participants will have five days to run their systems on the test data, thereby predicting the target words. For each system, we will compare the results to the expected target words and compute an accuracy. The participants will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach and the results.

For the participating systems, we will distinguish two categories: (1) Unrestricted systems. They can use any kind of data to compute their results. (2) Restricted systems: These systems are only allowed to draw on the freely available ukWaC corpus (comprising 2 billion words) in order to extract information on word associations. Participants are allowed to compete in either category or in both.


Schedule for Shared Task

• Training Data Release:  March 25, 2014
• Test Data Release:  May 5, 2014
• Final Results:  May 9, 2014
• Deadline for Paper Submission:  May 25, 2014
• Reviewers' feedback:  June, 15, 2014
• Camera-Ready Version:  July 7, 2014
• Workshop date:  August 23, 2014

All data releases to be found on the workshop website.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

• Bel Enguix, Gemma(LIF-CNRS, France) and (GRLMC, Tarragona, Spain)
• Chang, Jason(National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
• Cook, Paul(University of Melbourne, Australia)
• Cristea, Dan(University A.I.Cuza, Iasi, Romania)
• De Deyne, Simon(Experimental Psychology, Leuven, Belgium) and (Adelaide, Australia)
• De Melo, Gerard(IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
• Ferret, Olivier(CEA LIST, Gif sur Yvette, France)
• Fontenelle, Thierry(CDT, Luxemburg)
• Gala, Nuria(LIF-CNRS, Aix Marseille University, Marseille, France)
• Granger, Sylviane(Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Grefenstette, Gregory (Inria, Saclay, France)
• Hirst, Graeme(University of Toronto, Canada)
• Hovy, Eduard(CMU, Pittsburgh, USA)
• Hsieh, Shu-Kai(National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan)
• Huang, Chu-Ren(Hongkong Polytechnic University, China)
• Joyce, Terry(Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)
• Lapalme, Guy(RALI, University of Montreal, Canada)
• Lenci, Alessandro(CNR, university of Pisa, Italy)
• L'Homme, Marie Claude(University of Montreal, Canada)
• Mihalcea, Rada(University of Texas, USA)
• Navigli, Roberto(Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy)
• Pirrelli, Vito(ILC, Pisa, Italy)
• Polguère, Alain(ATILF-CNRS, Nancy, France)
• Rapp, Reinhard(LIF-CNRS, France) and (Mainz, Germany)
• Rosso, Paolo(NLEL, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
• Schwab, Didier(LIG-GETALP, Grenoble, France)
• Serasset, Gilles(IMAG, Grenoble, France)
• Sharoff, Serge(University of Leeds, UK)
• Su, Jun-Ming(University of Tainan, Taiwan)
• Tiberius, Carole(Institute for Dutch Lexicology, The Netherlands)
• Tokunaga, Takenobu(TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)
• Tufis, Dan(RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
• Valitutti, Alessandro(Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Finland)
• Wandmacher, Tonio(IRT SystemX, Saclay, France)
• Zock, Michael(LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), currently (University of Tainan, Taiwan)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS and CONTACT PERSONS

• Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
• Reinhard Rapp (University of Aix Marseille (France) and Mainz (Germany), reinhardrapp AT gmx.de
• Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong), churen.huang AT inet.polyu.edu.hk

For more details see:

http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html
(again, this page is still under construction)

Back

Top

org

Back

Top

In the framework of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex) to be held at COLING 2014, we invite participation in a shared task devoted to the problem of lexical access in language production, with the aim of providing a quantitative comparison between different systems.

 
MOTIVATION

The quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on the accessibility of the information. That is a crucial point is dictionary access. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the very moment of consultation (words, concepts, speech sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

To bring some structure into this multitude of possibilities, the shared task will concentrate on a crucial subtask, namely multiword association.  What we mean by this in the context of this workshop is the following. Suppose, we were looking for a word expressing the following ideas: 'superior dark coffee made of beans from Arabia', but could not remember the intended word 'mocha' due to the tip-of-the-tongue problem. Since people always remember something concerning the elusive word, it would be nice to have a system accepting this kind of input, to propose then a number of candidates for the target word. Given the above example, we might enter 'dark', 'coffee', 'beans', and 'Arabia', and the system would be supposed to come up with one or several associated words such as 'mocha', 'espresso', or 'cappuccino'.

 
TASK DEFINITION

The participants will receive lists of five given words (primes) such as 'circus', 'funny', 'nose', 'fool', and 'fun' and are supposed to compute the word which is most closely associated to all of them. In this case, the word 'clown' would be the expected response. Here are some more examples:

   given words:  gin, drink, scotch, bottle, soda
   target word:  whisky

   given words:  wheel, driver, bus, drive, lorry
   target word:  car

   given words:  neck, animal, zoo, long, tall
   target word:  giraffe

   given words:  holiday, work, sun, summer, abroad
   target word:  vacation

   given words:  home, garden, door, boat, chimney
   target word:  house

   given words:  blue, cloud, stars, night, high
   target word:  sky

We will provide a training set of 2000 sets of five input words (multiword stimuli), together with the expected target words (associative responses). The participants will have about five weeks to train their systems on this data. After the training phase, we will release a test set containing another 2000 sets of five input words, but without providing the expected target words.

Participants will have five days to run their systems on the test data, thereby predicting the target words. For each system, we will compare the results to the expected target words and compute an accuracy. The participants will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach and their results.

For the participating systems, we will distinguish two categories:

(1) Unrestricted systems. They can use any kind of data to compute their results.
(2) Restricted systems: These systems are only allowed to draw on the freely available ukWaC corpus in order to extract information on word associations. The ukWaC corpus comprises about 2 billion words and is can be downloaded from http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=corpora.

Participants are allowed to compete in either category or in both.


VENUE

The shared task will take place as part of the CogALex workshop which is co-located with COLING 2014 (Dublin). The workshop date is August 23, 2014. Shared task participants who wish to have a paper published in the workshop proceedings will be required to present their work at the workshop.
 

SHARED TASK SCHEDULE

Training data release:  March 27, 2014
Test data release:  May 5, 2014
Final results due:  May 9, 2014
Deadline for paper submission: May 25, 2014 
Reviewers' feedback:  June, 15, 2014
Camera-ready version:  July 7, 2014
Workshop date:  August 23, 2014


FURTHER INFORMATION

CogALex workshop website: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html
Data releases: To be found on the above workshop website from the dates given in the schedule.
Registration for the shared task: Send e-mail to Michael Zock, with Reinhard Rapp in copy.


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
Reinhard Rapp (University of Aix Marseille (France) and Mainz (Germany), reinhardrapp AT gmx.de
Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong), churen.huang AT inet.polyu.edu.hk

Back

Top

The 22nd European Signal Processing Conference  September 1 – 5, 2014, Lisbon, Portugal http://www.eusipco2014.org/ ============================================================== Deadline for the submission of Full Papers: FEBRUARY 17, 2014 ============================================================== EUSIPCO 2014 will be held on September 1- 5, 2014, in Lisbon, Portugal. This is one of the largest international conferences in the field of signal processing and will address all the latest developments in research and technology. The conference will bring together individuals from academia, industry, regulation bodies, and government, to exchange and discuss ideas in all the areas and applications of signal processing. EUSIPCO 2014 will feature world-class keynote speakers, special sessions, plenary talks, tutorials, and technical sessions. We invite the submission of original, unpublished technical papers on signal processing topics, including but not limited to: • Audio and acoustic signal processing • Design and implementation of signal processing systems • Multimedia signal processing • Speech processing • Image and video processing • Machine learning • Signal estimation and detection • Sensor array and multichannel signal processing • Signal processing for communications including wireless and optical communications and networking • Signal processing for location, positioning and navigation • Nonlinear signal processing • Signal processing applications including health and biosciences Submitted papers must be camera-ready and no more than five pages long, and conforming to the format that will soon be specified on the EUSIPCO website (http://www.eusipco2014.org/ ). ============================================================== Best Paper Awards ============================================================== Two “EUSIPCO best young author paper awards” will be given at the dinner banquet of EUSIPCO 2014 to the two best papers from authors under the age of 30. ============================================================== Important Dates ============================================================== Proposal for special sessions: December 9, 2013 Proposal for tutorials: February 17, 2014 Electronic submission of full papers: February 17, 2014 Notification of acceptance: May 26, 2014 Submission of camera-ready papers and copyright forms: June 23, 2014 _______________________________________________

Back

Top

Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology 7 (LARP VII)
   

Aix-en-Provence, France
Sept. 3-5, 2014

The biannual conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology
(LARP) seeks to bring together international researchers interested in all
areas of Romance phonetics and phonology, in particular within the
 laboratory phonology approach. In the past decades, research in the
 laboratory phonology paradigm has expanded significantly so that the
 disciplines of phonetics and phonology are being investigated from a unique
 interdisciplinary angle. LARP aims at providing an interdisciplinary forum
 for world-wide research focusing on the experimental investigation
 of
 Romance phonetics and phonology and their related areas, such as language
 acquisition, language variation and change, prosody, speech pathology,
 speech technology, as well as the phonology-phonetics interface.
 LARP VII will be hosted for the first time in Europe, by the Laboratoire
 Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence, and will be the result of a joint
 effort between Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en-Provence, France) and the
 Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain).

 Meeting Dates:
 Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology VII will be held from
 03-Sept-2014 to 05-Sept-2014.

 Contact Information:
 Mariapaola D'Imperio: larp7conference@gmail.com
 
Organizers:
 Mariapaola D'Imperio (Aix-Marseille University & LPL,CNRS)
 Pilar Prieto (ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

 Conference webpage:
 http://larp7.sciencesconf.org/

 Abstract Submission Information:

Abstracts can be submitted from 15-Dec-2013 until 15-April-2014. 
 Invited speakers
 Laura Bosch, Univ. Barcelona
 Martine Grice, Univ. Koeln, Germany
 Thierry Nazzi, CNRS, Paris
 Daniel Recasens, Univ. Autonoma, Barcelona

Back

Top

Welcome to ISCSLP 2014

第九届中文口语语言处理国际会议

http://www.iscslp2014.org

The 9th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP 2014) will be held on September 12-14, 2014 in Singapore.

ISCSLP 2014 is a joint conference between ISCA Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing and National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication of China.

ISCSLP is a biennial conference for scientists, researchers, and practitioners to report and discuss the latest progress in all theoretical and technological aspects of spoken language processing.

While the ISCSLP is focused primarily on Chinese languages, works on other languages that may be applied to Chinese speech and language are also encouraged. The working language of ISCSLP is English.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Speech Production and Perception

2. Speech Analysis

3. Speech Coding

4. Speech Enhancement

5. Hearing Aids and Cochlear Implant

6. Phonetics and Phonology

7. Corpus-based Linguistics

8. Speech and Language Disorders

9. Speech Recognition

10. Spoken Language Translation

11. Speaker, Language, and Emotion Recognition

12. Speech Synthesis

13. Language Modeling

14. Speech Prosody

15. Spoken Dialog Systems

16. Machine Learning Techniques in Speech and Language Processing

17. Voice Conversion

18. Indexing, Retrieval and Authoring of Speech Signals

19. Multi-Modal Interfaces

20. Speech and Language Processing in Education

21. Spoken Language Resources and Technology Evaluation

22. Applications of Spoken Language Processing Technology

23. Others

Important Dates

Back

Top

SPECOM 2014 - CALL FOR PAPERS

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

16th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2014)

Venue: Novi Sad, Serbia, 5-9 October 2014

Web: www.specom.nw.ru

SPECOM NEWS

SPECOM this year is organized in parallel with DOGS (The Tenth Conference on Digital Speech and Image Processing) in the same time at the same place. Participants will be able to attend both conferences.

ORGANIZERS

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad (UNS, Novi Sad, Serbia), in cooperation with Moscow State Linguistic University (MGLU, Moscow, Russia) and St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Science (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia).

SPECOM conferences

The SPECOM conferences are long time being organised by SPIIRAS (St.Petersburg) and MGLU (Moscow). Recently SPECOM venue is significantly varied: Patras, Greece, 2005; Kazan, Russia, 2011; Plzen, Czech Republic, 2013.

The last conference was organized in parallel with TSD'2013 (The 16th International Conference of Text, Speech and Dialogue) and had a great success and benefits of joining the various research teams. Continue this tradition SPECOM'2014 and DOGS'2014 will be organized jointly. The both conferences are devoted to issues of human-machine interaction and their topics harmonically add each other.

Since 2013 due to extending contribution of University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic the SPECOM proceedings are published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. 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):

Signal processing and feature extraction

Speech enhancement

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

Speech translation

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.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

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

Social events including a trip to the Krusedol monastery and wine makers on Fruska Gora will allow for 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 SPECOM 2014 must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

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

The paper format for the review has to be the PDF 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).

IMPORTANT DATES

May 18, 2014 ............. Submission of full papers

June 1, 2014 ............. Notification of acceptance

June 15, 2014 ............ Final papers (camera ready) and registration

October 5-9, 2014 ........ Conference dates

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. 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 15, 2013 – RSD 40000 (approx. 350 EUR)

late registration by September 1, 2013 – RSD 43000 (approx. 380 EUR)

on-site registration – RSD 50000 (approx. 440 EUR)

Student (reduced):

early registration by June 15, 2013 – RSD 32000 (approx. 280 EUR)

late registration by September 1, 2013 – RSD 35000 (approx. 310 EUR)

on-site registration – RSD 40000 (approx. 350 EUR)

The payment may be refunded up until September 15, at the cost of RSD 6.500. No refund is possible after this date. All costs are in Serbian Dinar (RSD), 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 15, 2014 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 RSD 5000 per page. Any additional paper is treated as extra pages. An extra page charge is RSD 5000 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.

VENUE

The conference will be organized in Hotel Park, Novi Sad, Serbia (http://hotelparkns.com).

Novi Sad is the second largest city in Serbia. The city has population of 231,798 inhabitants. It is located in the southern part of Pannonian Plain, on the border of the Bačka and Srem regions, on the banks of the Danube river and Danube-Tisa-Danube Canal, facing the northern slopes of Fruška Gora mountain. The city was founded in 1694, when Serb merchants formed a colony across the Danube from the Petrovaradin fortress, a Habsburg strategic military post. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it became an important trading and manufacturing centre, as well as a centre of Serbian culture of that period, earning the nickname Serbian Athens. Today, Novi Sad is an industrial and financial centre of the Serbian economy, as well as a major cultural center.

The University of Novi Sad was founded on 28 June 1960. Today it comprises 14 faculties located in the four major towns of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina: Novi Sad, Subotica, Zrenjanin, and Sombor. The University of Novi Sad is now the second largest among six state universities in Serbia. The main University Campus, covering an area of 259,807m², provides the University of Novi Sad with a unique and beautiful setting in the region and the city of Novi Sad. Having invested considerable efforts in intensifying international cooperation and participating in the process of university reforms in Europe, the University of Novi Sad has come to be recognized as a reform-oriented university in the region and on the map of universities in Europe.

The Faculty of Technical Sciences (Fakultet Tehničkih Nauka, FTN, www.ftn.uns.ac.rs) with 1,200 employees and more than 12,000 students is the largest faculty at UNS. FTN offers engineering education within 71 study programmes. As a research and scientific institution, FTN has 13 departments and 31 research centres. FTN also publishes 4 international journals and organises 16 scientific conferences on various aspects of engineering, including the conference DOGS which is dedicated to the area of speech technologies where FTN has the leading position in the Western Balkan region.

ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee has arranged accommodation for reasonable prices in the same Hotel Park, which is situated near the city center. The rooms with sufficient discount are reserved for the conference days.

ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

SPECOM Secretariat

E-mail: specom@iias.spb.su

Phone/Fax: +7 812 328 7081

Fax: +7 812 328 4450 — Please, designate the faxed material with capitals 'SPECOM' on top.

SPECOM-2014 conference web site: www.specom.nw.ru

Back

Top

2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

PROCESSING

SLSP 2014

Grenoble, France

October 14-16,

2014

Organised by:

Équipe GETALP

Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/slsp2014/

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

AIMS:

SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent 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 and workshops hosting contributions to any of

these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and

people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2014, significant room will be reserved to young

scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.