ODYSSEY 2014: THE SPEAKER AND LANGUAGE RECOGNITION WORKSHOP 
June 16-19, 2014, Joensuu, Finland 
 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 
https://www.facebook.com/SpeakerOdyssey2014 
 
Registration now opened: 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/registration/ 
 
Early-bird deadline: April 30 
Late-bird deadline:  May 31 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
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 
 

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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                  

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   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 

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 

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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.

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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

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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/

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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.

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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)

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org

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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

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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 _______________________________________________

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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

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 56th International Symposium ELMAR-2014 

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

September 10-12, 2014 Zadar, Croatia

 Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2014 

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

CALL FOR PAPERS TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS IEEE Region 8 

IEEE Croatia Section 

IEEE Croatia Section SP, 

AP and MTT Chapters 

EURASIP - 

European Association for Signal Processing 

TOPICS

 --> Image and Video Processing 

--> Multimedia Communications

 --> Speech and Audio Processing 

--> Wireless Communications 

--> Telecommunications

 --> Antennas and Propagation

 --> e-Learning and m-Learning 

--> Navigation Systems 

--> Ship Electronic Systems 

--> Power Electronics and Automation 

--> Naval Architecture

 --> Sea Ecology 

--> Special Sessions: http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2014/special_sessions/ 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER 

Prof. Milo Oravec, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, SLOVAKIA: 

Feature Extraction and Classification by Machine Learning Methods for Biometric Recognition 

of Face and Iris

 SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES 

Deadline for submission of full papers: May 15, 2014 

Notification of acceptance mailed out by: June 3, 2014 

Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: June 10, 2014 

Preliminary program available online by: June 17, 2014 

Registration forms and payment deadline: June 17, 2014 

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SLAM2014 Call for Paper
=========================

2nd Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM 2014)Penang, Malaysia
http://language.cs.usm.my/SLAM2014/
11-12 September, 2014
Following the first successful edition of the Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM) in Marseille, France last year, we will be bringing the next edition of the workshop to Penang, Malaysia! SLAM workshop aims at bringing together researchers working in speech, language and audio processing to analyze, index and access multimedia data. Multimedia data are now available in very large amounts: Lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast, podcasts, social videos on the Web, etc. Such data, along with the associated use scenarios, raise specific challenges: Robustness facing the high variability in quality; Efficiency to handle very large amount of data; Semantics shared across modalities; Potentially high error rates in transcription; etc. Worldwide, several national and international research projects are focusing on audio analysis of multimedia data. Similarly, various benchmark initiatives have been initiated such as TRECVID MED, Me!
diaEval, or ETAPE and REPERE in France.

SLAM 2014 is organized in conjunction with Interspeech 2014 over one and a half days, starting Thursday 11 September 2014 and ending Friday 12 September 2014. Penang is conveniently connected by bus, train and flight to Singapore, where the Interspeech 2014 conference will take place. The format of the workshop will include an invited talk, oral presentations of scientific work and a poster session for project and benchmark presentations. SLAM 2014 Workshop is jointly organized by the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia and the IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing in Multimedia. The proceeding will be published by ISCA and available online at ISCA Online Archive. Best papers selected will be able to extend their paper to be submitted to special issue in a dedicated journal that we will announce later.


SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Chng Eng Siong, Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
Eric Castelli, Hanoi University of Science and Technology - Vietnam
Fernando Fernández-Martínez, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid - Spain
Florian Metze, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh - USA
Frédéric Bechet, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille - France
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Dublin - Ireland
Gerald Friedland, University of California, Berkeley - USA
Guillaume Gravier, Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires (IRISA), Rennes - France
Juan Manuel Montero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Laurent Besacier, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble - France
Lin-Shan Lee, Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
Luis Fernando D’Haro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, Delft - Netherlands
Ricardo de Córdoba, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Roberto Barra-Chicote, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Rubén San-Segundo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo - Japan
Tang Enya Kong, Linton University College, Negeri Sembilan - Malaysia
Xavier Anguera, Telefónica Research, Barcelona - Spain

Two distinguished professors will be giving keynotes presentations during the workshop, they are Prof. Shrikanth S. Narayanan and Assoc. Prof. Min-Yen Kan

IMPORTANT DATES:
Full paper submission deadline 20th June 2014 (extended deadline)
Notification of acceptance 16th July 2014
Camera ready paper 31st July 2014
SLAM workshop 11-12th September 2014
Interspeech conference 14-18th September 2014

Independently of the scientific actions we will provide tour around George Town, Penang, which is a Unesco World Heritage Historical City.  

Jointly Organised by:
Universiti Sains Malaysia, SLAM Organising Committee, Interspeech 2014, ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia, IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing in Multimedia

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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

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                    Call for Papers
--------------------------------------------------------------
8th Workshop:
     'emotion and computing  - 
            current research and future impact'

WORKSHOP at the KI 2014
Stuttgart, September 22nd, 2014

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

The workshop series Òemotion and computing Ð current research and future impactÓ has been
providing a platform for discussion of emotion related topics of computer science and AI since
2006. In recent years computer science research has shown increasing efforts in the field of
software agents which incorporate emotion. Several approaches have been made concerning
emotion recognition, emotion modelling, generation of emotional user interfaces and dialogue
systems as well as anthropomorphic communication agents. Motivations for emotional
computing are manifold. From a scientific point of view, emotions play an essential role in
decision making, as well as in perception and learning. Furthermore, emotions influence rational
thinking and therefore should be part of rational agents as proposed by artificial intelligence
research. Another focus is on human computer interfaces which include believable animations of
interface agents. From a user perspective, emotional interfaces can significantly increase
motivation and engagement which is of high relevance to the games and e-learning industry.
Moreover, motivational and emotional aspects may play a key role in persuasive technologies,
which intend to influence the user behaviour.

Contributions are solicited from the following fields:
 
-Artificial Intelligence Research
-Cognitive Sciences and Cognitive Robotics
-Multi-agent System Technology
-Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition
-Dialogue Systems and Communication
-Modeling Uncertainty and Vagueness
-Computer Game Development
-User Modeling and Personalization
-Applications using models of emotion
-Persuasive Computing/Technologies
-Affective Computing
        
Contributions are expected in the following form:

- Presentations should have a duration of 15-20 minutes. Each 
  presenter is required to submit a short paper on the presented
  topic. Papers are subject to regular peer review and subsequent
  publication within the workshop proceedings (4-8 pages).

- Demonstrations are documented by an extended abstract which
  should not exceed 1 page in total

- Workshop submission is electronic. Submitted papers
  should conform Springer LNCS style and must
  be written in English. Papers will be published on the
  workshop website. Further publication is in discussion
  and depends on submitted papers.

Important Dates:

Workshop paper submission deadline:          July 4th, 2014
Notification of workshop paper acceptance:   July 18th, 2014
Workshop camera ready copy submission:       August 1st, 2014

Organization and Scientific Committee:

Prof. Dr. Dirk Reichardt, Baden-WŸrttemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart (main contact)
Dr. Joscha Bach, MIT
Dr. Christian Becker-Asano, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Dr. Hana Boukricha,University of Bielefeld
Dr. Patrick Gebhard, DFKI SaarbrŸcken
Prof. Dr. Michael Kipp, Hochschule Augsburg
Prof. Dr. Paul Levi, University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr. John-Jules Charles Meyer, University of Utrecht
Dr. Gštz Renner, Daimler AG, Customer Research Center
Prof. Dr. Michael M. Richter, University of Calgary
Dr.-Ing. Bjšrn Schuller, Imperial College London / TU MŸnchen
Prof. Dr. David SŸndermann, DHBW Stuttgart

Please refer to the workshop website for further information:

Workshop Website:       http://www.emotion-and-computing.de
Email:                  mailto://info@emotion-and-computing.de

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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

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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.

VENUE:

SLSP 2014 will take place in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps.

SCOPE:

The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical methods

(including machine learning) within language and speech processing. The list below is

indicative and not exhaustive:

phonology, morphology

syntax, semantics

discourse, dialogue, pragmatics

statistical models for natural language processing

supervised, unsupervised and semi‐supervised machine learning methods applied to

natural language, including speech

statistical methods, including biologically‐inspired methods

similarity

alignment

language resources

part‐of‐speech tagging

parsing

semantic role labelling

natural language generation

anaphora and coreference resolution

speech recognition

speaker identification/verification

speech transcription

text‐to‐speech synthesis

machine translation

translation technology

text summarisation

information retrieval

text categorisation

information extraction

term extraction

spelling correction

text and web mining

opinion mining and sentiment analysis

spoken dialogue systems

author identification, plagiarism and spam filtering

STRUCTURE:

SLSP 2014 will consist of:

invited talks

invited tutorials

peer‐reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

to be announced

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Sophia Ananiadou (Manchester, UK)

Srinivas Bangalore (Florham Park, US)

Patrick Blackburn (Roskilde, DK)

Hervé Bourlard (Martigny, CH)

Bill Byrne (Cambridge, UK)

Nick Campbell (Dublin, IE)

David Chiang (Marina del Rey, US)

Kenneth W. Church (Yorktown Heights, US)

Walter Daelemans (Antwerpen, BE)

Thierry Dutoit (Mons, BE)

Alexander Gelbukh (Mexico City, MX)

Ralph Grishman (New York, US)

Sanda Harabagiu (Dallas, US)

Xiaodong He (Redmond, US)

Hynek Hermansky (Baltimore, US)

Hitoshi Isahara (Toyohashi, JP)

Lori Lamel (Orsay, FR)

Gary Geunbae Lee (Pohang, KR)

Haizhou Li (Singapore, SG)

Daniel Marcu (Los Angeles, US)

Carlos Martín‐Vide (Tarragona, ES, chair)

Manuel Montes‐y‐Gómez (Puebla, MX)

Satoshi Nakamura (Nara, JP)

Shrikanth S. Narayanan (Los Angeles, US)

Vincent Ng (Dallas, US)

Joakim Nivre (Uppsala, SE)

Elmar Nöth (Erlangen, DE)

Maurizio Omologo (Trento, IT)

Barbara H. Partee (Amherst, US)

Gerald Penn (Toronto, CA)

Massimo Poesio (Colchester, UK)

James Pustejovsky (Waltham, US)

Gaël Richard (Paris, FR)

German Rigau (San Sebastián, ES)

Paolo Rosso (Valencia, ES)

Yoshinori Sagisaka (Tokyo, JP)

Björn W. Schuller (London, UK)

Satoshi Sekine (New York, US)

Richard Sproat (New York, US)

Mark Steedman (Edinburgh, UK)

Jian Su (Singapore, SG)

Marc Swerts (Tilburg, NL)

Jun'ichi Tsujii (Beijing, CN)

Renata Vieira (Porto Alegre, BR)

Dekai Wu (Hong Kong, HK)

Feiyu Xu (Berlin, DE)

Roman Yangarber (Helsinki, FI)

Geoffrey Zweig (Redmond, US)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

Laurent Besacier (Grenoble, co‐chair)

Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)

Benjamin Lecouteux (Grenoble)

Carlos Martín‐Vide (Tarragona, co‐chair)

Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit non‐anonymized papers in English presenting original and

unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single‐spaced pages (including

eventual appendices) and should be prepared according to the standard format for

Springer Verlag's LNAI/LNCS series (see

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0‐164‐6‐793341‐0).

Submissions have to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp2014

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI/LNCS series will be available

by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer‐reviewed

extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it

will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from January 16, 2014 to October 14, 2014. The

registration form can be found at:

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

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: May 7, 2014 (23:59h, CET)

Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: June 18, 2014

Final version of the paper for the LNAI/LNCS proceedings: June 25, 2014

Early registration: July 2, 2014

Late registration: September 30, 2014

Submission to the post‐conference journal special issue: January 16, 2015

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

SLSP 2014

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

Av. Catalunya, 35

43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34 977 559 543

Fax: +34 977 558 386

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Departament d’Economia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya

Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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Call for Participation
MediaEval 2014 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation
http://www.multimediaeval.org
Early registration deadline: 1 May 2014
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MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2014 focuses on aspects of multimedia that include speech and audio. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2014 workshop.

The tasks that focus on speech are:

*QUESST: Query by Example Search on Speech Task (ex SWS)*
*Search and Hyperlinking*

The entire list of tasks and their descriptions is below.

For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a 'required reading' list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. To sign up, please click the “MediaEval 2014 registration site” link at:

http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2014

The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2014:

*Synchronization of multi-user Event Media (New!)*
This task requires participants to automatically create a chronologically-ordered outline of multiple image galleries corresponding to the same event, where data collections are synchronized altogether and aligned along parallel lines over the same time axis, or mixed in the correct order.

*C@merata: Question Answering on Classical Music Scores (New!)*
In this task, systems take as input a noun phrase (e.g., 'harmonic perfect fifth') and a short score in MusicXML (e.g., J.S. Bach, Suite No. 3 in C Major for Cello, BWV 1009, Sarabande) and return an answer stating the location of the requested feature (e.g., 'Bar 206').

*Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task*
This task requires participants to automatically refine a ranked list of Flickr photos with landmarks using provided visual and textual information. The objective is to select only a small number of photos that are equally representative matches but also diverse representations of the query.

*Search and Hyperlinking*
This task requires participants to find video segments relevant to an information need and to provide a list of useful hyperlinks for each of these segments. The hyperlinks point to other video segments in the same collection and should allow the user of the system to explore the collection with respect to the current information need in a non-linear fashion. The task focuses on television data provided by the BBC and real information needs from home users.

*QUESST: Query by Example Search on Speech Task (ex SWS)*
The task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. This task is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection or low-resource speech processing.

*Visual Privacy*
This task requires participants to implement privacy filtering solutions that provide an optimal balance between obscuring information that personally identifies people in a video, and retraining information that allows viewers otherwise to interpret the video.

*Emotion in Music (an Affect Task)*
We aim at detecting emotional dynamics of music using its content. Given a set of songs, participants are asked to automatically generate continuous emotional representations in arousal and valence.

*Placing: Geo-coordinate Prediction for Social Multimedia*
This task requires participants to estimate the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of multimedia items (photos, videos and accompanying metadata), as well as predicting how “placeable” a media item actually is. The Placing Task integrates all aspects of multimedia: textual meta-data, audio, image, video, location, time, users and context.

*Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection*
This task requires participants to automatically detect portions of movies depicting violence. Participants are encouraged to deploy multimodal approaches (audio, visual, text) to solve the task.

*Social Event Detection in Web Multimedia*
This task requires participants to discover, retrieve and summarize social events, within a collection of Web multimedia. Social events are events that are planned by people, attended by people and for which the social multimedia are also captured by people.

*Crowdsourcing: Crowdsorting Multimedia Comments (New!)*
This task asks participants to combine human computation (i.e., input from the crowd) with automatic computation to carry out classification. The classification involves sorting timed-comments in music, i.e., comments that users have made at certain points in a song, into categories according to their type (e.g., useful vs. non-useful and informative vs. affective).

Tasks marked 'New!' are the 2014 Brave New Tasks. If you sign up for these tasks, please be aware that you will be asked to keep in close touch with the task organizers concerning the details of the task over the course of the benchmarking cycle. We ask for extra-tight communication in order to ensure that these tasks have the flexibility they need to reach their goals.

MediaEval 2014 Timeline
(dates vary slightly from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2014)

April-May: Registration and return usage agreements.
May-June: Release of development/training data.
June-July: Release of test data.
Mid-Sept.: Participants submit their completed runs.
Mid-Sept.-End-Sept.: Evaluation of submitted runs. Participants write their 2-page working notes papers.
16-17+18 October: MediaEval 2014 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain

We ask you to register by 1 May, when the first task will release its data set. After that point, late registration will be possible, but we encourage teams to register as early as they can.

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

MediaEval 2014 Organization Committee:

Martha Larson at Delft University of Technology and Gareth Jones at Dublin City University act as the overall coordinators of MediaEval. Individual tasks are coordinated by a group of task organizers, who form the MediaEval Organizing Committee. It is the collective efforts of this group of people that makes MediaEval possible. The complete list of MediaEval organizers is at:

http://www.multimediaeval.org/who

A large number of organizations and projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including the projects (alphabetical): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), CNGL (http://www.cngl.ie), CrowdRec (http://crowdrec.eu), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu), Media Mixer (http://mediamixer.eu), Mucke (http://www.chistera.eu/projects/mucke), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl), SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org), and VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu).

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Call for short and long paper contributions for ACM Multimedia 2014 - 

Area on Music, Speech, and Audio Processing in Multimedia 

November 3-7, 2014 Orlando, Florida, USA 

(For general information and information on other areas check http://www.acmmm.org/2014/) 

As a core part of multimedia data, the acoustic modality is of great importance as a source of 

information that is orthogonal to other modalities like video or text. This allows for richer

 information to be extracted when performing content analysis, as well as a rich mean of 

communication of information. We are seeking strong technical submissions revolving around 

music, speech and audio processing in multimedia. One topic of interest is submissions

 performing an analysis of the acoustic signals in order to extract information from multimedia 

content (e.g. what notes are being played, what is being said, or what sounds appear), or the 

context (e.g. language spoken, age and gender of the speaker, localization using sound). 

Another topic of interest is submissions performing synthesis of acoustic content for multimedia 

purposes (e.g. speech synthesis, singing voices, acoustic scene synthesis). Furthermore, we are 

also interested in ways to represent acoustic data as multimedia; for example, in symbolic form

 (e.g. closed captioning of speech), in the form of sensor input and visual images (e.g. recordings

 of gestures in musical performances). or others. Another topic of interest is applications that 

involve the acoustic modality. The inclusion of acoustics opens up interesting possibilities for 

novel multimedia interfaces and user interactions. In addition, contextual, social and affective 

aspects play an important role when using acoustics, which can be seen, for example, in the 

consumption and enjoyment of music, and the sound design of cinematic productions.

 All submissions should maintain a clear relation to multimedia: there either should be an 

explicit relation to multimedia items, applications or systems, or an application of a multimedia 

perspective, in which information sources from different modalities are considered. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 · Multimedia audio analysis and synthesis · Multimedia audio indexing, search, and retrieval

 · Music, speech, and audio annotation, similarity measures, and evaluation 

· Multimodal and multimedia approaches to music, speech, and audio

 · Multimodal and multimedia context models for music, speech, and audio 

· Computational approaches to music, speech, and audio inspired by other domains (e.g. 

computer vision, information retrieval, musicology, psychology) 

· Multimedia localization using acoustic information 

· Social data, user models and personalization in music, speech, and audio 

· Music, audio, and aural aspects in multimedia user interfaces

 · Algorithms and applications of music, speech, and audio

 · New and interactive musical instruments, systems and other music, speech, and audio 

applications · Novel interaction interfaces using/with music, speech, and audio 

· Music, speech, and audio coding, transmission, and storage for multimedia applications 

Deadlines for long papers is March 31st, 2014 and for short papers is April 14th, 2014 

For other deadlines please check http://www.acmmm.org/2014/important_dates.html 

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Technical Program Chairs: Douglas Williams, Timothy Davidson, and Ghassan AlRegib
General Chairs: Geoffrey Li and Fred Juang

The IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) is a recently launched flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. GlobalSIP’14 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, during the week of December 1, 2014. The conference will focus broadly on signal and information processing with an emphasis on up-and-coming signal processing themes. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and technical sessions consisting of poster or oral presentations. GlobalSIP’14 will be comprised of colocated symposia selected competitively based on responses to this call-for-symposium proposals. Symposium topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Signal processing in communications and networks, including green communication and optical communications
• Image and video processing
• Selected topics in speech and language processing
• Acoustic array signal processing
• Signal processing in security applications
• Signal processing in finance
• Signal processing in energy and power systems
• Signal processing in genomics and bioengineering (physiological, pharmacological, and behavioral)
• Neural signal processing
• Selected topics in statistical signal processing
• Seismic signal processing
• Graph-theoretic signal processing
• Machine learning and human machine interfaces
• Compressed sensing, sparsity analysis, and applications
• Big data processing, heterogeneous information processing, and informatics
• Radar and array processing including localization and ranging techniques
• Multimedia transmission, indexing and retrieval, and playback challenges
• Hardware and real-time implementations
• Other novel and significant applications of selected areas of signal processing

Symposium proposals should include the title of the symposium; length of the symposium (one day or two days); projected selectivity of the symposium; paper length requirements (submission: from 2 to 6 pages, final: 4-6 pages, invited papers may be longer); names, addresses, and short CVs (up to 250 words) of the organizers, including the general organizers and the technical chairs; an up-to two page description of the technical issues that the symposium will address (including timeliness and relevance to the signal processing community; names of (potential) technical program committee members; name of (potential) invited speakers (up to 2 for one-day symposia and 4 for two-day ones)); and a draft call-for-papers. Please package everything in a single pdf file. More detailed information can be found at http://renyi.ece.iastate.edu/globalsip2014/cfs.html

Symposium proposals should be emailed to Doug Williams (doug.williams@ece.gatech.edu) and Geoffrey Li (liye@ece.gatech.edu) according the following timeline:

November 8, 2013: Symposium proposals due
November 22, 2013: Symposium selection decision notification
November 29, 2013: Final version of the call-for-papers for the accepted symposia due

Tentative timeline for paper submission:
May 16, 2014: Paper submission deadline (regular and invited)
June 27, 2014: Review results announced
September 5, 2014: Camera-ready regular and invited papers due

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We are pleased to announce the opening of the third Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC3). Complete information, including the challenge handbook, training data, evaluation scripts, and baseline trackers are available on the DSTC3 website:

http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc/

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) is a research challenge focused on improving the state of the art in tracking the state of spoken dialog systems. State tracking refers to accurately estimating the user's goal as a dialog progresses. Accurate state tracking is desirable because it provides robustness to errors in speech recognition, and helps reduce ambiguity inherent in language within a temporal process like dialog.

In this challenge, participants are given labelled corpora of dialogs to develop state tracking algorithms. The trackers will then be evaluated on a common set of held-out dialogs which are released, un-labelled, during a one week period. This is a corpus-based challenge: participants do not need to implement a speech recognizer, a semantic parser, or an end-to-end dialog system.

The first DSTC completed in 2013, with 9 teams participating and a total of 27 entries, with 9 papers presented at SIGDIAL 2013, advancing the state-of-the-art in several dimensions. DSTC2 introduced a completely new dataset, in a new domain (restaurant information), with more complicated and dynamic dialog states that may change throughout the dialog. DSTC2 concluded a few months ago, again with 9 participating teams (about half new) -- results have been submitted to and will be presented at a special session at SIGDIAL 2014.

DSTC3 will focus on the task of adapting and expanding to a new domain, when there is a lot of labelled data in a smaller domain. The 'smaller domain' is the restaurants domain from DSTC2; the 'new extended domain' is a larger tourist information domain: DSTC3 includes restaurants and adds pubs and coffee shops, and more detail (slots) for restaurants relative to the DSTC2 data.

Participants are encouraged to submit papers describing their work to SLT 2014, whose deadline will be approx. 20 July. The organisers are awaiting confirmation of a proposed special session at the conference.

DSTC3 schedule:

- 4 April 2014 : Labelled tourist information seed set released

- 9 June 2014 : Unlabelled tourist information test set released

- 16 June 2014 : Tracker output on tourist information test set due

- 23 June 2014 : Results on tourist information test set given to participants

- 20 July 2014 : SLT paper deadline (approximate)

- 7-10 Dec 2014 : SLT workshop (Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA)

The training data, scoring scripts, baselines, domain ontology and database are all available for public download. Prospective participants are strongly encouraged to join the mailing list, to ensure you receive notifications of updates to data or scripts, and are included in discussions about the challenge. To join, email listserv@lists.research.microsoft.com with 'subscribe DSTC' in the body of the message (without quotes).

Feel free to direct questions to the organizers. We hope you will consider participating!

DSTC3 organizers

Matt Henderson (lead) - Cambridge University [matthen@gmail.com]

Blaise Thomson - Cambridge University [brmt2@cam.ac.uk]

Jason D. Williams - Microsoft Research [jason.williams@microsoft.com]

DSTC3 advisory board

Bill Byrne - University of Cambridge

Paul Crook - Microsoft Research

Maxine Eskenazi - Carnegie Mellon University

Milica Gasic - University of Cambridge

Helen Hastie - Herriot Watt

Kee-Eung Kim - KAIST

Sungjin Lee - Carnegie Mellon University

Oliver Lemon - Herriot Watt

Olivier Pietquin - SUPELEC

Joelle Pineau - McGill University

Deepak Ramachandran - Nuance Communications

Brian Strope - Google

Steve Young - University of Cambridge

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The 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2014) will be held in South Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada, on Dec 7-10, 2014. The main theme of the workshop will be 'machine learning in spoken language technologies'. One of our goals is to increase both intra and inter community interaction, by means of (inter alia)

• keynote/guest speakers from machine learning community (e.g. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and others);

• online panel discussions before/during the conference;

• miniSIGs - small discussion groups to get organized before/during /after the panel discussions or as independent SIG meetings;

• highlight sessions, where 3-5 best papers will be presented orally.

Following tradition from the last two SLT workshops in 2010 (Berkeley, CA) and 2012 (Miami, FL), we are looking forward to hosting challenges and special or themed sessions.

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

·      Speech recognition and synthesis

·      Spoken language understanding

·      Spoken dialog systems

·      Spoken document summarization

·      Machine translation for speech

·      Question answering from speech

·      Speech data mining

·      Spoken document retrieval

·      Spoken language databases

·      Multimodal processing

·      Human/computer interaction

·      Educational and healthcare applications

·      Assistive technologies

·      Natural Language Processing

Important Deadlines

Paper Submission Monday, July 21, 2014

Notification of Acceptance Friday, September 5, 2014

Demo Submission September 2014

Demo Acceptance October 2014

Early registration deadline October 17, 2014

Workshop December 7-10, 2014

Submission Procedure

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the SLT 2014 website. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

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The Iranian Society of Acoustics and Vibration (ISAV) has the great pleasure of inviting you to the 4th International Conference on Acoustics and Vibration (ISAV2014). ISAV2014 is jointly organized by ISAV and Iran University of Science and Technology and will be held in Tehran, Iran from 10-11 December, 2014. Following three successful conferences in three last years (ISAV2011, ISAV2012 and ISAV2013), we look forward to welcoming you to another memorable and exciting ISAV conference in 2014. Through keynote lectures and oral and poster presentations, the conference will present an overview of the latest developments in theoretical and applied acoustics and vibration. We cordially invite you to submit your papers for oral and poster sessions through the conference website www.isav.ir/2014. We also invite sponsors and exhibitors to participate in the conference exhibition where they can present their latest scientific and industrial achievements, advertise their new products and services, and learn about the latest developments in acoustics and vibration. Please use the link here to go to the conference website. The deadline for paper submission is 22th June 2014. We look forward to seeing you at ISAV2014 in December 2014 in Tehran.

Sincerely,

ISAV2014 Secretariat

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Call for papers

International Conference on Human Machine Interaction 2014 23 – 25, December 2014 http://intconfhmi.com

In association with SETIT, Sfax University, Tunisia. and ASDF (Association of Scientists, Developers and Faculties) Chennai Chapter, we will organize the International Conference HMI 2014 which will be held in New delhi -INDIA.

Human Machine Interaction (HMI), is a main annual research conference aimed at presenting current research being carried out. The idea of the conference is for the scientists, scholars, engineers and students from the Universities all around the world and the industry to present ongoing research activities, and hence to foster research relations between the Universities and the industry. HMI 2014 is co-sponsored by Association of Scientists, Developers and Faculties and SETIT, Sfax University, Tunisia and technical co-sponsored by many other universities and institutes.
The HMI 2014 conference proceeding will be published in the ASDF Proceedings as one volume, and will be included in the Engineering & Technology Digital Library, and indexed by EBSCO, World Cat, Google Scholar, and sent to be reviewed by Ei Compendex and ISI Proceedings. Selected papers will be recommended to be published in the Journals.

Area of Submission

Topics of interest for HMI is widely declared for the above, but not limited to.

Conference Registration Fees Rebate (Discount)

We are pleased to inform you that the organizing committee of the HMI2014 allocates a financial support for all participants from developing or emerging countries. This Financial support of among of 150 Dollars is available to help participants to attend HMI2014

You can find more details in: http://intconfhmi.com/register.html

We are waiting for seeing you in India.

NB : A select number of Post Conference Excursions will take place during 5 days.

As examples : 1 Day Tour to Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Mathura in AC Bus : 25 $ per person 1 Day Tour to Qutub Minar, Parliament, Lotus Temple, India Gate, Gandhi Smiriti, Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Rajghat: 25 $ per person

Best Regards

 Mohamed Salim BOUHLEL General Co-Chair, HMI2014 Head of Research Unit: Sciences & Technologies of Image and Telecommunications ( Sfax University ) GSM +216 20 200005

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The Advisory Board of SProSIG, the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, invites bids from sites interested in hosting

 its flagship conference Speech Prosody in 2016.  

The bid process will proceed as follows:

(1) Optional: Groups interested in hosting a bid are invited to express interest in an e-mail to the current SProSIG Secretary

 and/or President (e.g., by replying to this e-mail).

(2) Optional: Each group interested in hosting the conference is invited to give a presentation on May 23, 2014 at the Speech 

Prosody 2014 conference in Dublin.

(3) Required: Each bid should then be formalized in a written document, mailed to the secretary of SProSIG by June 15, 2014.  

These documents will be posted at sprosig.isle.illinois.edu for all SProSIG members to read.

(4) Selection of the site for Speech Prosody 2016 will then be conducted using an on-line ballot at http://sprosig.isle.illinois.edu.  

Each current member of SProSIG will be allowed to vote.

Bids to host Speech Prosody 2016 should include the following information:

(a) Names and affiliations of members of the organizing committee.

(b) Information about institutional support for the conference if any.

(c) Tentative location of the conference (city and, if possible, venue).  Oral and written presentation of the bid should highlight 

attributes that make both city and site suitable for hosting an international conference, including transportation to/from and

 within the city, lodging and dining options near the proposed venue, facilities in the proposed venue for a 300-person oral

 session and a 40-poster poster session, and any other attributes likely to be of interest to the members of SProSIG.

(d) Tentative dates of the proposed conference (typically four days in late May 2016)

(e) Proposed theme of the conference and/or proposed new session topics that will be included, along with existing session

 topics of the Speech Prosody conference, in the Conference Call for Papers.

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Carnegie Mellon University

degree designed for students who want to rapidly master advanced content-analysis, mining, and intelligent information technologies prior to beginning or resuming leadership careers in industry and government. Just over half of the curriculum consists of graduate courses. The remainder provides direct, hands-on, project-oriented experience working closely with CMU faculty to build systems and solve problems using state-of-the-art algorithms, techniques, tools, and datasets. A typical MIIS student completes the program in one year (12 months) of full-time study at the Pittsburgh campus.  Part-time and distance education options are available to students employed at affiliated companies. The application deadline for the Fall 2013 term is December 14, 2012. For more information about the program, please visit http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/education/msiis/overview.shtml

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The IEEE Signal Processing Society is accepting proposals for the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP®). SPS Members are invited to submit a proposal to host ICASSP. If you are interested in submitting a proposal please contact Nicole Allen to get the forms and guidelines.

ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing applications. The series is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has been held annually since 1976. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. ICASSP is a cooperative effort of the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Committees:

• Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing
• Bio Imaging and Signal Processing
• Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems
• Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
• Information Forensics and Security
• Machine Learning for Signal Processing
• Multimedia Signal Processing
• Sensor Array and Multichannel
• Signal Processing for Communications and Networking
• Signal Processing Theory and Methods
• Speech and Language Processing
• Standing Committee on Industry DSP Technology

To submit a proposal, send a notice of intent to bid to the Vice President – Conferences and the Conference Service Coordinator using the email addresses as shown below. Include in the notice your contact information and the proposed location. The Signal Processing Society Conference Services staff will issue the proposal submission form and guidlines upon receipt of the letter of intent. The form must be completed and the proposal submitted to the Conference Services staff by 21 March 2014. Proposals will be assessed by the Conference Board Executive Subcommittee. Accepted bidding teams [finalists] will be invited to present at the Conference Board meeting held at ICASSP 2014, May 4-9, 2014 in Florence, Italy.

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Master's in Linguistics (Aix-Marseille Université): Linguistic Theories, Field Linguistics and Experimentation TheLiTEx offers advanced training in Linguistics. This specialty focuses Linguistics is aimed at presenting in an original way the links between corpus linguistics and scientific experimentation on the one hand and laboratory and field methodologies on the other. On the basis of a common set of courses (offered within the first year), TheLiTEx offers two paths: Experimental Linguistics (LEx) and Language Contact & Typology (LCT) The goal of LEx is the study of language, speech and discourse on the basis of scientific experimentation, quantitative modeling of linguistic phenomena and behavior. It focuses on a multidisciplinary approach which borrows its methodologies to human physical and biological sciences and its tools to computer science, clinical approaches, engineering etc.. Among the courses offered: semantics, phonetics / phonology, morphology, syntax or pragmatics, prosody and intonation, and the interfaces between these linguistic levels, in their interactions with the real world and the individual, in a biological, cognitive and social perspective. Within the second year, a set of more specialized courses is offered such as Language and the Brain and Laboratory Phonology. LCT aims at understanding the world's linguistic diversity, focusing on language contact, language change and variation (European, Asian and African languages, Creoles, sign language, etc.).. This specialty focuses, from a a linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective, on issues of field linguistics and taking into account both the human and socio-cultural dimension of language (speakers, communities). It also focuses on documenting rare and endangered languages and to engage a reflection on linguistic minorities. This path also provides expertise and intervention models (language policy and planning) in order  to train students in the management of contact phenomena and their impact on the speakers, languages and societies More info at: http://thelitex.hypotheses.org/678

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NEW MASTER IN BRAIN AND COGNITION AT UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA, BARCELONA

A new, one-year Master in Brain and Cognition will begin its activities in the Academic Year 2014-15 in Barcelona, Spain, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (http://www.upf.edu/mbc/).

The core of the master's programme is composed of the research groups at UPF's Center for Brain and Cognition  (http://cbc.upf.edu). These groups are directed by renowned scientists in areas such as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, vision, multisensory perception, human development and comparative cognition. Students will  be exposed to the ongoing research projects at the Center for Brain and Cognition and will be integrated in one of its main research lines, where they will conduct original research for their final project.

Application period is now open. Please visit the Master web page or contact luca.bonatti@upf.edu for further information.

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REU Site: Research in Interactive Virtual Experiences

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The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) offers a 10-week summer research program for undergraduates in interactive virtual experiences. A multidisciplinary research institute affiliated with the University of Southern California, the ICT was established in 1999 to combine leading academic researchers in computing with the creative talents of Hollywood and the video game industry. Having grown to encompass a total of 170 faculty, staff, and students in a diverse array of fields, the ICT represents a unique interdisciplinary community brought together with a core unifying mission: advancing the state-of-the-art for creating virtual reality experiences so compelling that people will react as if they were real.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of ICT research, we welcome applications from students in computer science, as well as many other fields, such as psychology, art/animation, interactive media, linguistics, and communications. Undergraduates will join a team of students, research staff, and faculty in one of several labs focusing on different aspects of interactive virtual experiences. In addition to participating in seminars and social events, students will also prepare a final written report and present their projects to the rest of the institute at the end of summer research fair.

Students will receive $5000 over ten weeks, plus an additional $2800 stipend for housing and living expenses.  Non-local students can also be reimbursed for travel up to $600.  The ICT is located in West Los Angeles, just north of LAX and only 10 minutes from the beach.

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The site is expected to begin summer 2013, pending final award issuance.

Students can apply online at: http://ict.usc.edu/reu/

Application deadline: March 31, 2013

For more information, please contact Evan Suma at reu@ict.usc.edu.

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