Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) On

Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology

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

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

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

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

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

Submission process

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

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

Important dates:

◦              Extended deadline for full paper submission: 28th April 2014

◦              Response to authors: 30^th June 2014

◦              Revised submission deadline: 31^st August 2014

◦              Notification of acceptance: 31^st October 2014

◦              Final manuscripts due: 30^th November 2014