Guest editors: Laurent Besacier, Wolfgang Minker

Speech is the most natural way to communicate and interact (with the machine or with another person) . Spoken language processing and dialogue have now many direct applications in various areas such as (but not limited to) information retrieval, natural language interaction with mobile devices, social robotics, assistive technologies, technologies for language learning, etc. . However, spoken language processing poses specific problems related to the nature of the speech material itself. Indeed, spontaneous speech utterances have to be processed and they contain many paralinguistic features. For instance, disfluencies (repetitions , false starts, etc.) reduces the syntactic regularity of utterances. Moreover, spontaneous utterances convey rich information related to emotions , etc. Furthermore, automatic speech recognition (ASR) step, often required before the application of higher level processing (understanding , translation, analysis, etc.), produces noisy outputs (with errors ) which require robust and tight coupling between modules.

 We invite contributions on any aspect (theoretical, methodological and practical) of spoken language processing and oral communication ; in particular (non-exclusive list):

 -Automatic speech recognition

-Spoken language understanding

-Speech translation

-Text-to-Speech synthesis

-Man-machine dialogue

-Robust analysis of spoken language

-Analysis of social affects or emotions in spontaneous speech

-Mining spoken language documents

-Spoken language applications (mobile interaction, robotics, etc. )

-Technologies for language learning

-Multilingual aspects of spoken language processing

-Evaluation for spoken language processing

-Corpora and resources for spoken language

-(Spoken) discourse analysis

-Adaptive dialogue (context, user profile)

-Analysis of paralinguistic features in spoken language