Call for papers

SPECOM 2016

 ^{18th International Conference}

on Speech and Computer

August 23-27, 2016 | Budapest, Hungary

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Rodmonga Potapova

Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia

General Conference Co-Chair

Andrey Ronzhin

SPIIRAS, Saint-Petersburg, Russia,

General Conference Co-Chair

Géza Németh

Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Organising Committee Chair

THE CONFERENCE

The International Conference on Speech and Computer – SPECOM is a regular event organized since 1996 and attracts researchers in the area of computer speech processing, multimodal interfaces and applied systems for telecommunication, robotics, intelligent and cyberphysical environments.

ORGANIZERS

The conference is organized by Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Budapest, Hungary) and Scientific Association for Infocommunications (HTE, Hungary), in cooperation with Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU, Moscow, Russia), St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Science (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia) and St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Etienne Barnard, North-West University, South Africa

Laurent Besacier, Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, France

Vlado Delic, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Olivier Deroo, Acapela Group, Belgium

Christoph Draxler, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Communication, Germany

Thierry Dutoit, University of Mons, Belgium

Nikos Fakotakis, University of Patras, Greece

Peter French, University of York, UK

Hiroya Fujisaki, University of Tokyo, Japan

Todor Ganchev, Technical University of Varna, Bulgaria

Ruediger Hoffmann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Oliver Jokisch, Leipzig University of Telecommunication, Germany

Slobodan Jovicic, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Dimitri Kanevsky, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA

Alexey Karpov, SPIIRAS, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Heysem Kaya, Bogazici University, Turkey

Irina Kipyatkova, SPIIRAS, Russia

Daniil Kocharov, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

George Kokkinakis, University of Patras, Greece

Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Lin-shan Lee, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Boris Lobanov, United Institute of Informatics Problems, Belarus

Elena Lyakso, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Konstantin Markov, The University of Aizu, Japan

Yuri Matveev, ITMO University, Russia

Péter Mihajlik, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Konstantinos Moustakas, University of Patras, Greece

Iosif Mporas, University of Patras, Greece

Heinrich Niemann, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Alexander Petrovsky, Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, Belarus

Dimitar Popov, Bologna University, Italy

Elias Potamitis, University of Patras, Greece

Lawrence Rabiner, Rutgers University, USA

Gerhard Rigoll, Munich University of Technology, Germany

Murat Saraclar, Bogazici University, Turkey

Jesus Savage, University of Mexico, Mexico

Tanja Schultz, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Milan Secujski, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Pavel Skrelin, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Viktor Sorokin, Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russia

Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Greece

György Szaszák, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Klára Vicsi, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Christian Wellekens, EURECOM, France

Csaba Zainkó, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Milos Zelezny, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic

TOPICS

The SPECOM conference is devoted to issues of human-machine interaction, particularly:

▪ Applications for human-computer interaction

▪ Audio-visual speech processing

▪ Automatic language identification

▪ Corpus linguistics and linguistic processing

▪ Forensic speech investigations and security systems

▪ Multichannel signal processing

▪ Multimedia processing

▪ Multimodal analysis and synthesis

▪ Signal processing and feature extraction

▪ Speaker identification and diarization

▪ Speaker verification systems

▪ Speech and language resources

▪ Speech analytics and audio mining

▪ Speech dereverberation

▪ Speech driving systems in robotics

▪ Speech enhancement

▪ Speech perception and speech disorders

▪ Speech recognition and understanding

▪ Speech translation automatic systems

▪ Spoken dialogue systems

▪ Spoken language processing

▪ Text-to-speech and Speech-to-text systems

▪ Virtual and augmented reality

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

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

Details about the social events 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 2016 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.

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).

PROCEEDINGS

SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series listed in all major citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, COMPENDEX. SPECOM Proceedings are included in the list of forthcoming proceedings for August 2016.

IMPORTANT DATES

April 8, 2016 Submission of full papers

April 15, 2016 Submission of final papers upload

May 15, 2016 Notification of acceptance

June 01, 2016 Camera-ready papers and registration

August 23-27, 2016 Conference date

The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time of the conference.

VENUE

The conference will be organized in the Aquincum Hotel Budapest, Hungary (http://www.aquincumhotel.com).

Budapest, 'the pearl of the Danube' is one of the truly historic European capitals with its past stretching back over one thousand years. The picturesque bridges spanning the river Danube, the Castle Hill, the churches and architecture, the sculptures, the wooded hills, the Hungarian cuisine and wine, and the warm hospitality of Hungarian people all ensure that no guest can leave here without longing to return.

ACCOMMODATION

The organising committee has arranged accommodation for reasonable prices in hotels, which are situated near the city center. The rooms with sufficient discount are reserved for the conference days.

CONTACT

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

SPECOM 2016 Secretariat

Scientific Association for Infocommunications, HTE, Hungary

E-mail: specom@hte.hu

Phone: +36 1 353 1027

SPECOM 2016 conference web site: http://www.hte.hu/specom2016

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 EURASIP/IEEE 2016 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) that will be held in  Budapest, Hungary, from August 29 to September 2, 2016.

http://www.eusipco2016.org
http://www.eusipco2016.org/documents/391615/1433605/EUSIPCO2016_CfP_v3.pdf

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Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016: 

Methods in Prosody and Intonation Research: Data, Theories, Transcription

Laboratoire de Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, France.

September 6-9, 2016

http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/

We are pleased to announce the Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 to be held from September 6-9, 2016 in Aix-en-Provence (France).

The Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 will bring together experts on theoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody. The school will be organized around morning lectures and afternoon tutorials (where participants will practice concepts and skills discussed in lectures) and data clinics (where participants can bring together their own data and questions for discussion).

The school is intended for post-graduate students and researchers interested in all the theoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody and intonation. The school will be suitable both for researchers already working on intonation and prosody, and wishing to learn more about specific topics, and for researchers who wish to better understand how to incorporate and control prosody in their own work.

Topics will include (but not limited to): theoretical models on prosody and intonation; perception of intonation; prosody and language pathologies; prosody, semantics, and discourse; prosody and L2; prosody and neurolinguistics; transcription of intonation and prosody; statistical methods in prosody research; and preparation of stimuli for perception studies.

The confirmed invited speakers are:

• Amalia Arvaniti (Kent University): Theoretical models of prosody
• Mariapaola  D'Imperio (Aix-Marseille Université - IUF): Experimental protocols for prosody and perception
• Laura Dilley (Michigan State University): Prosody and perception methods
• Janet Fletcher (The University of Melbourne): Transcription of under-described languages
• James Sneed German (Aix-Marseille Université): Prosody and discourse
• Kiwako Ito (Ohio State University): Prosody and acquisition, prosody and eye tracking
• Jelena Krivokapi? (University of Michigan): Prosody and articulatory phonology
• Oliver Niebuhr (University of Southern Denmark): Prosody and experimental methods in acoustics
• Bert Remeijsen and Otto Gwado Ayoker (University of Edimburgh): Typology and field methods in prosody research: Shilluk prosody workshop
• Annie Tremblay (Kansas University): Prosody and L2

Application deadline: May 31st 2016

For more information, please visit http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/

A number of scholarships will be offered for PhD students and postdocs. For more information about registration and scholarships, go to http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/registration.html

The Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 is co-organized by:

Mariapaola D?Imperio ? AMU & Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 7309 CNRS) ? Institut Universitaire de France
Amalia Arvaniti ? University of Kent (UK)

Tamara Rathcke ? University of Kent (UK)

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 58th International Symposium ELMAR-2016
***********************************
   
                    September 12-14, 2016
                      Zadar, Croatia
 
          Paper submission deadline: March 12, 2016
 
                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/2016/special_sessions/
 
 
 
 KEYNOTE SPEAKER
 
 Prof. Borko Furht, Florida Atlantic University, USA
   
 
 SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES
 
Deadline for submission of full papers: March 12, 2016
Notification of acceptance mailed out by: May 20, 2016
Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: May 27, 2016
Preliminary program available online by: June 10, 2016
Registration forms and payment deadline: June 17, 2016

E-mail: elmar2016@fer.hr
http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

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SLPAT 2016

Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)

13 September 2016, co-located with Interspeech 2016, San Francisco, California

Submission deadline:  17 June 2016
     http://www.slpat.org/slpat2016

=====================================================================
 
We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the seventh Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT) on Tuesday 13 September 2016 to be co-located with Interspeech 2016 in San Francisco, California. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline, and formatting of regular papers are here:
           
     http://www.slpat.org/slpat2016
 
This 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. The 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:
              
         ? Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments
         ? Speech transformation for improved intelligibility
         ? Speech and language technologies for daily assisted living and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
         ? Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language
         ? Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) / Assistive Technologies (AT) applications

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L'Ecole d'été thématique CNRS 'Sciences et Voix : expressions, usages et prises en charge de l'instrument vocal humain' se tiendra du Lundi 26 Septembre au Vendredi 30 Septembre 2016 au centre IGESA de l'ïle de Porquerolles.
Vous pouvez trouver toutes les informations concernant cette école d'été et son contenu pédagogique sur ce site web:
http://www.gipsa-lab.fr/summerschool/eesv2016/

Ci-joint une plaquette qui vous donne également les informations essentielles concernant l'école.

Nous venons de lancer la phase de pré-inscriptions. Vous avez jusqu'au 1er Juin pour vous pré-inscrire :
https://www.azur-colloque.fr/DR11/AzurInscription/?&iColId=78&NaiveForm_id=AzChoixColloque&btnAzurP=Preinscription&lang=fr

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Les inscriptions pour PAC 2016 sont désormais ouvertes ! Intitulée 'Les mélodies de l'anglais', la conférence se tiendra du 29 septembre au 1er octobre 2016 au Laboratoire Parole et Langage à Aix-en- Provence.

Veuillez trouver le programme et le bulletin d'inscription ci-dessous et également sur le site Web du LPL.

Délai d'inscription : 30 juillet 2016

Documents téléchargeables :

Programme : http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~fulltext/actualites/programme_final_PAC_2016_affil.pdf

Inscription : http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~fulltext/actualites/Bulletin_inscription_PAC.xlsx

Projet PAC : http://www.projet-pac.net/

Call for papers: 12^th PAC conference

(Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain / Phonology of Contemporary English)

PAC 2016: English Melodies

Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France

Sept 29-Oct 1 2016

We are pleased to announce the 2016 edition of the annual PAC conference, ‘English Melodies’, due to take place from Thursday September 29 to Saturday October 1 2016,  hosted by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage and Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence. We shall welcome as invited guest speaker Professor Francis Nolan, from the University of Cambridge.

The PAC Project, ‘La Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure; The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure’ is a project coordinated by Anne Prezwozny, Philip Carr, Jacques Durand and Sophie Herment. Among other things it aims at:

ü     giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and diversity (geographical, social and stylistic);

ü     testing phonological and phonetic models from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, making room for the systematic study of variation,

ü     favouring communication between specialists in speech and in phonological theory,

ü     providing data and analyses which will help improve the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Several sessions will be organised, following the development of a variety of thematic research groups with dedicated interests within the PAC program:

• PAC-Research with a workshop on tools and annotation: Brigitte Bigi and Daniel Hirst will present the latest functions of SPPAS, a tool producing automatic phonetic annotations from a recorded speech sound and its transcription, including Momel and Intsint which are now implemented.
• PAC-Prosody
• ICE-PAC (interphonologies of contemporary English)
• LVTI (Langue Ville Travail Identité), the study of English in urban contexts and its link with the concept of identity.

Papers from a wide range of theoretical perspectives addressing the above issues and related topics are welcome. Other things being equal, we will give priority to papers focusing on the relationship between corpus studies and the phonological/phonetic modelling of spoken English. A special emphasis will be given this year to English melodies, in the broadest sense, from intonation to segmental primes. We will welcome proposals on the use of automatic tools for the study of very large data sets as well, in connection with the workshop.

The deadline for sending a title with a one-page abstract (excluding references) is March 15,2016 (extended deadline). Please send your proposal in 2 pdf files, one with name and affiliation, the other anonymous to:

gabor.turcsan@univ-amu.fr  & sophie.herment@univ-amu.fr

Notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of March.

Organising committee:

Gabor Turcsan, AMU, LPL

Sophie Herment, AMU, LPL

Anne Tortel, AMU, LPL

Stéphanie Desous, CNRS-AMU, LPL

Joëlle Lavaud, CNRS-AMU, LPL

Catherine Perrot, CNRS-AMU, LPL

Claudia Pichon-Starke, CNRS-AMU, LPL

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Linguistic and Behavioral Interaction Analysis?, inside the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive InfoCommunication, Wroclaw (PL), the 16^thto 18 of October 2016.

http://www.coginfocom.hu/conference/CogInfoCom16/tracks.html

The deadline for submitting the first version of the paper is July 15 2016

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Call for Participation
MediaEval 2016 Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark
First data releases: May 2016
Regular registration: Open through June 2016
For dates per task see: http://multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2016
--------------------------------------------------

MediaEval offers shared-tasks in multimedia retrieval and analysis.
Successful approaches make use of multiple modalities and go beyond
visual content to also exploit audio, text, and other contextual
information. For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data, and
accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as keyframes, visual features, and social
metadata.

Participating teams submit results, which are evaluated. The teams then
write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2016 workshop.
This year?s workshop will be held 20-21 October, right after ACM
Multimedia in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Over its lifetime, MediaEval
teamwork and collaboration has given rise to nearly 600 publications in
the workshop proceedings, at conferences, and in journals.

MediaEval 2016 is offering the following tasks:

*Verifying Multimedia Use Task*
Detect misleading or deceptive images and videos shared on Twitter.

*Emotional Impact of Movies Task*
Infer the affective impact of film clips based on audio-visual content.

*C@MERATA: Querying Musical Scores with English Noun Phrases Task*
Information retrieval on musical scores.

*Predicting Media Interestingness Task*
Infer interesting frames and segments of movies (using audio, visual
features, text).

*Zero Cost Speech Recognition Task (ex QUESST)*
Train the best possible speech recognition system (for Vietnamese) using
only free resources.

*Placing Task*
Automatically estimate the locations of photos and videos (using audio,
visual features, text).

*Multimodal Person Discovery in Broadcast TV Task*
Automatically name the people occurring in broadcast content (audio,
visual features, text).

*Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task*
Diversify image results lists (text, visual features).

*Context of Multimedia Experience Task*
Predict multimedia content suitable for watching in stressful situations.

Participation is open to all interested research groups.
Click the ?MediaEval 2016 registration page? link at:
http://multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2016

***MediaEval 2016 Timeline***
(dates vary slightly from task to task, see the individual task pages
for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2016)
May-June: Release of development/training data.
June-July: Release of test data.
Begin-Mid.  September: Run submission
End Sept.: Participants submit their 2-page working notes papers
20-21 October: MediaEval 2016 Workshop right after ACM Multimedia in
Amsterdam, Netherlands

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

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=== Announcement for 2nd Workshop on Psycholinguistic Approaches to Speech
Recognition in Adverse Conditions  ===

31 October 2016 -1 November 2016
Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Website: http://odettescharenborg.ruhosting.nl/pasrac2016/

The second workshop on Psycholinguistic Approaches to Speech Recognition
in Adverse Conditions (PASRAC) will be held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
The workshop is a follow-up on the first workshop organised in Bristol in
March 2010.

The aim of the two-day workshop is to bring together scientists from
different disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, computer
science, neuroscience, and cognitive science, working on the topic of
speech recognition in adverse conditions.

Basic themes will be, but are not limited to:
- Sensory degradation
    * Extrinsic: Noise and other distortions, such as atypical speech,
accented speech, conversational speech
    * Intrinsic: Hearing impairments and cochlear implants
- Incomplete knowledge (L1-L2, adults-children)
- Limited processing resources (dual tasking, divided attention, etc).

We are inviting abstracts (maximum length is 500 words, excluding
references) for oral or poster presentations.

*  IMPORTANT DATES:
1 May 2016: Submission portal opens
1 June 2016: Registration opens
30 June 2016: Abstract submission deadline
31 July 2016: Notification of abstract acceptance

* KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Ann Bradlow (Northwestern University, IL)
Sophie Scott (University College London, UK)

* INVITED SPEAKERS:
Helen Blank (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, UK)
Maria Chait (University College London, UK)
Antje Heinrich (MRC Institute of Hearing Research, UK)
Bob McMurray (University of Iowa, IA)
Bernd Meyer (Johns Hopkins University, MD / University of Oldenburg,
Germany)
Kevin Munro (University of Manchester, UK)
Kathy Pichora-Fuller (University of Toronto, Canada)
Adriana Zekveld (VU University Medical Centre, the Netherlands)

* ORGANISERS:
Polina Drozdova (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
Florian Hintz (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
Sven Mattys (University of York, UK)
Odette Scharenborg (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

* PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
Helen Blank
Florian Hintz
Sven Mattys
Bernd Meyer
Kathy Pichora-Fuller
Odette Scharenborg
Adriana Zekveld

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APPEL A COMMUNICATIONS

XV^ème Colloque International des Etudes Créoles

« Pourquoi étudier les langues, cultures et sociétés créoles aujourd?hui ? »

31 octobre 2016 - 4 novembre 2016, Baie Mahault - Guadeloupe

  Le Comité International des Etudes Créoles réalise depuis presqu?une cinquantaine d?années, à intervalle régulier, le colloque des études créoles. En 2016, le XV^ème colloque International des Etudes Créoles se tiendra à Baie Mahault - Guadeloupe. L?organisation du XV^ème colloque du CIEC a été confiée au CRENEL en collaboration avec l?Université des Antilles, l?ESPE de Guadeloupe, le CREF et le CRILLASH. Le colloque sera organisé avec le soutien de l?association Haïti Monde et de la Mairie de Baie Mahault, Guadeloupe.

     Les études sur les langues, cultures et sociétés créoles s?inscrivent dans plusieurs perspectives définies comme majeures aussi bien par la communauté internationale (UNESCO, PNUD, Objectifs du Millenium, etc.), que par l?Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). Cette dernière Organisation regroupe une dizaine d?Etats ou de pays créolophones : France et ses Départements d?Outre-Mer (Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion), Haïti, La Dominique, Maurice, Sainte Lucie, Seychelles ; Cap-Vert, Guinée Bissau, San Tome et Principe.

     L?importance des études créoles pour les sciences humaines et sociales n?est plus à démontrer. Cette importance tient d?abord à la jeunesse de ces systèmes sociaux, linguistiques et culturels (quatre à cinq siècles d?existence au maximum), mais plus encore, sans doute, à ce que ces langues, cultures et sociétés ont, en quelque sorte, fait rarissime, un « état-civil » (Chaudenson). Il est constitué, comme tout état-civil, d?un lieu de naissance (le plus souvent une île, souvent déserte ou vidée de ses premiers habitants, ce qui dispense de se poser les épineuses questions des limites territoriales de l?investigation comme des substrats indigènes), d?une date de naissance (ou en tout cas de conception que détermine le début de la colonisation européenne) et d?ascendants (des populations introduites pour l?exploitation coloniale de ces terres, dont on connaît souvent avec précision l?importance et l?origine, car on compte, on pèse et on enregistre sur les navires).

     Etudier les langues, cultures et sociétés créoles suscite de nombreuses interrogations scientifiques. Ce XV^ème colloque se demandera :

« Pourquoi étudier les langues, cultures et sociétés créoles aujourd?hui ? »

     Cette thématique invite les universitaires, les spécialistes et les intellectuels à réfléchir et à présenter leurs travaux autour des sociétés créoles d?aujourd?hui dans leurs trajectoires historiques, linguistiques, sociales, politiques, économiques et culturelles. Comment l?évolution linguistique de ces sociétés a-t-elle influencé leur devenir social ? Qu?est-ce que le monde créole d?aujourd?hui a à dire aux autres aires géographiques et culturelles ?

     Philosophes, historiens, anthropologues, sociologues et linguistes sont conviés à contribuer aux questions relatives  à l?oralité, à l?interculturalité, aux phénomènes de migration et aux répertoires artistiques qui se développent au sein des sociétés créoles.

Où en est l?étude de la genèse et du développement des langues créoles ? Qu?en est-il de l?intercompréhension des langues créoles ? Quels sont les cheminements de l?institution des langues créoles dans leurs zones d?influences respectives (voir la question des académies de langue créole) ? Les pratiques militantes en créole pourront également être évoquées.

     Les communications et conférences plénières de ce colloque tenteront d?une part de faire avancer les travaux linguistiques (linguistique théorique, descriptive, sociolinguistique et didactiques), littéraires et anthropologiques consacrés aux langues et cultures créoles, et d?autre part, de dégager des perspectives pour des recherches futures.

Un des axes majeurs devrait être le développement des politiques concertées de coopération entre les trois espaces francophone, lusophone et hispanophone, dans le prolongement de propositions faites lors des colloques du Cap-Vert (2005), de Haïti (2008), de Maurice (2012), d?Aix-en-Provence (2014). Cet axe s?inscrit dans la volonté, clairement manifestée au sein de l?OIF.

Les communications et propositions d?ateliers pourront s?inscrire dans l?un des thèmes du colloque et / ou dans une thématique transversale.

Parmi les sujets qui pourraient être abordées, citons, à titre illustratif, les questions suivantes :

• Les diasporas « créoles » et leurs pratiques linguistiques
• Les variétés créoles développées hors des territoires d?origine
• Les variétés des néo-apprenants de langues créoles
• Le développement des programmes de littéracie en créole
• Les programmes d?éducation bilingue intégrant la langue créole
• Les littératures des pays de langue créole
• L?état des recherches sur les corpus de langue créole
• L?aménagement du créole à l?école
• Morphologie, Syntaxe etc. des langues créoles
• Les études diachroniques des langues créoles
• Les rapports entre les langues créoles et les langues africaines
• Histoire, paysage et société créoles à travers les ans.
• Créolisation et devenir des sociétés créoles
• Philosophie et histoire des idées dans les sociétés créoles.

     Les propositions de communications rédigées en langue française, en anglais ou dans une langue créole française avec l?adresse et l?appartenance institutionnelle du ou des communiquant(e)s devront parvenir à l?adresse suivante : colloqueciec2016@gmail.com avant le 15 mars 2016. Elles indiqueront le thème, les données traités, les résultats escomptés et ne dépasseront pas 3 000 caractères ou 500 mots (bibliographie incluse).

      Après évaluation, l?acceptation ou le refus de la proposition de communication sera notifiée dans la semaine du 15 avril 2016.

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ICMI 2016 call for Long and Short Papers

ICMI 2016, Tokyo, Japan (November 12-16, 2016)

http://icmi.acm.org/2016/

The 18th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2016) will be held in Tokyo, Japan.  ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development.

This year, ICMI welcomes contributions on machine learning for multimodal interaction as a special topic of interest. ICMI 2016 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers, technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations), demonstrations, exhibits and doctoral spotlight papers. The conference will also feature workshops and grand challenges. The proceedings of ICMI'2016 will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and Digital Library. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Affective Computing and interaction

- Cognitive modeling and multimodal interaction

- Gesture, touch and haptics

- Healthcare, assistive technologies

- Human communication dynamics

- Human-robot/agent multimodal interaction

- Interaction with smart environment

- Machine learning for multimodal interaction

- Mobile multimodal systems

- Multimodal behavior generation

- Multimodal datasets and validation

- Multimodal dialogue modeling

- Multimodal fusion and representation

- Multimodal interactive applications

- Speech behaviors in social interaction

- System components and multimodal platforms

- Visual behaviors in social interaction

- Virtual/augmented reality and multimodal interaction

Important dates

Long and short paper submission: May 6th, 2016

Reviews available for rebuttal: July 21st, 2016

Paper notification: August 24th, 2016

Main Conference: November 13-15, 2016

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ALBAYZIN 2016 SEARCH ON SPEECH EVALUATION

The Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology (RTTH) and the ISCA Special Interest Group on Iberian Languages (SIG-IL) are pleased to announce the ALBAYZIN 2016 Search on Speech Evaluation, which will be carried out as part of Iberspeech 2016, a biennial event gathering the Spanish researchers on speech Technology. This year?s event will take place in Lisbon (Portugal), on November 23-25, 2016 (see http://iberspeech2016.inesc-id.pt/ for details).

Research groups worldwide are invited to participate in this evaluation.
Here we just provide the key points. The full evaluation plan can be found attached.

**TASKS**

The ALBAYZIN 2016 Search on Speech evaluation involves searching in audio content a list of terms/queries. This evaluation focuses on retrieving the appropriate audio files that contain any of those terms/queries. Two different tasks are defined:

1) SPOKEN TERM DETECTION (STD), where the input to the system is a list of terms,
but this is unknown when processing the audio. This is the same task as in NIST STD 2006
evaluation [2] and Open Keyword Search in 2013 [3], 2014 [4], 2015 [5], and 2016 [6].

2) QUERY-BY-EXAMPLE SPOKEN TERM DETECTION (QbE STD), where the input to the system is an acoustic example per query and hence a prior knowledge of the correct word/phone transcription corresponding to each query cannot be made. This task must generate a set of occurrences for each query detected in the audio files, along with their timestamps as output, as in the STD task.QbE STD is the same task as those proposed in MediaEval 2011, 2012 and 2013 [1].

**REGISTRATION**

Interested groups must register for the evaluation before July 15th 2016, by contacting the organizing team at:

javiertejedornoguerales@gmail.com

with CC to Iberspeech 2016 Evaluation organizers at:

luisjavier.rodriguez@ehu.eus
lapiz@die.upm.es
alberto.abad@l2f.inesc-id.pt
ortega@unizar.es
ajst@ua.pt

and providing the following information:

  Research group (name and acronym)
  Institution (university, research center, etc.)
  Contact person (name)
  Email

**SCHEDULE**

?      June 30, 2016: Release of training and development data

?      July 15, 2016: Registration deadline

?      September 15, 2016: Release of evaluation data

?      October 15, 2016: Deadline for the submission of system outputs and description papers

?      October 31, 2016: Results distributed to participants

?      November 23-25, 2016: Evaluation Workshop at Iberspeech 2016


**REFERENCES**

[1] Metze, F., Anguera, X., Barnard, E., Davel, M., Gravier, G.: Language independent search in
mediaeval?s spoken web search task. Computer Speech and Language (2014).

[2] NIST: The spoken term detection (STD) 2006 evaluation plan. National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, 10 edn. (September 2006), http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/std

[3] NIST: NIST Open Keyword Search 2013 Evaluation (OpenKWS13). National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington DC, USA, 1 edn. (July 2013), http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws13.cfm

[4] NIST: NIST Open Keyword Search 2014 Evaluation (OpenKWS14). National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington DC, USA, 1 edn. (July 2014), http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws14.cfm

[5] NIST: NIST Open Keyword Search 2015 Evaluation (OpenKWS15). National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington DC, USA, 1 edn. (July 2015), http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws15.cfm

[6] NIST: NIST Open Keyword Search 2016 Evaluation (OpenKWS16). National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington DC, USA, 1 edn. (July 2016), http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws16.cfm

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First Call for Papers

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1st Workshop on 'Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity' (CL4LC).

Collocated with COLING 2016 in Osaka (Japan) on Sunday, 11 December 2016.

https://sites.google.com/site/cl4lc2016/home

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Workshop Description

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

CL4LC aims at investigating 'processing' aspects of linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modelling of linguistic complexity.

The term linguistic complexity is highly polysemous and several definitions have been advanced according to different standpoint theories. One major standpoint considers the 'theoretical' distinction between absolute complexity (i.e. the formal properties of linguistic systems) and relative complexity (i.e. covering issues such as cognitive cost, difficulty, level of demand for a user/learner).

CL4LC aims at investigating a complementary standpoint which has long attracted great interest in the Computational Linguistics community. This is focused on 'processing' aspects related to linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject.

The objective of the workshop is to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modeling of linguistic complexity, with a particular emphasis on  research questions such as:

whether, and to what extent, a machine and human subject perspective can be combined or share commonalities; whether, and to what extent, linguistic complexity metrics specific for the human subject perspective can be extended for handling complexity for machine and vice versa; whether, and to what extent, linguistic phenomena hampering human processing correlate with difficulties in the automatic processing of language.

Despite the two perspectives have been separately treated, the interest for the “processing” aspects of linguistic complexity is shared by several initiatives and workshops within the NLP community where the emphasis has been put more on the achievement of specific tasks than on an overt reflection of linguistic complexity underlying the treated phenomena. From the machine point of view, this is the case, for instance, of initiatives focusing on linguistic complexity raised by e.g. the automatic processing of typologically different languages or language varieties deviant with respect to the standard language or by the challenges of parsing languages with morphology richer than English, or non-canonical varieties of language (e.g. spoken language, the language of social media, historical data etc.).

From the human subject perspective the attention is directed to what is complex (i.e. difficult) for a speaker, hearer, reader, learner with the aim of both modeling the cognitive processing underlying language usage and developing human-oriented applications. This is the case e.g. of computational linguistics methods devoted to unravel the difficulties in online language processing or to build applications to improve text accessibility in different scenarios, e.g. education, social inclusion.

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List of Topics

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We encourage the submission of long and short research papers including, but not limited to the following topics:

Detection and Measurement of Linguistic Complexity:

- methods to measure and modeling human comprehension difficulty, in terms of e.g. Dependency Locality and Surprisal frameworks;

- methods to measure complexity in linguistic systems with respect to different linguistic dimensions (e.g. morphology, syntax);

- methods to measure the distance between texts and learners' competences, according to their literacy skills, native language or language impairments;

- methods and models to measure text quality, in terms e.g. of grammaticality, style, accessibility, readability;

- methods to measure the distance between training corpora and texts in machine learning perspective;

- approaches to compute the processing perplexity of machine learning systems.

Processing of Linguistic Complexity:

- models of human language acquisition in specific linguistic environments, e.g. atypical language acquisition scenarios, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), learning of domain specific sub-languages;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving human understanding, e.g. text simplification and normalization to improve human comprehension;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving machine processing, e.g. text simplification for machine translation, word reordering to improve semantic and syntactic parsing;

- experimental approaches to CL4LC: experimental platforms and designs, experimental methods, resources;

- automatic processing of non-canonical languages and cross-lingual model transfer approaches; NLP tools and resources for CL4LC; Vision papers discussing the link between human and machine oriented perspectives on linguistic complexity.

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Submissions

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We invite submissions of both long and short papers, including opinion statements. All of the papers will be included in conference proceedings, this time in electronic form only.

Long papers may consist of up to eight pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Short papers may consist of up to four pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Authors of accepted papers will be given additional space in the camera-ready version to reflect space needed for changes stemming from reviewers comments.

Papers shall be submitted in English, anonymised with regard to the authors and/or their institution (no author-identifying information on the title page nor anywhere in the paper), including referencing style as usual. Authors should also ensure that identifying meta-information is removed from files submitted for review.

Papers must conform to official COLING 2016 style guidelines, which are available in coling2016.zip. coling2016.zip has LaTeX files, Microsoft Word template file, and sample PDF file.

Submission and reviewing will be managed online by the START system. The only accepted format for submitted papers is in Adobe's PDF. Submissions must be uploaded on the START system (to be anounced soon) by the submission deadlines.

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Important Dates

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June 2016: First call for workshop papers September 25, 2016: Workshop paper due October 16, 2016: Notification of acceptance October 30, 2016: Camera-ready due November 30, 2016: Official proceedings publication date December 11, 2016: Workshop date

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Program committee

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

Delphine Bernhard (LilPa, France)

Nicoletta Calzolari (European Language Resources Association (ELRA), France) Angelo Cangelosi, (Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, UK) Benoît Crabbé (Université Paris 7, INRIA, France) Matthew Crocker (Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany) Scott Crossley (Georgia State University, USA) Rodolfo Delmonte (Department of Computer Science, Università Ca’ Foscari, Italy) Piet Desmet (KULeuven, Belgium) Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Cédrick Fairon (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Marcello Ferro (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Nuria Gala (Aix-Marseille Université, France) Ted Gibson (MIT, USA) Itziar Gonzalez-Dios (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Alex Housen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh, UK) Kristopher Kyle (Georgia State University, USA) Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa, Italy) Annie Louis (University of Essex, UK) Xiaofei Lu (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Ryan Mcdonald (Google) Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany) Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of Washington, USA, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, CA) Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden) Gabriele Pallotti (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Magali Paquot (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Katerina Pastra (Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Greece) Vito Pirrelli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Barbara Plank (University of Groningen, Netherlands) Massimo Poesio (University of Essex, UK) Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Advaith Siddharthan (University of Aberdeen, UK) Paul Smolensky (John Hopkins University, USA) Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KULeuven, Belgium) Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii (University of Tokyo, Japan) Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Labs) Sara Tonelli (FBK, Trento, Italy) Sowmya Vajjala (Iowa State University, USA) Aline Villavicencio (Institute of Informatics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Elena Volodina (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) Daniel Wiechmann (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Victoria Yaneva (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

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Organisers

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Dominique Brunato,  Felice Dell'Orletta,  Giulia Venturi

    ItaliaNLP Lab @ Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale 'A. Zampolli', Pisa (Italy)

Thomas François

    CENTAL, IL&C, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

Philippe Blache

    Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS & Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence (France)

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Contact

=======

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to: cl4lc.ws@gmail.com

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Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-v)

https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home

Workshop co-lated with coling (the 26th International Conference on

Computational Linguistics, Osaka, Japan), December 12, 2016

Invited speaker :  Chris Biemann (Technische Universität, Darmstadt)

We are pleased to announce the 5th Workshop on ‘Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon’ (Cogalex-V), taking place just before coling (Osaka, Japan), december 12, 2016.

1        Context and background

The way we look at the lexicon (creation and use) has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. While in the past being considered as an appendix to grammar, the lexicon has now moved to centre stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without it. Also, rather than considering it as a static entity (database view), dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, akin to the human brain, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time.

Linguists work on products, while psychologists and computer scientists deal with processes. They decompose the task into a set of subtasks, i.e. modules between  which information flows. There are inputs, outputs and processes in between. A typical task in language processing is to go from meanings to sound or vice versa, the two extremes of language production and language understanding. Since this mapping is hardly ever direct, various intermediate steps or layers (syntax, morphology) are necessary.

Most of the work done by psycholinguists has dealt with the information flow from meaning (or concepts) to sound or the other way around. What has not been addressed though is the creation of a map of the mental lexicon, that is a  represention of the way how words are organized or connected.

In this respect WordNet and Roget's Thesaurus are probably closest to what one can expect these days. This being said, to find a word in a resource one has to reduce the search space (entire lexicon) and this is done via the knowledge one has at the onset of search. While the information stored in the lexicon is a product, its access is clearly a (cognitive, i.e. knowledge-based) process.

1.1      Goal

The goal of Cogalex is to provide a forum for researchers in NLP, psychologists, computational lexicographers and users of lexical resources to share their knowledge and needs concerning the construction, organization and use of a lexicon by people (lexical access) and machines (NLP, IR, data-mining).

Like in the past (2004, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014), we will invite researchers to address various unsolved problems, by putting this time stronger emphasis though on distributional semantics (DS). Indeed, we would like to see work showing the relevance of DS as a cognitive model of the lexicon. The interest in distributional approaches has grown considerably over the last few year, both in computational linguistics and cognitive sciences. A further boost has been provided by the recent hype around deep learning and neural embeddings. While all these approaches seem to have great potential, their added value to address cognitive and semantic aspects of the lexicon still needs to be shown.

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and electronic dictionaries, as well as on any aspect relevant to the achieve a better understanding of the mental lexicon and semantic memory.We solicit contributions including but not limited to the topics listed here below, topics, which can be considered from any of the following points of view:

• (computational, corpus) 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.
  
  

We also plan to organize a “friendly competition” for corpus-based models of lexical networks and navigation, i.e. lexical access (see below).

1.2      Possible Topics

1.2.1   Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

• What does a language producer start out with and how does this input relate to the target form? (meaning, collocation, topically related, etc.)
• 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)?
• Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
• Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
• Distributional semantics (count models, neural embeddings, etc. )
• Neurocomputational theories of content representation.
• Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of view (clustering, topical structure)
• Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
• Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information concerning words, organization of words)
• 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
• Search based on sound, meaning or associations
• Search (simple query vs. multiple words)
• Search-space determination based on user's knowledge, meta-knowledge and cognitive state (information available at the onset, knowledge concerning the relationship between the input and the target word, ...)
• Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
• Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used by people)
• Interface problems, data-visualization
• Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations (reading between the lines, subliminal communication).

1.2.2   The meaning of words

1.2.3    Structure of the lexicon

1.2.4     Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

1.2.5     Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies), interface issues,

2        Description of the shared tasks associated with the workshop.

We plan to organize a “friendly competition” of corpus-based models of lexical access and semantic/associative relations between words.  This competition will be based on an existing, publicly available data set.  We provide an official separation of the data set into training, development and test data as well as a detailed specification of the task and evaluation metrics (implemented as easy-to-use scripts), so that the results obtained by different participants can be compared directly.

The precise design of the task has not been finalized yet, but it will be based on one or more of the following data sets:

• free association norms from the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT)
• free association norms from the University of South Florida (USF)
• prime-target pairs from the Semantic Priming Project (SPP)
• semantically related word pairs from EVALution 1.0 (https://github.com/esantus/EVALution)

3        INVITED SPEAKER

Chris Biemann, leader of the LT research group in Darmstadt, and well known for his work on graph-based-approaches for NLP, has kindly accepted to give the invited presentation.

4        Deadlines.

• September 25:   Submission deadline
• October 16:       Author notification
• October 30:       Camera ready due by Authors
• November 6:     Proceedings due by Workshop Organisers to Workshop & Publication Chairs.
• December 12 :   Workshop

5        Submission

The submissions should be written in English and be anonymized for review. They must comply with the style-sheets provided by Coling: http://coling2016.anlp.jp/#instructions

• Long papers may consist of 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references;
• Short paper may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references
• The respective final versions may be up to 9 pages for long papers and 5 pages for short ones. In both cases the number of pages for references is limited to 3 pages

Papers should be in PDF format and have to be submitted electronically via the START submission system (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/ CogALex-V/). You probably have to register first, and then choose: submission, i.e. (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/CogALex-V/user/scmd.cgi?scmd=submitPaperCustom&pageid=0).

6       Organizers.

• Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France)
• Alessandro Lenci (Computational Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pisa,, Italy)
• Stefan Evert (FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)

7       Contact persons

For general questions, please get in touch with Michael Zock (michael.zock@lif.univ-mrs.fr), for questions concerning the shared task, send an e-mail to Stefan Evert (stefan.evert@fau.de)

8       Program committee

Bieman Chris (Technische Universität, Darmstadt, Germany)

Babych, Bogdan (University of Leeds, UK)

Brysbaert, Marc (Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium)

Cristea Dan ('Al. I. Cuza' University, Iasi, Romania)

deDeyne Simon (University of Adelaide, Australia)

de Melo Gerard (IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)

Evert, Stefan (University of Erlangen, Germany)

Ferret Olivier (CEA LIST, France)

Fontenelle Thierry (CDT, Luxemburg)

Gala Nuria (University of Aix-Marseille, France)

Geeraerts Dirk (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Granger Sylviane (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

Grefenstette Gregory (Inria, Paris, France)

Hirst Graeme (University of Toronto, Canada)

Hovy Ed (CMU, Pittsburgh, USA)

Hsieh, Shu-Kai (National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan)

Joyce Terry (Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)

Lafourcade, Matthieu (LIRMM, université de Montepellier, France

Lapalme Guy (RALI, University of Montreal, Canada

Lebani Gianluca (University of Pisa, Italy)

Lenci Alessandro (University of Pisa, Italy)

L'Homme Marie Claude (University of Montreal, Canada)

Mititelu Verginica (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)

Navigli, Roberto  (Sapienza, Rome, Italy)

Paradis Carita (Centre for Languages and Literature Lund University, Sweden)

Pihlevar, Taher  (university of Cambridge, UK)

Pirrelli, Vito (ILC, Pisa, Italy)

Polguère Alain (ATILF-CNRS, Nancy, France)

Purver, Matthew (King's College, London, UK)

Ramisch Carlos (AMU, Marseille, France)

Rayson Paul (UCREL, university of Lancaster, UK

Rosso, Paol (NLEL, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)

Sahlgren, Magnus (Gavagai Inc. & SICS, Sweden)

Schulte im Walde Sabine (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Schwab Didier (LIG, Grenoble, France)

Sharoff Serge (University of Leeds, UK)

Stella Massimo (Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, university of Southhampton, UK)

Tokunaga Takenobu (TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)

Tufis Dan (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)

Zarcone, Alessandra (Saarland University, Germany)

Zock Michael (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France)

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(Dis)Fluency2017: Fluency and disfluency across languages and language varieties

15-17 February 2017
Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

Fluency and disfluency have attracted a great deal of attention in different areas of linguistics such as language acquisition or psycholinguistics. They have been investigated through a wide range of methodological and theoretical frameworks, including corpus linguistics, experimental pragmatics, perception studies and natural language processing, with applications in the domains of language learning, teaching and testing, human/machine communication and business communication.

Spoken and signed languages are produced and comprehended online, with typically very little time to plan ahead. As a result, they are often characterized by features such as (filled and unfilled) pauses, discourse markers, repeats and self-repairs, which can be said to reflect on-going mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The role of these items is ambivalent, as they can both be a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two faces of the same phenomenon.

Within the frame of a research project entitled ?Fluency and disfluency markers. A multimodal contrastive perspective? (see http://www.uclouvain.be/en-415256.html), the universities of Louvain and Namur have been involved in a large-scale usage-based study of (dis)fluency markers in spoken French, L1 and L2 English, and French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. To close this five-year research project, an international conference will be organized in Louvain-la-Neuve on the subject of fluency and disfluency across languages and language varieties.

The conference aims at bringing together scholars and researchers from different disciplines in order to discuss and confront different conceptions and perspectives on fluency and disfluency, in both spoken and sign languages. We particularly welcome abstracts for oral or poster presentations on the following topics:

        ?  theoretical insights gained from the study of fluency and disfluency;

        ?  methodological issues raised by the investigation of (dis)fluency markers;

        ?  acquisitional perspectives on (dis)fluency and pedagogical implications;

        ?  contrastive analyses of (dis)fluency markers;

        ?  variationist approaches to fluency and disfluency;

        ?  (dis)fluency in the Sign Language of native, near-native and late signers;

        ?  applications of fluency research (NLP, testing, etc.)

Keynote Speakers:

Martin Corley, University of Edinburgh
Sandra Götz, Justus Liebig University, Giessen
Helena Moniz, Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering: Research and Development, Lisbon
David Quinto-Pozos, The University of Texas at Austin

Abstracts (1000 words, excluding references) should be submitted via Easy chair at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=disfluency2017

Important dates:

        ? Deadline submission of abstracts: 15 September 2016

        ? Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2016

        ? Early-bird registration: 30 November 2016

        ? Deadline registration: 15 January 2017

Scientific committee

Nicolas Ballier (Université Paris Diderot)
Roxane Bertrand (Université Aix-Marseille)
Philippe Blache (Université Aix-Marseille)
Catherine Bolly (Universität zu Köln)
Hans Rutger Bosker (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
Maria Candéa (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris)
Sylvie De Cock (Université catholique de Louvain)
Nivja de Jong (Utrecht University)
Robert Eklund (Linköping University)
Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark)
Thomas François (Université catholique de Louvain)
Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya (University of Michigan, USA)
Jonathan Ginzburg (Université Paris Diderot)
Pascale Goutéraux (Université Paris Diderot)
Heather Hilton (Université de Lyon 2)
Judit Kormos (University of Lancaster)
Anne Lacheret (Université Paris Ouest)
Bertille Pallaud (Université Aix-Marseille)
Laurent Prévot (Université Aix-Marseille)
Helmer Strik (Radboud Universiteit)
Parvaneh Tavakoli (University of Reading, UK)
Gunnel Tottie (University of Zurich)
Mieke Van Herreweghe (Universiteit Gent)
Ioana Vasilescu (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris)
Myriam Vermeerbergen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Organizing committee

Liesbeth Degand (UCL)
Cédrick Fairon (UCL)
Gaëtanelle Gilquin (UCL)
Sylviane Granger (UCL)
Laurence Meurant (UNamur)
Anne Catherine Simon (UCL)
George Christodoulides (UCL)
Ludivine Crible (UCL)
Amandine Dumont (UCL)
Iulia Grosman (UCL)
Ingrid Notarrigo (UNamur)
Lucie Rousier-Vercruyssen (UCL & Université de Neuchâtel)

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HSCMA Hands Free Communication and Microphone Arrays

March 1–3, 2017 • San Francisco, CA, USA

Call for Papers

The Fifth Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays will

be held on March 1-3, 2017 at the Google Offices in downtown San Francisco, California.

The workshop is devoted to presenting recent advances in distant-talking speech communication

and human/machine interaction with an emphasis on multi-microphone systems. It will bring

together researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in distant speech

and speaker recognition, speech enhancement, high-quality sound capture, and multiple-input/

multiple-output (MIMO) acoustic signal processing. Demonstrations of experimental systems,

applications, and prototypes are especially welcome.

HSCMA 2017 is being held with technical sponsorship by the IEEE Signal Processing Society

and will immediately precede ICASSP 2017.

Workshop Topics

Papers in all areas of distant-talking human/human and human/machine interaction are

encouraged, including:

• Multi-channel and single-channel approaches for speech acquisition, noise suppression,

source localization and separation, dereverberation, echo cancellation, and acoustic event

detection

• Speech and speaker recognition technology for hands-free scenarios, including robust

acoustic modeling, novel features, feature enhancement, dereverberation, and model

adaptation

• Microphone array technology and architectures, especially for distant-talking speech

recognition and acoustic scene analysis

• Multi-channel rendering, including spatial audio for immersive environments, improvements

to intelligibility in noisy environments, and privacy of speech communications

• Speech corpora for training and evaluation of distant-talking speech systems

• Applications based on microphone arrays and hands-free speech systems.

Special Sessions

The program will also feature special sessions on new or emerging topics of interest. Proposals

for special sessions must include the session title, rationale, outline, and a list of four invited

papers.

Paper & demo submission

The workshop technical program will consist of oral presentations, poster sessions, and

demonstrations. Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers up to four pages,

with a fifth page permitted for references only. Submissions for proposed demonstrations may be

up to two pages in length. Manuscripts should be prepared using the same format as for ICASSP

submissions using the ICASSP author kit for LaTeX or Word. Accepted papers will be published

in IEEEXplore.

Committee

General Co-chairs Jerome Bellegarda, Apple Malcolm Slaney, Google Ivan Tashev, Microsoft Technical Program Chairs Shoko Araki, NTT Jacob Benesty, INRS-EMT, University of Quebec Bastiaan Kleijn, Victoria University of Wellington Mike Seltzer, Microsoft

Finance Chair Mark Thomas, Dolby

Publicity/Publications Chair Ozlem Kalinli,

Sony Demo/Special Sessions Chair Shiva Sundaram,

Amazon Local Arrangements Chair Horacio Franco, SRI

Important Dates
Special Session Proposals Due ..........................September 1, 2016 Notification for Special Sessions ........................September 15, 2016 Paper Submission Deadline .........................December 13, 2016 Final Upload of Submitted Papers .........................December 18, 2016 Notification of Paper Decisions .............................January 20, 2017 Camera Ready Papers Due .............................January 23, 2017

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2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2017)
New Orleans, USA
March 5-9, 2017

http://www.ieee-icassp2017.org/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Just as music and rhythm are the heartbeats of life, signal and information processing are the heartbeats of IT development. Having both of them capture the attendees' hearts and souls is the goal of the 42th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2017) which will be held at the Hilton Conference Center, in the jazz-music capital of the world (New Orleans, USA) on March 5-9, 2017. ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference provides, both for researchers and developers, an engaging forum to exchange ideas and proposed new developments in this field. The theme of ICASSP 2017 is 'The Internet of Signals' which is the real technology and world behind the Internet of Things. The conference will feature world-class international speakers, tutorials, exhibits, lectures and poster sessions from around the world. Topics include but are not limited to:
+ Audio and acoustic signal processing
+ Sensor array & multichannel signal processing
+ Bio-imaging and biomedical signal processing
+ Signal processing education
+ Design & implementation of signal processing systems
+ Signal processing for communication & networking
+ Image, video & multidimensional signal processing
+ Signal processing theory & methods
+ Industry technology tracks
+ Signal processing for Big Data
+ Information forensics and security
+ Internet of Things and RFID
+ Machine learning for signal processing
+ Speech processing
+ Multimedia signal processing
+ Spoken language processing
+ Remote Sensing and signal processing
+ Signal Processing for Brain Machine Interface
+ Signal Processing for Smart Systems
+ Signal Processing for Cyber Security

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. A selection of best papers will be made by the ICASSP 2017 committee upon recommendations from Technical Committees.

SPECIAL SESSIONS
Special-session proposals should be submitted by July 11, 2016. Proposals for special sessions must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information for the session chair, a list of authors, and a tentative title and abstract. Additional information can be found at the ICASSP 2017 website (http://www.ieee-icassp2017.org).

TUTORIALS
Will be held on March 5, 2017. Brief proposals should be submitted by September 15, 2016. Proposal for tutorials must include a title, an outline of the tutorial and its motivation, a two-page CV of the presenter(s), and a short description of the material to be covered.

SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS
Authors of IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL) papers will be given the opportunity to present their work at ICASSP 2017, subject to space availability and approval by the ICASSP Technical Program Chairs. SPL papers published between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016 are eligible for presentation at ICASSP 2017. Because they are already peer-reviewed and published, SPL papers presented at ICASSP 2017 will neither be reviewed nor included in the ICASSP proceedings. Requests for presentation of SPL papers should be made through the ICASSP 2017 website on or before December 12, 2016. Approved requests for presentation must have one author/presenter register for the conference.

DEMOS
Offers a perfect stage to showcase innovative ideas in all technical areas of interest at ICASSP. All demo sessions are highly interactive and visible. Please refer to the ICASSP 2017 website for additional information regarding demo submission.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
  Special-Session proposals:                    July 11, 2016
  Tutorials proposals:                          September 15, 2016
  Notification of Special Session acceptance:   August 15, 2016
  Notification of Tutorial acceptance:          October 15, 2016
  Submission of regular papers:                 September 12, 2016
  Signal Processing Letters:                    November 21, 2016
  Notification of paper acceptance:             December 12, 2016
  Author registration:                          January 9, 2017

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Workshop on Speech perception and production across the lifespan (SPPL 2017)

26/27 April 2017, UCL, London, UK

Workshop website: www.sppl2017.org

Contact email: sppl2017@pals.ucl.ac.uk

Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2017

Workshop description

Although the focus of much research into speech development has been to establish when ?adult-like? performance is reached (with young adult speakers taken as a ?norm?), it is increasingly clear that speech perception and production abilities are undergoing constant change across the lifespan as a result of physical changes, exposure to language variation, and cognitive changes at various periods of our lives.  Few studies have examined changes in speech production or perception measures across the lifespan using common materials and experimental designs. Lifespan studies can further our understanding of the extent and direction of these changes for key measures of speech communication and of how these changes interact with cognitive, social or sensory factors. Such knowledge is essential to refine and extend models of speech perception and production.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for interactions between researchers from areas of speech and language sciences research that may be focused on different developmental stages, e.g. early development and ageing. It will also discuss methodological issues, such as how to overcome the difficulty of developing tests that are equally appropriate for children, younger and older adults, and will consider ?missing gaps? in the developmental trajectory, e.g. data for older teenagers and middle-aged adults.

Invited speakers

Paul FOULKES (University of York)

Sandra GORDON-SALANT (University of Maryland)

Mitchell SOMMERS (Washington University)

Hayo TERBAND (University of Utrecht)

Call for papers

We invite submissions for oral and poster presentations. Presentations can include or consist of demonstrations of tests and software. We expect submitted papers to report experimental and modelling studies relating to more than one age group or longitudinal work. See further detail of topics at http://sppl2017.org/call-for-papers

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The Phonetics Laboratory of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Málaga are happy to announce the upcoming celebration of the International Conference Subsidia: Tools and Resources for Speech Sciences, which will take place on June 21-23, 2017, in the city of Málaga (Costa del Sol, Spain).
During this quarter of 2016 we will be sending further information concerning the Conference, as well as its website address.
If you have any questions, please contact Juana Gil: juana.gil@cchs.csic.es, or José Villa:jovillavilla@hotmail.com. 

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