The 4th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP 2016) invites researchers to submit poster presentations. SLSP 2016 will be held in Pilsen (Czech Republic) on October 11-12, 2016. See 

http://grammars.grlmc.com/SLSP2016/

Poster presentations are intended to enhance informal interactions with the conference participants, at the same time allowing for in-depth discussion.

TOPICS

Presentations displaying novel work in progress on the employment of statistical models (including machine learning) in language and speech processing are invited. Posters do not need to show final research results. Work that might lead to new interesting developments is welcome.

KEY DATES

Poster submission deadline: September 4, 2016
Notification of poster acceptance or rejection: September 11, 2016

SUBMISSION

Please submit a .pdf abstract through:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp2016

It should contain the title, author(s) and affiliation, and should not exceed 500 words.

PRESENTATION

Posters will be allocated 10 minutes each in the programme for oral presentation. Moreover, they will remain hanging out during the whole conference for discussion.

PUBLICATION

Posters will not appear in the LNCS/LNAI proceedings volume of SLSP 2016. However, they will be eligible for submission to the post-conference journal special issue in Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier, JCR 2014 impact factor: 1.753).

REGISTRATION

At least one author of each accepted poster must register to the conference by September 27, 2016. The registration fare is reduced: 240 Euro. It gives the same rights all other conference participants have (attendance, copy of the proceedings volume, lunches...). Contributors of regular papers who in addition get a poster accepted must register for the latter independently.

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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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Let's Discuss: Learning Methods for Dialogue? ?

NIPS 2016 Workshop

10 December 2016

Barcelona, Spain

http://letsdiscussnips2016.weebly.com/

Overview

Humans conversing naturally with machines is a staple of science fiction. Building agents capable of mutually coordinating their states and actions via communication, in conjunction with human agents, would be one of the greatest engineering feats of human history. In addition to the tremendous economic potential of this technology, the ability to converse appears intimately related to the overall goal of AI. 

Although dialogue has been an active area within the linguistics and NLP communities for decades, the wave of optimism in the machine learning community has inspired increased interest from researchers, companies, and foundations.  The NLP community has enthusiastically embraced and innovated neural information processing systems, resulting in substantial relevant activity published outside of NIPS.  The goal of this forum is increased interaction (dialogue!) between these communities at NIPS to accelerate creativity and progress.

Call For Papers

The workshop will consist of a mixture of invited talks and contributed talks, with panel sessions.  To avoid the 'mini-conference effect', there is no poster session.

We anticipate a total of six contributed talks of 20 minutes each, distributed evenly over the following three high-level areas:

-          Being data-driven.

• What can and cannot be done with ?offline evaluation on fixed data sets?  How can we facilitate development of these offline evaluation tasks in the public domain?
• What is the role of online evaluation (e.g. as a benchmark?), and how would we make it accessible to the general community?
• What can be done with simulated environments, or tasks where machines communicate solely with each other?

-          Build complete applications.

• Do we need to build a irreducible end-to-end system, or can we define modules with abstractions that do not leak?
• ?How do we ease the burden on the human designer of specifying or bootstrapping the system?

-          Model innovation.

• What are the requisite capabilities for learning architectures, ?and where are the deficiencies in our current architectures?
• How can we beneficially incorporate linguistic knowledge into our architectures?

The papers should be typeset according to NIPS format.

The paper should not exceed more than 4 pages (including references).

The authors of all the accepted papers will be expected to give a 20 minute talk (15 for the talk + 5 min for questions) and participate in a panel session.

Accepted papers will be displayed on the website.

There will be no posters.

Key Dates

-          10/09/2016: Submissions Due

-          10/23/2016: Acceptance Notification

Organizers:

-          Hal Daume III

-          Paul Mineiro

-          Amanda Stent

-          Jason Weston

Paper submission and more information : http://letsdiscussnips2016.weebly.com/

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First Call for Papers

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

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

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

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

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.

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

List of Topics

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

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.

===========

Submissions

===========

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.

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

Important Dates

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

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

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

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)

==========

Organisers

==========

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)

=======

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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11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
 
LATA 2017
 
Umeå, Sweden
 
March 6-10, 2017
 
Organized by:
           
Department of Computing Science
Umeå University
 
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2017/
*************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field organized by Rovira i Virgili University since 2002, LATA 2017 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas.
 
VENUE:
 
LATA 2017 will take place in Umeå, a university town in North Sweden which was European Capital of Culture in 2014. The venue will be the Faculty of Science and Technology.
 
SCOPE:
 
Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
algebraic language theory
algorithms for semi-structured data mining
algorithms on automata and words
automata and logic
automata for system analysis and programme verification
automata networks
automatic structures
codes
combinatorics on words
computational complexity
concurrency and Petri nets
data and image compression
descriptional complexity
foundations of finite state technology
foundations of XML
grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, unification, categorial, etc.)
grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
graphs and graph transformation
language varieties and semigroups
language-based cryptography
mathematical and logical foundations of programming methodologies
parallel and regulated rewriting
parsing
patterns
power series
string processing algorithms
symbolic dynamics
term rewriting
transducers
trees, tree languages and tree automata
weighted automata
 
STRUCTURE:
 
LATA 2017 will consist of:
 
invited talks
invited tutorials
peer-reviewed contributions
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be completed):
 
Eric Allender (Rutgers University, Piscataway, US)
Christel Baier (Technical University of Dresden, DE)
Armin Biere (Johannes Kepler University Linz, AT)
Avrim Blum (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US)
Liming Cai (University of Georgia, Athens, US)
Alessandro Cimatti (Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, IT)
Rocco De Nicola (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, IT)
Rodney Downey (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)
Frank Drewes (Umeå University, SE)
Zoltán Fülöp (University of Szeged, HU)
Gregory Z. Gutin (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Lane A. Hemaspaandra (University of Rochester, US)
Dorit S. Hochbaum (University of California, Berkeley, US)
Marek Karpinski (University of Bonn, DE)
Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Ottawa, CA)
Lars M. Kristensen (Bergen University College, NO)
Kim G. Larsen (Aalborg University, DK)
Axel Legay (INRIA, Rennes, FR)
Leonid Libkin (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Carsten Lutz (University of Bremen, DE)
João Marques Silva (University of Lisbon, PT)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, ES, chair)
Mitsunori Ogihara (University of Miami, Coral Gables, US)
Arlindo Oliveira (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, PT)
David Parker (University of Birmingham, UK)
Madhusudan Parthasarathy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, US)
Doron A. Peled (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, IL)
Jean-Éric Pin (Paris Diderot University, FR)
Wojciech Rytter (University of Warsaw, PL)
Kunihiko Sadakane (University of Tokyo, JP)
Jens Stoye (Bielefeld University, DE)
Wing-Kin Sung (National University of Singapore, SG)
Dimitrios M. Thilikos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, GR)
Ioannis G. Tollis (University of Crete, Heraklion, GR)
Bianca Truthe (University of Giessen, DE)
Frits Vaandrager (Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Yonas Demeke (Umeå)
Frank Drewes (Umeå, co-chair)
Petter Ericson (Umeå)
Anna Jonsson (Umeå)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Manuel Jesús Parra Royón (Granada)
Bianca Truthe (Giessen)
Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)
Niklas Zechner (Umeå)
 
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, references, proofs, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).
 
Submissions have to be uploaded to:
 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2017
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the 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 substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.
 
REGISTRATION:
 
The registration form can be found at:
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2017/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Paper submission: October 21, 2016
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: November 25, 2016
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: December 5, 2016
Early registration: December 5, 2016
Late registration: February 20, 2017
Submission to the journal special issue: June 10, 2017
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
florentinalilica.voicu (at) urv.cat
 
POSTAL ADDRESS:
 
LATA 2017
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain
 
Phone: +34 977 559 543+34 977 559 543
Fax: +34 977 558 386
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
 
Umeå universitet
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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 ************************************
Call for Papers
************************************
Workshop (In)Coherence of Discourse 4

March 30th and 31th, 2017
LORIA - Nancy

http://discours.loria.fr
************************************

The fourth (In)Coherence of discourse workshop will be held in the
University of Lorraine on March 30th and 31th, 2017.
The objective of the workshop is to discuss the latest advances in the
modelling of discourses, in particular the kind held with pathological
patients (e.g. schizophrenics). The adopted modelling paradigm is that
of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics
and logic while also making ties to the philosophy of language.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
discourse comprehension and representation
experimental studies of non standard dialogues
formal accounts of dialogues
logic and reasoning
semantics / pragmatics interfaces
goals, intentions and commitments in dialogues
Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics        mental illness and cognitive (in)coherence
radical interpretation
logicality and cognitive (in)coherence

Like the previous (In)Coherence of discourse workshops, the fourth
edition is organised by the SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language: Analysis
and Modelling) project. The SLAM project aims to systematize the study
of pathological conversations as part of an interdisciplinary approach
combining Psychology, Linguistics, Computer Science and Philosophy. It
focuses particularly on conversations involving people with psychiatric
disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder).

Important dates:
        * January 9th, 2017: Submission deadline
        * February 6th, 2017: Notification
        * March 30th-31th, 2017: Workshop

Submission:
Authors are invited to submit a two-page PDF abstract (including
references), anonymously prepared for review, in English or French,
using easychair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=incoherence4

Keynote speakers:
Alain Lecomte, professeur émérite Université Paris 8
Ellen Breitholtz and Christine Howes, University of Gothenburg

Scientific committee:
Maxime Amblard - Université de Lorraine
Nicholas Asher - CNRS Toulouse
Valérie Aucouturier - Université Paris Descartes
Patrick Blackburn - University of Roskilde
Mathilde Dargnat - Université de Lorraine
Felicity Deamer - Durham University
Hans van Ditmarsch - CNRS Nancy
Bart Geurts - University of Nijmegen
Philippe de Groote - INRIA Nancy
Klaus von Heusinguer - Universität zu Köln
Michel Musiol - Université de Lorraine
Denis Paperno - CNRS Nancy
Sylvain Pogodalla - INRIA Nancy
Manuel Rebuschi - Université de Lorraine
Christian Retoré - Université de Montpellier
Laure Vieu - CNRS Toulouse
Sam Wilkinson - Durham University


Organisation committee:
Maxime Amblard (Loria, INRIA, CNRS, Université de Lorraine)
Stefan Jokulsson (LHSP-Archives Poincaré, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)
Michel Musiol (ATILF, UFR SHS Nancy, CNRS, Université de Lorraine)
Marie-Hélène Pierre (ATILF, UFR SHS Nancy, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)
Manuel Rebuschi (LHSP-Archives Poincaré, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)

Supported by: CNRS, Université de Lorraine, INRIA, MSH Lorraine,
LORIA, LHSP? Archives Henri-Poincaré and ATILF

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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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*First Call for Papers and Workshops: Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2017*

University of Cologne, 12-14 June 2017

The Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) conference is an interdisciplinary forum
bringing together researchers interested in all areas of phonetics and phonology, both
theoretical and applied, with a special focus on Laboratory Phonology. The series covers
a wide variety of topics including tone and intonation, phonological theory, language
acquisition, linguistic typology, and methodologies from fields as diverse as
psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and speech technology.

The Cologne PaPE conference, scheduled for June 12-14 2017, complements this broad
mission with a more specific scientific aim, namely to contribute towards a fundamental
integration of the fields of phonetics and phonology, highlighting the intrinsic
relationship between the two. Submissions in any area of phonetics and phonology are
welcome with special consideration given to papers addressing the conference's
integrative goal.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Jonathan Barnes (Boston University)

Bettina Braun (Universität Konstanz)

Mirjam Ernestus (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)

Maria Josep Solé (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Satellite workshops will be held on June 11 (whole day) and June 14 (afternoon) 2017.

Conference web site: http://pape2017.uni-koeln.de/


Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: December 9, 2016
Notification of acceptance: January 21, 2017
Submission of revised abstracts: February 25, 2017
PaPE 2017 Conference: June 12-14, 2017


Submission Information
Abstracts should be written in English and not exceed one page of text (A4). In addition,
references, examples and/or figures can optionally be included on a second page.
Abstracts can be submitted from November 1 until December 9, 2016, using the EasyChair
link that will be provided on the conference website. Abstracts may be submitted either
for a 'talk/poster', or as a 'poster only'. Authors may submit one abstract as first
author and up to three abstracts as a co-author.


Call for Satellite Workshop proposals

University of Cologne, June 11 (whole day) and June 14 (afternoon) 2017

The PaPE 2017 Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops to be held in
conjunction with the conference. There is no restriction regarding topics, as long as
there is a clear relevance to phonetics and phonology. Rooms for the workshops will be
provided.
The workshop proposal should be sent to pape-2017@uni-koeln.de by October 1 and should
not exceed two A4 pages and include information on the topic, the organizers (including
affiliation and e-mail address) and the paper selection process.


PaPE Organization
Martine Grice, Stefan Baumann, Francesco Cangemi, Anna Bruggeman (University of Cologne)


Contact
For enquiries please contact us at pape-2017@uni-koeln.de.

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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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Paris,  29 juin - 30 juin 2017

Organisées pour la première fois à Paris en 2005 puis rééditées successivement à Grenoble (2007), Aix-en-Provence (2009), Strasbourg (2011), Liège  (2013) et Montpellier (2015), les Journées de Phonétique Clinique (JPC) reviennent à Paris en 2017.

Elles réunissent des chercheurs et des ingénieurs mais aussi des médecins (ORL, phoniatres, chirurgiens,…) ainsi que des orthophonistes s’intéressant tous aux questions liées aux pathologies de la voix, de la parole et du langage.

Les 7^èmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique,  se dérouleront à Paris du 29 juin au 30 juin 2017, organisées par le Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie (LPP-UMR7018), l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris3, l’Université Paris Descartes, l’Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou HEGP (service ORL et Unité d’exploration fonctionnelle des troubles de la voix, de la parole et de la déglutition), le Département Universitaire d’Orthophonie (Université Pierre et Marie Curie UPMC).

Les thèmes de ces 7^èmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique incluront, de façon non exhaustive, les problématiques suivantes :

- troubles phonétiques / phonologiques

- troubles de la production / de la perception

- troubles de la voix / de la parole

- communication verbale / non verbale

- troubles moteurs de la parole  

- Instrumentation, ressources et modélisations en phonétique clinique

Bientôt plus d’'infos...

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Speech Rhythm in L1, L2 and Learner Varieties of English

Workshop at BICLCE2017 (7^th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English) in Vigo, 28-30 September 2017

https://sites.google.com/site/rflinguistics/workshops/rhythm2017

Convenor: Robert Fuchs (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Speech rhythm has long been recognised as an important supra-segmental category of speech, yet its measurement, relevance and the theoretical soundness of the concept continue to be hotly debated. The arguably most widely supported approach considers speech rhythm to consist of a continuum ranging from (1) a syllable-timed pole, with relatively small differences in prominence between syllables, to (2) a stress-timed pole, with relatively large differences in prominence between syllables. Most L1 varieties of English are widely regarded to be more stress-timed than most L2 and learner varieties, and this is supported by a considerable amount of empirical evidence (e.g. Deterding 1994, 2001, Fuchs 2016, Gut 2005, Gut and Milde 2002, Low 1998).

Yet, upon closer inspection, many of the concepts underlying this research appear to be contested. For one, L1 varieties of English are themselves heterogeneous in their rhythm. There is, for example, regional variation, with some dialects spoken in the British Isles being more syllable-timed than others (Ferragne 2008, Ferragne and Pellegrino 2004, White and Matty 2007a, 2007b, White et al. 2007). Similarly, in L2 varieties, sociolinguistic differences such as that between acrolect and basilect might go hand in hand with a difference in speech rhythm. As for learner Englishes, while there is good evidence of the transfer of rhythmic characteristics from L1 to L2 (e.g. Dellwo et al. 2009, Gut 2009, Jang 2008, Sarmah et al. 2009), more research is needed to show that this has consequences in terms of foreign accent and accent recognition. More generally, research on speech rhythm would benefit from studies showing that quantitative measures of speech rhythm (so-called rhythm metrics) are perceptually relevant and psychologically ?real? in the sense that what is measured is reflected in a certain kind of percept. Finally, the very nature and reliability of these rhythm metrics has been discussed extensively, but arguably inconclusively, in the past years, with some researchers attempting to identify those duration-based metrics that are most reliable (White and Mattys 2007a, White et al.2007, Wiget et al. 2010), others concluding that none of them are reliable (Arvaniti 2009, 2012, Arvaniti et al. 2008), and yet others suggesting metrics that focus on acoustic correlates of prominence other than duration, such as intensity (Fuchs 2016, He 2012, Low 1998), loudness (Fuchs 2014a), f0 (Cumming 2010, 2011, Fuchs 2014b) and sonority (Galves et al. 2012).

In order to address these issues, this workshop aims to bring together researchers working on one or more of the following aspects:

• Applications of rhythm metrics that measure speech rhythm based on acoustic correlates of prominence other than duration
• Comparative tests of the validity and reliability of existing rhythm metrics
• Perceptual relevance and psychological reality of speech rhythm
• Relevance of speech rhythm in Second Language Acquisition/learner Englishes, e.g. its contribution to foreign accent as well as pedagogical approaches
• Differences in speech rhythm between varieties previously thought to be in the same 'rhythm class'
• Sociolinguistic relevance of speech rhythm in indexing e.g. lectal differences or ethnic subvarieties within the same national variety of English

Apart from addressing one or more of the issues above, papers need be concerned with (a variety of) English or a language contact situation involving English (in keeping with the scope of the conference).

The workshop will consist of full papers and work in progress reports, which will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation (plus 10 minutes for discussion). The deadline for submission of abstracts (ca. 500 words, excluding title, references and keywords) is 15 December 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January 2017. Abstracts should be sent to rfuchs@hkbu.edu.hk .

References

Arvaniti, Amalia. 2009. Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica 66(1/2): 46?63.

Arvaniti, Amalia. 2012. The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm. Journal of Phonetics 40: 351?373.

Arvaniti, Amalia, Tristie Ross, and Naja Ferjan. 2008. On the reliability of rhythm metrics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124(4): 2495.Dellwo, Volker, Francisco Gutiérrez Diez, and Nuria Gavalda. 2009. The development of measurable speech rhythm in Spanish speakers of English. In Actas de XI Simposio Internacional de Comunicacion Social, Santiago de Cuba, 594?597.

Cumming, Ruth E. 2010. The language-specific integration of pitch and duration. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

Cumming, Ruth E. 2011. Perceptually informed quantification of speech rhythm in pairwise variability indices. Phonetica 68(4): 256?277.

Deterding, David. 1994. The rhythm of Singapore English. In Proceedings of the fifth Australian international conference on speech science and technology, ed. Roberto Togneri, 316?321. Perth: Uniprint.

Deterding, David. 2001. The measurement of rhythm: A comparison of Singapore and British English. Journal of Phonetics 29: 217?230.

Ferragne, Emmanuel. 2008. Etude Phonétique des Dialectes Modernes de l?Anglais des Iles Britanniques: Vers l?Identification Automatique du Dialecte. PhD thesis. Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Ferragne, Emmanuel, and François Pellegrino. 2004. A comparative account of the suprasegmental and rhythmic features of British English dialects. Actes de Modelisations pour l?Identification des Langues, Paris, 121?126.

Fuchs, Robert. 2014a. Integrating variability in loudness and duration in a multidimensional model of speech rhythm: Evidence from Indian English and British English. In Proceedings of speech prosody 7, Dublin, ed. Nick Campbell, Dafydd Gibbon, and Daniel Hirst, 290?294.

Fuchs, Robert. 2014b. Towards a perceptual model of speech rhythm: Integrating the influence of f0 on perceived duration. In Proceedings of interspeech 2014, ed. Haizhou Li, Helen Meng, Bin Ma, Eng Siong Chng, and Lei Xie, Singapore, 1949?1953.

Fuchs, Robert. 2016. Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English: Evidence from Educated Indian English and British English. Singapore: Springer.

Galves, Antonio, Jesus Garcia, Denise Duarte, and Charlotte Galves. 2002. Sonority as a basis for rhythmic class discrimination. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2002, Aix-en-Provence, 323?326.

Gut, Ulrike. 2005. Nigerian English prosody. English World-Wide 26(2): 153?177.

Gut, Ulrike. 2009. Non-native speech. A corpus-based analysis of phonological and phonetic properties of L2 English and German. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gut, Ulrike, and Jan-Torsten Milde. 2002. The prosody of Nigerian English. In Proceedings of the speech prosody 2002 conference, ed. Bel Bell and Isabelle Marlien, 367?370. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage.

He, Lei. 2012. Syllabic intensity variations as quantification of speech rhythm: Evidence from both L1 and L2. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on speech prosody, Shanghai, 22?26 May 2012, ed. Qiuwu Ma, Hongwei Ding, and Daniel Hirst, 466?469. Shanghai: Tongji University Press.

Jang, Tae-Yeoub. 2008. Speech rhythm metrics for automatic scoring of English speech by Korean EFL learners. Malsori Speech Sounds 66: 41?59.

Low, Ee Ling. 1998. Prosodic Prominence in Singapore English. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

Sarmah, Priyankoo, Divya Verma Gogoi, and Caroline Wiltshire. 2009. Thai English. Rhythm and vowels. English World-Wide 30(2): 196?217.

White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007a. Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. Journal of Phonetics 35(4): 501?522.

White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007b. Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology 282: 237?257.

White, Laurence, Sven L. Mattys, Lucy Series, and Suzi Gage. 2007. Rhythm metrics predict rhythmic discrimination. In  Proceedings of the 16th international congress of phonetic sciences, Saarbrücken, 1009?1012.

Wiget, Klaus, Laurence White, Barbara Schuppler, Izabelle Grenon, Oleysa Rauch, and Sven L. Mattys. 2010. How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127(3): 1559?1569.

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