ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2016  »  ISCApad #220  »  Journals

ISCApad #220

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 by Chris Wellekens

7 Journals
7-1Special Issue CSL on Language and Interaction Technologies for Children

Special Issue on Language and Interaction Technologies for Children
The link:
goo.gl/CFSjTR

Description:
The purpose of this special edition of CSL is to publish the results of new research in the area of speech, text and language technology applied specifically to children?s voices, texts and applications. Children are different to adults both at the acoustic and linguistic level as well as in the way that they interact with people and technology. To address these issues appropriately, it is necessary to work across many disciplines, including cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, phonetics and linguistics, health and education.

Linguistic characteristics of children's speech are widely different from those of adults. This is manifested in their interactions, their writings and their speech. The processing of queries, texts and spoken interactions therefore opens challenging research issues on how to develop effective interaction, language, pronunciation and acoustic models for reliable processing of children?s input. The behavior of children interacting with a computer or a mobile device is also different from that of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults. The aim of the special edition is to provide a platform for collecting mature research in this area.

Technical Scope:
The special issue will focus on how children use text and speech in all aspects of communication, including human-human and human-computer interaction. We invite the submission of original, unpublished papers on topics including but not limited to:

- Speech Interfaces: acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech, discourse analysis of spoken language in child-machine interaction, age-dependent characteristics of spoken language, automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems
- Text Analysis: Analysis of complexity and accuracy in children?s text productions, understanding progression and development in orthography and syntax skills, use of vocabulary and registers or handwriting skills.
- Multi-modality, Robotics and Avatars: multi-modal child-machine interaction, multi-modal input and output interfaces, including robotic interfaces, intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing, pen or gesture/visual interfaces
- User Modeling: user modeling and adaptation, usability studies accounting for age preferences in child-machine interaction
- Cognitive Models: internal learning models, personality types, user-centered and participatory design
- Application Areas: training systems, educational software, gaming interfaces, medical conditions, such as autism or speech disorders, diagnostic tools and (speech) therapy

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: March 1, 2016
Target publication date: January 1, 2017

Guest Editors:
Berkling Kay, Cooperative State University, Berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de
Russell Martin, University of Birmingham, m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk
Evanini Keelan, ETS, kevanini@ets.org

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7-2Computer Speech and Language Journal, Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding and Interaction

 Computer Speech and Language Journal, Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding and Interaction

For more information:

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-speech-and-language/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-spoken-language-understanding-and-interacti/

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7-3Call for papers - Journal TIPA no 32, 2016

Call for papers - Journal TIPA no 32, 2016

 

Tipa. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage

https://tipa.revues.org/

 

 

Conflict in discourse and discourse in conflict

 

Guest editors: Tsuyoshi KIDA* & Laura-Anca PAREPA**

*Language and Communication Science Laboratory (LCSL)-Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences (ICR), University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

**Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

 

 

Description

 

Nowadays, conflict between individuals, countries or groups seems omnipresent. The reasons for this are numerous, be they religious, cultural, ideological, territorial, patrimonial or familial. Conflict manifests itself in numerous forms of expression and resolution, which can include diplomatic declarations, civil demonstrations, ideological clashes, family disputes, intercultural misunderstandings, lawsuits or other negotiations.

 

In the public or private sphere, conflict is triggered through the process of discourse being produced, disseminated, interpreted and amplified –therefore having an effect the opinions and attitudes of its receivers. At the same time, human beings are inherently endowed with the ability to manage and overcome these conflicts through lexical choice, ways of speaking, non-verbal communication, deconfliction techniques and conflict resolution methods. In other words, conflict is mediated through discourse.

 

The thematic concept for volume 32 of TIPA –conceived following collaboration between a linguist and an expert in political discourse – proposes to focus on the relations between discourse and conflict, within various disciplinary frameworks, in order to address the following questions: What type of discourse engenders conflict? What are the features specific to conflictual discourse in terms of prosody, semantics, pragmatics, discursive or interactional structure? How can conflict be dealt with and resolved? How can identities and images be constructed or deconstructed through speech acts? How can lexical choice influence the success or failure of strategic narratives in an official speech?

 

These are just some of the questions to which linguistics and language sciences, as well as other neighbouring disciplines, can be sensitive and to which the scientific community may propose comprehensive answers by engaging in interdisciplinary research.

 

This call for papers is open to theoretical and/or empirical contributions coming from researchers and experts from a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to: discourse analysis (political, media, forensic, international relations), pragmatics, sociolinguistics, interactional analysis, rhetoric, semantics, intercultural communication, discourse prosody, multimodality, neurolinguistics, etc.

 

The language of publication will be either English or French. Each article should contain a detailed two-page abstract in the other language, in order to make papers in French more accessible to English-speaking readers, and vice versa, thus insuring a larger audience for all the articles.

 

Important dates

 

June 30: due date for submission of articles

September 15: notification of acceptance

October 30: receipt of final version

December: publication.

 

Submission guidelines

 

Please send your proposal in three files to: tipa@lpl-aix.fr
- one file in .doc containing the title, name and affiliation of the author(s).

- two anonymous files, in .doc and .pdf format
 Instructions for authors can be found at http://tipa.revues.org/222

 

 

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7-4Special Issue of Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering : Signal Processing Platforms and Algorithms for Real-life Communications and Listening to Digital Audio

Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

Special Issue on Signal Processing Platforms and Algorithms for Real-life Communications and Listening to Digital Audio

 

Call for Papers:

Design of modern electronic communication systems involves diversified scientific areas including algorithms, architectures, and hardware development. Variety of existent multimedia devices gives rise to development of platform-dependent signal processing algorithms. Their integration into existent digital environment is an urgent problem for application engineers.

Considering a wide range of applications including hearing aids, real-life communications, and listening to digital audio, the following research areas are of particular importance: advanced time-frequency representations, audio user interfaces, audio and speech enhancement, assisted listening, and perception and phonation modeling.

This special issue aims at publishing papers presenting novel methodologies and techniques (including theoretical methods, algorithms, software, and hardware) correspondent to these research areas indicated above.

 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Speech modeling, analysis, and synthesis

  • Signal processing for hearing aids and natural hearing

  • Speech intelligibility improvement in noisy environment

  • Low-delay speech and audio processing

  • Automatic speech recognition

  • Text-to-speech synthesis

  • Speech-based assistive technologies

  • Hardware platforms for real-time signal processing

  • Rapid prototyping and project portability

 

Authors can submit their manuscripts via the Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jece/signal.processing/spp/.

 

Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Hindawi publishing corporation) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece). According to the publisher policy, publishing a research article in this journal requires article processing charges ($600) that will be billed to the submitting author following the acceptance of an article for publication.

 

Important Dates:

  • Manuscript Due Friday, 24 June 2016

  • First Round of Reviews Friday, 16 September 2016

  • Publication Date Friday, 11 November 2016

 

Guest Editors:

 

Web: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/si/324109/cfp/

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7-5CfP TAL Special issue: Natural Language Processing and Ethics

CALL FOR
ARTICLES
Natural Language Processing and Ethics

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has always posed ethical or legal problems. These
problems are particularly sensitive in this age of Big Data and of data duplication,
areas in which NLP is involved. In addition to legal and economic matters (search for
patents and rights associated with data/software), there are military issues (monitoring
of conversations) and social issues (the ?right to be forgotten? imposed on Google).

The crucial problem today is access to data (including sensitive) and personal privacy
protection for citizens. Indeed, our domain produces applications considered to be
effective for both areas (data access and protection), but without their known
limitations being clear to the general public and governments.

Diversifying work on corpora has also led the community to be able to process more and
more sensitive sources, be it personal data, medical data or even that of a criminal
nature.

For privacy protection, anonymizing data, whether oral or written, is as much an
industrial as an academic stake, with sometimes strong coverage constraints depending on
the application or research needs, issues regarding the nature of the resources and the
information to be anonymized, or legal limits.

Some NLP tools also join the ethical concerns, such as tools for plagiarism detection,
facts checking and speaker identification. In addition, the advent of Web 2.0 and with it
the development of crowdsourcing raises new questions as to the way in which to consider
participants in the creation of linguistic resources.

This special issue of the TAL journal aims to highlight the NLP contributions to ethics
and data protection and to uncover the limitations of the field both in terms of real
possibilities (evaluation) and societal dangers.

We encourage submissions on all aspects related to ethics for and by Natural Language
Processing, and in particular on the following problems or tasks:


sensitive corpus processing, including medical, police or personal data
language resource production, in particular using crowdsourcing, and ethics
ethical questions linked to the use of tools or the result of NLP processing
ethical questions related to NLP practices
quality and ways of evaluating applications and/or language resources
anonymization, de-identification and re-identification of NLP corpora
plagiarism detection by NLP
facts checking
paralinguistic and ethics, in particular speaker identification or detection of
pathologies
historical perspective of ethics in NLP
definition of ethics as applied to NLP

We also welcome position papers on the subject.

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking authors are requested
to submit in French. Submissions in English are accepted only in case of one of the
authors not being a French speaker.



IMPORTANT DATES


** extension ** end of March 2016 Deadline for submission
end of May 2016 Notification to authors after first review
beg. of July 2016 Deadline for submission of revised version
mid-July 2016 Notification to authors after second review
end of Sept. 2016 Deadline for submission of final version
December 2016 Publication

PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to upload their contribution (no more
than 25 pages, PDF format) via the menu 'Paper submission' of the issue page of the
journal. To do so, you will need to have an account on the Sciencesconf platform. To
create an account, go to the Sciencesconf site and click on 'create account' next to the
'Connect' button at the top of the page. To submit, come back to this page, connect to
you account and upload your submission.

TAL perfoms double blind reviewing. Your paper should be anonymised.

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal
(http://www.atala.org/IMG/zip/tal-style.zip).

Invited editors: Karën Fort (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH), Gilles Adda (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI), K.
Bretonnel Cohen (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)

REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Maxime Amblard (U. de Lorraine/LORIA)
Jean-Yves Antoine (U. de Tours/LI)
Philippe Blache (CNRS / LPL)
Jean-François Bonastre (LIA/U. D'Avignon)
Alain Couillault (U. de La Rochelle/L3i)
Gaël de Chalendar (CEA LIST)
Patrick Drouin (U. de Montréal/OLST)
Cécile Fabre (U. de Toulouse/CLLE-ERSS)
Cyril Grouin (LIMSI-CNRS)
Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corporation)
Larry Hunter (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College/Dpt of Computer Science)
Juliette Kahn (LNE)
Mark Liberman (UPenn/LDC)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI)
Yann Mathet (U. de Caen/GREYC)
Claude Montacié (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH)
Jean-Philippe Prost (U. de Montpellier/LIRMM)
Rafal Rzepka (Hokkaido University/Language Media Laboratory)
Björn Schuller (University of Passau)
Michel Simard (National Reseach Council Canada)
Mariarosaria Taddeo (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues) is an international journal that has been
published by ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues) for the past
40 years with the support of the CNRS. Over the past few years, it has become an online
journal, with possibility of ordering the paper versions. This does not, in any way,
affect the selection and review process.

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7-6CfP Neurocomputing: Special Issue on Machine Learning for Non-Gaussian Data Processing
 
Neurocomputing: Special Issue on Machine Learning for Non-Gaussian Data Processing 
 
With the widespread explosion of sensing and computing, an increasing number of industrial applications and an ever-growing amount of academic research generate massive multi-modal data from multiple sources. Gaussian distribution is the probability distribution ubiquitously used in statistics, signal processing, and pattern recognition. However, not all the data we are processing are Gaussian distributed. It has been found in recent studies that explicitly utilizing the non-Gaussian characteristics of data (e.g., data with bounded support, data with semi-bounded support, and data with L1/L2-norm constraint) can significantly improve the performance of practical systems. Hence, it is of particular importance and interest to make thorough studies of the non-Gaussian data and the corresponding non-Gaussian statistical models (e.g., beta distribution for bounded support data, gamma distribution for semi-bounded support data, and Dirichlet/vMF distribution for data with L1/L2-norm constraint).

In order to analyze and understand such kind of non-Gaussian data, the developments of related learning theories, statistical models, and efficient algorithms become crucial. The scope of this special issue is to provide theoretical foundations and ground-breaking models and algorithms to solve this challenge.

We invite authors to submit articles to address the aspects ranging from case studies of particular problems with non-Gaussian distributed data to novel learning theories and approaches, including (but not limited to):
  • Machine Learning for Non-Gaussian Statistical Models
  • Non-Gaussian Pattern Learning and Feature Selection
  • Sparsity-aware Learning for Non-Gaussian Data
  • Visualization of Non-Gaussian Data
  • Dimension Reduction and Feature Selection for Non-Gaussian Data
  • Non-Gaussian Convex Optimization
  • Non-Gaussian Cross Domain Analysis
  • Non-Gaussian Statistical Model for Multimedia Signal Processing
  • Non-Gaussian Statistical Model for Source and/or Channel Coding
  • Non-Gaussian Statistical Model for Biomedical Signal Processing
  • Non-Gaussian Statistical Model for Bioinformatics
  • Non-Gaussian Statistical Model in Social Networks
  • Platforms and Systems for Non-Gaussian Data Processing
Timeline
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Oct 15, 2016
ACCEPTANCE DEADLINE: June 15, 2017
EXPECTED PUBLICATION DATE: Sep 15, 2017

Guest Editors

Associate Professor
Zhanyu Ma
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT)

Professor
Jen-Tzung Chien
National Chiao Tung University (NCTU)

Associate Professor
Zheng-Hua Tan
Aalborg University (AAU)

Senior Lecture
Yi-Zhe Song
Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)

Postdoctoral Researcher
Jalil Taghia
Stanford University

Associate Professor
Ming Xiao
KTH ? Royal Institute of Technology
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7-7IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing, Special Issue on Laughter Computing: towards machines able to deal with laughter

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Special Issue on Laughter Computing: towards machines able to deal with laughter


TOPIC SUMMARY:
Laughter is a significant feature of human-human communication. It
conveys various meanings and accompanies different emotions, such as
amusement, relief, irony, or embarrassment. It has strong social
dimensions: e.g., it can reduce the sense of threat in a group and
facilitate sociability and cooperation. It also may have positive
effects on learning, creativity, health, and well-being. Because of its
relevance in human-human communication, research on laughter deserves
important attention from the Affective Computing community. Several
recent initiatives, such as the Special Session on Laughter at the 6th
International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent
Interaction (ACII2015) and the series of Interdisciplinary Workshops on
Laughter and other Non-Verbal Vocalizations in Speech, witness the
importance of the topic. Recent research projects focused on laughter by
investigating automatic laughter processing, and by developing proof-of
concepts, experiments, and prototypes exploiting laughter for enhancing
human-computer interaction.
Most research questions, however, are still unanswered. These address,
for example, theoretical issues (e.g., how can laughter be modelled and
analysed as a multimodal phenomenon, including non-verbal full-body
expression? Which is the relation between different expressions of
laughter, their perceived meanings and their social functions?),
analysis (e.g., to what extent is multimodal analysis of laughter in
complex social scenarios feasible and effective?), and synthesis
techniques (e.g., can speech laughter be synthesized effectively?).
Overcoming the lack of HCI/HRI/HHI applications that exploit the
positive (as well as a critical analysis of negative) effects of
laughter is also of high interest. The issue of acceptability of
laughing machines, either virtual agent or robot, needs to be addressed as well.
The goal of this special issue is to gather recent achievements in
laughter computing in order to trigger new research directions in this
field. The interest is on computational models that deal with laughter
in human-computer and human-human interaction. Laughter is characterized
by a complex expressive behaviour that includes major expressive
modalities: auditory, facial expressions, body movements and postural
attitudes, and physiological signals. This special issue aims at taking
into account the multimodal nature of laughter and its variety of
contexts and meanings, and providing an interdisciplinary perspective of
ongoing scientific research and ICT developments.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
? Multimodal laughter detection and synthesis
? Computational models of laughter mimicry and contagion
? Multimodal datasets of different laughter types in both controlled and ecological context
? Laughter analysis in human-human communication
? Individual differences in the expression of laughter
? Modelling of different communicative meanings of laughter
? Laughter-based applications in HCI/HRI/HHI and future user-centric media
? Acceptability of laughter in HCI/HRI applications
? Laughter elicitation mechanisms (e.g., 'computational humour', KANSEI)
? Laughter as an expression of different emotions (e.g., amusement,
embarrassment, relief, and so on)

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for submissions: June 24, 2016
Review results: September 16, 2016
Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts: October 14, 2016
Final reviews: November 11, 2016

GUEST EDITORS:
? M. Mancini, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy), maurizio.mancini@unige.it
? R. Niewiadomski, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy),
radoslaw.niewiadomski@dibris.unige.it
? S. Hashimoto, SHALAB, Dept. of Applied Physics, Waseda University
(Japan), shuji@waseda.jp
? M.E. Foster, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
(Scotland, UK), maryellen.foster@glasgow.ac.uk
? S. Scherer, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of
Southern California (USA), scherer@ict.usc.edu
? G. Volpe, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy), gualtiero.volpe@unige.it

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts
electronically after the ?open for submissions? date, adhering to the
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing guidelines
(http://www.computer.org/web/tac/author). Please submit your papers
through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs)
and be sure to select the special issue or special section name.
Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for
publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for
review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts
should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.

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7-8revue Études Créoles-Nouvelle série

Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution en ligne du premier numéro de la revue Études Créoles-Nouvelle série.

Études Créoles est une revue qui existe depuis 1978 et qui a connu une parution papier régulière (1 à 2 numéros annuels). Il s'agit de la première revue du domaine disciplinaire de la créolistique qui a toujours eu une orientation pluridisciplinaire accueillant des articles sur les langues et la linguistique, les littératures, l'anthropologie et l'éducation dans les mondes créoles. 

Suite au 14e Colloque des Études Créoles qui s'est tenu à Aix-en-Provence en octobre 2014 avec le soutien du Laboratoire Parole et Langage, le Comité International des Études Créoles a confié la relance de la revue à une nouvelle équipe éditoriale.

Elle est désormais sous format électronique et en libre accès :
Études Créoles-Nouvelle série
: Numéro 2015 l 1 :
http://www.lpl-aix.fr/index.php?id=974?

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7-9CFP: Machine Translation Journal/Special Issue on Spoken Language Translation( updated)
******* CFP: Machine Translation Journal ********

** Special Issue on Spoken Language Translation **

http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/10590
 

Guest editors:

Alex Waibel (Carnegie Mellon University / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Sebastian Stüker (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Marcello Federico (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)

Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)

Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University)

Dekai Wu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

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Spoken language translation (SLT) is the science of automatic translation of spoken language.  It may be tempting to view spoken language as nothing more than language (as in text) with an added spoken verbalization preceding it.  Translation of speech could then be achieved by simply applying automatic speech recognition (ASR or ?speech-to-text?) before applying traditional machine translation (MT).

Unfortunately, such an overly simplistic approach does not address the complexities of the problem.  Not only do speech recognition errors compound with errors in machine translation, but spoken language also differs considerably in form, structure and style, so as to render the combination of two text-based components as ineffective.  Moreover, automatic spoken language translation systems serve different practical goals than voice interfaces or text translators, so that integrated systems and their interfaces have to be designed carefully and appropriately (mobile, low-latency, audio-visual, online/offline, interactive, etc.) around their intended deployment.

Unlike written texts, human speech is not segmented into sentences, does not contain punctuation, is frequently ungrammatical, contains many disfluencies, or sentence fragments.  Conversely, spoken language contains information about the speaker, gender, emotion, emphasis, social form and relationships and ?in the case of dialog- there is discourse structure, turn-taking, back-channeling across languages to be considered.

SLT systems, therefore, need to consider a host of additional concerns related to integrated recognition and translation performance, use of social form and function, prosody, suitability and (depending on deployment) effectiveness of human interfaces, and task performance under various speed, latency, context and language resource constraints.

Due to continuing improvements in underlying spoken language ASR and MT components as well as in the integrated system designs, spoken language systems have become increasingly sophisticated and can handle increasingly complex sentences, more natural environments, discourse and conversational styles, leading to a variety of successful practical deployments.

In the light of 25 years of successful research and transition into practice, the MT Journal dedicates a special issue to the problem of Spoken Language Translation.  We invite submissions of papers that address issues and problems pertaining to the development, design and deployment of spoken language translation systems.  Papers on component technologies and methodology as well as on system designs and deployments of spoken language systems are both encouraged.
 
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Submission guidelines:

- Authors should follow the 'Instructions for Authors' available on the MT Journal website:

http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/10590

- Submissions must be limited to 25 pages (including references)

- Papers should be submitted online directly on the MT journal's submission website: http://www.editorialmanager.com/coat/default.asp, indicating this special issue in ?article type?
 

Important dates (Modified)

- Paper submission: August 30th 2016.

- Notification to authors: October 15th 2016.

- Camera-ready*: January 15th 2016.

* tentative - depending on the number of review rounds required



 
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7-10CfP IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on Spoofing and Countermeasures for Automatic Speaker Verification (extended deadline)


 Call for Papers
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Special Issue on
Spoofing and Countermeasures for Automatic Speaker Verification

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) offers a low-cost and flexible biometric solution to
person authentication. While the reliability of ASV systems is now considered sufficient
to support mass-market adoption, there are concerns that the technology is vulnerable to
spoofing, also referred to as presentation attacks. Replayed, synthesized and converted
speech spoofing attacks can all project convincing, high-quality speech signals that are
representative of other, specific speakers and thus present a genuine threat to the
reliability of ASV systems.

Recent years have witnessed a movement in the community to develop spoofing
countermeasures, or presentation attack detection (PAD) technology to help protect ASV
systems from fraud. These efforts culminated in the first standard evaluation platform
for the assessment of spoofing and countermeasures of automatic speaker verification ?
the Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge (ASVspoof) ?
which was held as a special session at Interspeech 2015.

This special issue is expected to present original papers describing the very latest
developments in spoofing and countermeasures for ASV. The focus of the special issue
includes, but is not limited to the following topics related to spoofing and
countermeasures for ASV:

- vulnerability analysis of previously unconsidered spoofing methods;
- advanced methods for standalone countermeasures;
- advanced methods for joint ASV and countermeasure modelling;
- information theoretic approaches for the assessment of spoofing and countermeasures;
- spoofing and countermeasures in adverse acoustic and channel conditions;
- generalized and speaker-dependent countermeasures;
- speaker obfuscation, impersonation, de-identification, disguise, evasion and adapted
countermeasures;
- analysis and comparison of human performance in the face of spoofing;
- new evaluation protocols, datasets, and performance metrics for the assessment of
spoofing and countermeasures for ASV;
- countermeasure methods using other modality or multimodality that are applicable to
speaker verification

Also invited are submissions of exceptional quality with a tutorial or overview nature.
Creative papers outside the areas listed above but related to the overall scope of the
special issue are also welcome. Prospective authors can contact the Guest Editors to
ascertain interest on such topics.

Prospective authors should visit
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/jstsp/ for submission
information. Manuscripts should be submitted at
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jstsp-ieee and will be peer reviewed according to
standard IEEE processes.

Important Dates:
- Manuscript submission due: August 15, 2016 (extended)
- First review completed: October 15, 2016
- Revised manuscript due: December 1, 2016
- Second review completed: February 1, 2017
- Final manuscript due: March 1, 2017
- Publication date: June, 2017

Guest Editors:
Junichi Yamagishi, National Institute of Informatics, Japan, email: jyamagis@nii.ac.jp
Nicholas Evans, EURECOM, France, email: evans@eurecom.fr
Tomi Kinnunen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland, email: tomi.kinnunen@uef.fi
Phillip L. De Leon, New Mexico State University & VoiceCipher, USA, email:
pdeleon@nmsu.edu
Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID, Portugal, email: Isabel.Trancoso@inesc-id.pt

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7-11Special Issue on Biosignal-based Spoken Communication in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Call for Papers 
Special Issue on Biosignal-based Spoken Communication 
in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP) 

Speech is a complex process emitting a wide range of biosignals, including, but not limited to, acoustics. These biosignals ? stemming from the articulators, the articulator muscle activities, the neural pathways, or the brain itself ? can be used to circumvent limitations of conventional speech processing in particular, and to gain insights into the process of speech production in general. Research on biosignal-based speech capturing and processing is a wide and very active field at the intersection of various disciplines, ranging from engineering, electronics and machine learning to medicine, neuroscience, physiology, and psychology. Consequently, a variety of methods and approaches are thoroughly investigated, aiming towards the common goal of creating biosignal-based speech processing devices and applications for everyday use, as well as for spoken communication research purposes. We aim at bringing together studies covering these various modalities, research approaches, and objectives in a Special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing entitled Biosignal-based Spoken Communication. 

For this purpose we will invite papers describing previously unpublished work in the following broad areas: 
  • Capturing methods for speech-related biosignals: tracing of articulatory activity (e.g. EMA, PMA, ultrasound, video), electrical biosignals (e.g. EMG, EEG, ECG, NIRS), acoustic sensors for capturing whispered / murmured speech (e.g. NAM microphone), etc. 
  • Signal processing for speech-related biosignals: feature extraction, denoising, source separation, etc. 
  • Speech recognition based on biosignals (e.g. silent speech interface, recognition in noisy environment, etc.). 
  • Mapping between speech-related biosignals and speech acoustics (e.g. articulatory-acoustic mapping) 
  • Modeling of speech units: articulatory or phonetic features, visemes, etc. 
  • Multi-modality and information fusion in speech recognition 
  • Challenges of dealing with whispered, mumbled, silently articulated, or inner speech 
  • Neural Representations of speech and language 
  • Novel approaches in physiological studies of speech planning and production 
  • Brain-computer-interface (BCI) for restoring speech communication 
  • User studies in biosignal-based speech processing 
  • End-to-end systems and devices 
  • Applications in rehabilitation and therapy 

Submission Deadline: November 2016 
Notification of Acceptance: January 2017 
Final Manuscript Due: April 2017 
Tentative Publication Date: First half of 2017 

Editors: 
Tanja Schultz (Universität Bremen, Germany) tanja.schultz@uni-bremen.de (Lead Guest Editor) 
Thomas Hueber (CNRS/GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France) thomas.hueber@gipsa-lab.fr 
Dean J. Krusienski (ASPEN Lab, Old Dominion University) dkrusien@odu.edu 
Jonathan Brumberg (Speech-Language-Hearing Department, University of Kansas) brumberg@ku.edu
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7-12CSL special issue 'Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization'

    Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on 
  Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization

                            Call for Papers

The goal of this special issue is to highlight the current state of research 
efforts on speaker and language recognition and characterization. New ideas
about features, models, tasks, datasets or benchmarks are growing making this
a particularly exciting time. 

In the last decade, speaker recognition (SR) has gained importance in the
field of speech science and technology, with new applications beyond forensics,
such as large-scale filtering of telephone calls, automated access through
voice profiles, speaker indexing and diarization, etc. Current challenges
involve the use of increasingly short signals to perform verification,
the need for algorithms that are robust to all kind of extrinsic variabilities,
such as noise and channel conditions, but allowing for a certain amount of
intrinsic variability (due to health issues, stress, etc.) and the development
of countermeasures against spoofing and tampering attacks. On the other hand,
language recognition (LR) has also witnessed a remarkable interest
from the community as an auxiliary technology for speech recognition,
dialogue systems and multimedia search engines, but specially for large-scale
filtering of telephone calls. An active area of research specific to LR is
dialect and accent identification. Other issues that must be dealt with
in LR tasks (such as short signals, channel and environment variability, etc.)
are basically the same as for SR.

The features, modeling approaches and algorithms used in SR and LR
are closely related, though not equally effective, since these two tasks
differ in several ways. In the last couple of years, and after
the success of Deep Learning in image and speech recognition,
the use of Deep Neural Networks both as feature extractors
and classifiers/regressors is opening new exciting research horizons. 

Until recently, speaker and language recognition technologies were mostly
driven by NIST evaluation campaigns: Speaker Recognition Evaluations (SRE)
and Language Recognition Evaluations (LRE), which focused on large-scale
verification of telephone speech. In the last years, other initiatives
(such as the 2008/2010/2012 Albayzin LRE, the 2013 SRE in Mobile Environment,
the RSR2015 database or the 2015 Multi-Genre Broadcast Challenge)
have widened the range of applications and the research focus.
Authors are encouraged to use these benchmarks to test their ideas.

This special issue aims to cover state-of-the-art works; however,
to provide readers with a state-of-the-art background on the topic, 
we will invite one survey paper, which will undergo peer review.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

o Speaker and language recognition, verification, identification
o Speaker and language characterization
o Features for speaker and language recognition
o Speaker and language clustering
o Multispeaker segmentation, detection, and diarization
o Language, dialect, and accent recognition
o Robustness in channels and environment
o System calibration and fusion
o Speaker recognition with speech recognition
o Multimodal speaker recognition
o Speaker recognition in multimedia content
o Machine learning for speaker and language recognition
o Confidence estimation for speaker and language recognition
o Corpora and tools for system development and evaluation
o Low-resource (lightly supervised) speaker and language recognition
o Speaker synthesis and transformation
o Human and human-assisted recognition of speaker and language
o Spoofing and tampering attacks: analysis and countermeasures
o Forensic and investigative speaker recognition
o Systems and applications

Note that all papers will go through the same rigorous review process
as regular papers, with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.
 
Guest Editors

Eduardo Lleida             University of Zaragoza, Spain
Luis J. Rodríguez-Fuentes  University of the Basque Country, Spain

Important dates

Submission deadline:                September 16, 2016
Notifications of final decision:    March 31, 2017
Scheduled publication:              April, 2017


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7-13IEEE CIS Newsletter on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
 
Dear colleagues,

I am happy to announce the release of the latest issue of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (open access).
This is a biannual newsletter addressing the sciences of developmental and cognitive processes in natural and artificial organisms, from humans to robots, at the crossroads of cognitive science, developmental psychology, machine intelligence and neuroscience. 

It is available at: http://goo.gl/KBA9o6

Featuring dialog:
=== 'Moving Beyond Nature-Nurture: a Problem of Science or Communication?'
== Dialog initiated by John Spencer, Mark Blumberg and David Shenk
with responses from: Bob McMurray, Scott Robinson, Patrick Bateson, Eva Jablonka, Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, Bart de Boer, Gert Westermann, Peter Marshall, Vladimir Sloutsky, Dan Dediu, Jedebiah Allen and Mark Bickhard, Rick Dale and Anne Warlaumont and Michael Spivey.
== Topic: In spite of numerous scientific discoveries supporting the view of development as a complex multi-factored process, the discussions of development in several scientific fields and in the general public are still strongly organized around the nature/nurture distinction. Is this because there is not yet sufficient scientific evidence, or is this because the simplicity of the nature/nurture framework is much easier to communicate (or just better communicated by its supporters)? Responses show a very stimulating diversity of opinions, ranging from defending the utility of keeping the nature/nurture framing to arguing that biology has already shown its fundamental weaknesses for several decades.

Call for new dialog:
=== 'What is Computational Reproducibility?'
== Dialog initiated by Olivia Guest and Nicolas Rougier
==  This new dialog initiation explores questions and challenges related to openly sharing computational models, especially when they target to advance our understanding of natural phenomena in cognitive, biological or physical sciences: What is computational reproducibility? How shall codebases be distributed and included as a central element of mainstream publication venues? How to ensure computational models are well specified, reusable and understandable? Those of you interested in reacting to this dialog initiation are welcome to submit a response by November 10th, 2016. The length of each response must be between 600 and 800 words including references (contact pierre-yves.oudeyer@inria.fr).

Let me remind you that all issues of the newsletter are all open-access and available at: http://icdl-epirob.org/cdsnl

I wish you a stimulating reading!

Best regards,

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,

Editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Chair of the IEEE CIS AMD Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Research director, Inria
Head of Flower project-team
Inria and Ensta ParisTech, France
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7-14CfP *MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS* Special Issue on 'Content Based Multimedia Indexing'


                      Call for Papers

           *MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS*

  Special Issue on 'Content Based Multimedia Indexing' **********************************************************

Multimedia indexing systems aim at providing user-friendly, fast and accurate access to
large multimedia repositories. Various tools and techniques from different fields such as
data indexing, machine learning, pattern recognition, and human computer interaction have
contributed to the success of multimedia systems. In spite of significant progress in the
field, content-based multimedia indexing systems still show limits in accuracy,
generality and scalability. The goal of this special issue is to bring forward recent
advancements in content-based multimedia indexing. In addition to multimedia and social
media search and retrieval, we wish to highlight related and equally important issues
that build on content-based indexing, such as multimedia content management, user
interaction and visualization, media analytics, etc. The special issue will also feature
contributions on application domains, e.g., multimedia indexing for health or for
e-learning.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

    Audio, visual and multimedia indexing;
    Multimodal and cross-modal indexing;
    Deep learning for multimedia indexing;
    Visual content extraction;
    Audio (speech, music, etc) content extraction;
    Identification and tracking of semantic regions and events;
    Social media analysis;
    Metadata generation, coding and transformation;
    Multimedia information retrieval (image, audio, video, text);
    Mobile media retrieval;
    Event-based media processing and retrieval;
    Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for multimedia retrieval;
    Multimedia data mining and analytics;
    Multimedia recommendation;
    Large scale multimedia database management;
    Summarization, browsing and organization of multimedia content;
    Personalization and content adaptation;
    User interaction and relevance feedback;
    Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools;
    Evaluation and benchmarking of multimedia retrieval systems;
    Applications of multimedia retrieval, e.g., medicine, lifelogs, satellite imagery,
video surveillance.

Submission guidelines

All the papers should be full journal length versions and follow the guidelines set out
by Multimedia Tools and Applications: http://www.springer.com/journal/11042.

Manuscripts should be submitted online at https://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap/ choosing
'CBMI 2016' as article type. When uploading your paper, please ensure that your
manuscript is marked as being for this special issue.

Information about the manuscript (title, full list of authors, corresponding author?s
contact, abstract, and keywords) should be also sent to the corresponding editors (see
information below).

All the papers will be peer-reviewed following the MTAP regular paper reviewing
procedures and ensuring the journal high standards.

Important dates

    *Manuscript Due: now postponed to September 30, 2016*
    First Round Decisions: November 1, 2016
    Revisions Due: December 20, 2016
    Final Round Decisions: Feb. 1, 2017
    Publication: First semester 2017

Guest editors
  Guillaume Gravier, IRISA & Inria Rennes, CNRS, France
  Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Information Tech. Institute, CERTH, Greece

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7-15Special issue CSL on Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization

             Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on 
  Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization

                            Call for Papers

            -----------------------------------------------
            SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 9, 2016
            -----------------------------------------------

The goal of this special issue is to highlight the current state of research 
efforts on speaker and language recognition and characterization. New ideas
about features, models, tasks, datasets or benchmarks are growing making this
a particularly exciting time. 

In the last decade, speaker recognition (SR) has gained importance in the
field of speech science and technology, with new applications beyond forensics,
such as large-scale filtering of telephone calls, automated access through
voice profiles, speaker indexing and diarization, etc. Current challenges
involve the use of increasingly short signals to perform verification,
the need for algorithms that are robust to all kind of extrinsic variabilities,
such as noise and channel conditions, but allowing for a certain amount of
intrinsic variability (due to health issues, stress, etc.) and the development
of countermeasures against spoofing and tampering attacks. On the other hand,
language recognition (LR) has also witnessed a remarkable interest
from the community as an auxiliary technology for speech recognition,
dialogue systems and multimedia search engines, but specially for large-scale
filtering of telephone calls. An active area of research specific to LR is
dialect and accent identification. Other issues that must be dealt with
in LR tasks (such as short signals, channel and environment variability, etc.)
are basically the same as for SR.

The features, modeling approaches and algorithms used in SR and LR
are closely related, though not equally effective, since these two tasks
differ in several ways. In the last couple of years, and after
the success of Deep Learning in image and speech recognition,
the use of Deep Neural Networks both as feature extractors
and classifiers/regressors is opening new exciting research horizons. 

Until recently, speaker and language recognition technologies were mostly
driven by NIST evaluation campaigns: Speaker Recognition Evaluations (SRE)
and Language Recognition Evaluations (LRE), which focused on large-scale
verification of telephone speech. In the last years, other initiatives
(such as the 2008/2010/2012 Albayzin LRE, the 2013 SRE in Mobile Environment,
the RSR2015 database or the 2015 Multi-Genre Broadcast Challenge)
have widened the range of applications and the research focus.
Authors are encouraged to use these benchmarks to test their ideas.

This special issue aims to cover state-of-the-art works; however,
to provide readers with a state-of-the-art background on the topic, 
we will invite one survey paper, which will undergo peer review.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

o Speaker and language recognition, verification, identification
o Speaker and language characterization
o Features for speaker and language recognition
o Speaker and language clustering
o Multispeaker segmentation, detection, and diarization
o Language, dialect, and accent recognition
o Robustness in channels and environment
o System calibration and fusion
o Speaker recognition with speech recognition
o Multimodal speaker recognition
o Speaker recognition in multimedia content
o Machine learning for speaker and language recognition
o Confidence estimation for speaker and language recognition
o Corpora and tools for system development and evaluation
o Low-resource (lightly supervised) speaker and language recognition
o Speaker synthesis and transformation
o Human and human-assisted recognition of speaker and language
o Spoofing and tampering attacks: analysis and countermeasures
o Forensic and investigative speaker recognition
o Systems and applications

Note that all papers will go through the same rigorous review process
as regular papers, with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.
 
Guest Editors

Eduardo Lleida             University of Zaragoza, Spain
Luis J. Rodríguez-Fuentes  University of the Basque Country, Spain

Important dates

Submission deadline (EXTENDED!!!):    OCTOBER 9, 2016
Notifications of final decision:      March 31, 2017
Scheduled publication:                April, 2017

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7-16Spêcial issue of Advances in Multimedia on EMERGING CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FOR MULTIMEDIA SECURITY

SPECIAL ISSUE -- CALL FOR PAPERS

EMERGING CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FOR MULTIMEDIA SECURITY

Special Issue of Hindawi's Advances in Multimedia, indexed in Web of Science **

Today's world's societies are becoming more and more dependent on open networks such as the Internet, where commercial activities,
business transactions, government services, and entertainment services are realized. This has led to the fast development of new
cyber threats and numerous information security issues which are exploited by cyber criminals. The inability to provide trusted
secure services in contemporary computer network technologies could have a tremendous socioeconomic impact on global enterprises as
well as on individuals.

In the recent years, rapid development in digital technologies has been augmented by the progress in the field of multimedia
standards and the mushrooming of multimedia applications and services penetrating and changing the way people interact, communicate,
work, entertain, and relax. Multimedia services are becoming more significant and popular and they enrich humans' everyday life.
Currently, the term multimedia information refers not only to text, image, video, or audio content but also to graphics, flash, web,
3D data, and so forth. Multimedia information may be generated, processed, transmitted, retrieved, consumed, or shared in various
environments. The lowered cost of reproduction, storage, and distribution, however, also invites much motivation for large-scale
commercial infringement.

The above-mentioned issues have generated new challenges related to protection of multimedia services, applications, and digital
content. Providing multimedia security is significantly different from providing typical computer information security, since
multimedia content usually involves large volumes of data and requires interactive operations and real-time responses. Additionally,
ensuring digital multimedia security must also signify safeguarding of the multimedia services. Different services require different
methods for content distribution, payment, interaction, and so forth. Moreover, these services are also expected to be 'smart' in
the environment of converged networks, which means that they must adapt to different network conditions and types as multimedia
information can be utilized in various networked environments, for example, in fixed, wireless, and mobile networks. All of these
make providing security for multimedia even harder to perform.

This special issue intends to bring together diversity of international researchers, experts, and practitioners who are currently
working in the area of digital multimedia security. Researchers both from academia and industry are invited to contribute their work
for extending the existing knowledge in the field. The aim of this special issue is to present a collection of high-quality research
papers that will provide a view on the latest research advances not only on secure multimedia transmission and distribution but also
on multimedia content protection.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- Emerging technologies in digital multimedia security
- Digital watermarking
- Fingerprinting in multimedia signals
- Digital media steganology (steganography and steganalysis)
- Information theoretic analysis of secure multimedia systems
- Security/privacy in multimedia services
- Multimedia and digital media forensics
- Quality of Service (QoS)/Quality of Experience (QoE) and their relationships with security
- Security of voice and face biometry
- Multimedia integrity verification and authentication
- Multimedia systems security
- Digital rights management
- Digital content protection
- Tampering and attacks on original information
- Content identification and secure content delivery
- Piracy detection and tracing
- Copyright protection and surveillance
- Forgery detection
- Secure multimedia networking
- Multimedia network protection, privacy, and security
- Secure multimedia system design, trusted computing, and protocol security

Authors can submit their manuscripts via the Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/am/adms/.

Manuscript Due:            Friday, 2 December 2016
First Round of Reviews:        Friday, 24 February 2017
Publication Date:            Friday, 21 April 2017

Lead Guest Editor:

Wojciech Mazurczyk, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Guest Editors:

Artur Janicki, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Hui Tian, National Huaqiao University, Xiamen, China

Honggang Wang,
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, USA

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7-17Cfp Speech Communication Virtual Special Issue: Multi-laboratory evaluation of forensic voice comparison systems under conditions reflecting those of a real forensiccase (forensic_eval_01)

CALL FOR PAPERS:
 
Speech Communication
Virtual Special Issue
 
Multi-laboratory evaluation of forensic voice comparison systems under conditions reflecting those of a real forensic case (forensic_eval_01)
 
Guest Editors: Geoffrey Stewart Morrison & Ewald Enzinger
 
There is increasing pressure on forensic laboratories to validate the performance of forensic analysis systems before they are used to assess strength of evidence for presentation in court (including pressure from the recently released report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, PCAST). In order to validate a system intended for use in casework, a forensic laboratory needs to evaluate the degree of validity and reliability of the system under forensically realistic conditions.
 
This Speech Communication Virtual Special Issue will consist of papers reporting on the results of testing forensic voice comparison systems under conditions reflecting those of one actual forensic voice comparison case. A set of training and test data representative of the relevant population and reflecting the conditions of this particular case has been released, and operational and research laboratories are invited to use these data to train and test their systems.
 
Details are provided in the introductory paper, which is available on the Virtual Special Issue webpage: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01676393/vsi/10KTJHC7HNM

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