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 We invite the submission of original, unpublished papers on topics including but not limited to: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