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Call for Paper INTERSPEECH 2017 Special session on 
?Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages (DigRev-URL) ?
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The digital revolution is having an increasingly large impact on many aspects of our daily lives, 
and creating a new way of communication and socialization. There is no doubt that speech and 
language technology (i.e., speech recognition, speech translation, etc) is one of the key enabling 
technologies in the digital revolution. However, despite all the hype about how digital revolution 
could connect the world, currently, it only covers about five percent of the world's languages. 
This is because most of those activities have been conducted only in several languages where 
large resources are available. There are however more than 6000 languages and most of them 
have not been covered yet. And even languages with millions of speakers can lack the resources 
needed to construct spoken and language technologies.

This Interspeech 2017 special session on 'Digital Revolution for  Under-resourced Languages 
(DigRev-URL)' provides a forum for linguistic and speech  technology researchers, as well as 
academic and industrial counterparts to share achievements and challenges in all areas related to 
natural language processing and spoken language processing of under-resourced languages (mainly 
used in South, Southeast and West Asia; Africa and Northern and Eastern Europe). Particularly, as 
Interspeech 2017 will be held in Sweden, we highly encourage any submissions on under-resourced 
languages from Nordic, Uralic, and Slavic regions.

The theme of this special session will focus on digital revolution for under-resourced languages, 
including but not limited to:
- Linguistic and cognitive studies
- Resource acquisition of text and speech corpora
- Zero resource speech technologies
- Cross-lingual/multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling
- Code-switched lexical modeling
- Speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation
- Speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and dialog systems
- Applications of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages

At the end of the session, the plan would be to have a panel discussion as a continuation from the
panel discussion at SLTU 2016, in which various institutions that have been working on under-resourced 
languages will come and sit together to discuss the ?Digital Revolution for Under-Resourced Languages?. 
The main objective of this panel discussion is to provide an opportunity to initiate collaboration that 
could provide a better future for under-resourced languages.

We invite you to submit original papers on any of the research themes listed above. When submitting 
papers, please make sure that you select scientific area topic: [12.24] Special Session on 'Digital Revolution 
for Under-resourced Languages' in the INTERSPEECH 2017 submission system.