Call for Papers

                     Special Issue of COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE

Speech and Language Processing for Behavioral and Mental Health Research and Applications

The promise of speech and language processing for behavioral and mental health research and clinical applications is profound. Advances in all aspects of speech and language processing, and their integration—ranging from speech activity detection, speaker diarization, and speech recognition to various aspects of spoken language understanding and multimodal paralinguistics—offer novel tools for both scientific discovery and creating innovative ways for clinical screening, diagnostics, and intervention support. Credited to the potential for widespread impact, research sites across all continents are actively engaged in this societally important research area, tackling a rich set of challenges including the inherent multilingual and multicultural underpinnings of behavioural manifestations. The objective of this Special Issue on Speech and Language Processing for Behavioral and Mental Health Applications is to bring together and share these advances in order to shape the future of the field. It will focus on technical issues and applications of speech and language processing for behavioral and mental health applications. Original, previously unpublished submissions are encouraged within (not limited to) the following scope: 

• Analysis of mental and behavioral states in spoken and written language 
• Technological support for ecologically- and clinically-valid data collection and pre-processing
• Robust automatic recognition of behavioral attributes and mental states 
• Cross-cultural, cross linguistic, cross-domain mathematical approaches and   applications 
• Subjectivity modelling (mental states perception and behavioral annotation) 
• Multimodal paralinguistics (e.g., voice, face, gesture) 
• Neural-mechanisms, physiological response, and interplay with expressed behaviours 
• Databases and resources to support study of speech and language processing for mental health 
• Applications: scientific mechanisms, clinical screening, diagnostics, & therapy/treatment support 
• Example Domains: Autism spectrum disorders, addiction, family and relationship studies, major depressive disorders, suicidality, Alzheimer’s disease

Important Dates

• Manuscript Due October 31, 2017
• First Round of Reviews January 15, 2018
• Second Round of Reviews     April 15, 2018
• Publication Date June 31, 2018

Guest Editors

• Chi-Chun Lee, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, cclee@ee.nthu.edu.tw
• Julien Epps, University of New South Wales, Australia, j.epps@unsw.edu.au
• Daniel Bone, University of Southern California, USA, dbone@usc.edu
• Ming Li, Sun Yat-sen University, China, liming46@mail.sysu.edu.cn
• Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California, USA, shri@sipi.usc.edu

Submission Procedure

Authors should follow the Elsevier Computer Speech and Language manuscript format described at the journal site https://www.elsevier.com/journals/computer-speech-and-language/0885-2308/guidefor-authors#20000. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://www.evise.com/evise/jrnl/CSL When submitting your papers, authors must select VSI:SLP-Behavior-mHealth as the article type.