Joint SPECOM 2017 and ICR 2017

SPECOM 2017: 19th International Conference on Speech and Computer  

ICR 2017: 2nd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics

SPECOM 2017: 19^th International Conference on Speech and Computer

12-16 September 2017, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK

www.herts.ac.uk/specom2017

http://specom.nw.ru/

http://www.guide2research.com/conference/specom-2017-19th-international-conference-on-speech-and-computer-specom-2017

http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=57860&copyownerid=56734

Important Dates

April 15, 2017 ......... Submission of full papers (final date)

May 15, 2017 ............. Notification of acceptance

May 26, 2017 ............. Final papers (camera ready)

May 26, 2017 ............. Early registration

Sept 12-16, 2017 ??? Conference dates

TOPICS

The SPECOM conference is devoted to issues of human-machine interaction, particularly:

Affective computing; Applications for human-machine interaction; Audio-visual speech processing; Automatic language identification; Corpus linguistics and linguistic processing; Forensic speech investigations and security systems; Multichannel signal processing; Multimedia processing; Multimodal analysis and synthesis; Signal processing and feature extraction; Speaker identification and diarization; Speaker verification systems; Speech analytics and audio mining; Speech and language resources; Speech dereverberation; Speech disorders and voice pathologies; Speech driving systems in robotics; Speech enhancement; Speech perception; Speech recognition and understanding; Speech translation automatic systems; Spoken dialogue systems; Spoken language processing; Text mining and sentiment analysis; Text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems; Virtual and augmented reality.

Special Session 1: Natural Language Processing for Social Media Analysis

The exploitation of natural language from social media data is an intriguing task in the fields of text mining and natural language processing (NLP), with plenty of applications in social sciences and social media analytics. In this special session, we call for research papers in the broader field of NLP techniques for social media analysis. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to): sentiment analysis in social media and beyond (e.g., stance identification, sarcasm detection, opinion mining), computational sociolinguistics (e.g., identification of demographic information such as gender, age), and NLP tools for social media mining (e.g., topic modeling for social media data, text categorization and clustering for social media).

Organisers:

Vasiliki Simaki and Carita Paradis (Lund University, Sweden)

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros (UC San Diego, USA)

Andreas Kerren (Linnaeus University, Sweden)

Michalis Vazirgiannis (École Polytechnique, France)

Special Session 2: Multilingual and Low-Resourced Languages Speech Processing in Human-Computer Interaction

Multilingual speech processing has been an active topic for many years. Over the last few years, the availability of big data in a vast variety of languages and the convergence of speech recognition and synthesis approaches to statistical parametric techniques (mainly deep learning neural networks) have put this field in the center of research interest, with a special attention for low- or even zero-resourced languages. In this special session, we call for research papers in the field of multilingual speech processing. The topics include (but are not limited to): multilingual speech recognition and understanding, dialectal speech recognition, cross-lingual adaptation, text-to-speech synthesis, spoken language identification, speech-to-speech translation, multi-modal speech processing, keyword spotting, emotion recognition and deep learning in speech processing.

Organisers:

Alexandros Lazaridis (Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland)

Ivan Himawan (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Blaise Potard (CereProc Ltd, Edinburgh, UK)

Kate Knill (Cambridge University Engineering Department)

Peter Bell (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Special Session 3: Real-Life Challenges in Voice and Multimodal Biometrics

Complex passwords or cumbersome dongles are now obsolete. Biometric technology offers a secure and user friendly solution to authenticate and have been employed in various real-life scenarios. This special session seeks to bring together researchers, professionals, and practitioners to present and discuss recent developments and challenges in Real-Life applications of biometrics. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Biometric systems and applications; Identity management and biometrics; Fraud prevention; Anti-spoofing methods; Privacy protection of biometric systems; Uni-modalities, e.g. voice, face, fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, palm print and ear biometrics; Behavioural biometrics; Soft-biometrics; Multi-biometrics; Novel biometrics; Ethical and societal implications of biometric systems and applications.

Organisers:

Saeid Safavi (School of Engineering and Technology, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Lily Meng (School of Engineering and Technology, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Maryam Najafian (CSAIL Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Mohamad Hassan Bahari (Centre for processing speech and images, KU Leuven, Belgium)

Abosoud Hanani (Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Birzeit University, Palestine)

Hossein Zeinali (Computer and Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Iran)

Invited Speakers

Prof Mark Gales, University of Cambridge: ?Low-Resource Speech Recognition and Keyword-Spotting?.

Prof Björn Schuller, University of Passau and Imperial College London: ?Big Data, Deep Learning ? At the Edge of X-Ray Speaker Analysis?.

https://sites.google.com/site/specom2017/invited-speakers

Satellite Event

2^nd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR 2017)

web: http://specom.nw.ru/icr2017.html

Topics: Assistive robots; Child-robot interaction; Collaborative robotics; Educational robotics; Human-robot interaction; Medical robotics; Robotic mobility systems; Robots at home; Robot control and communication; Social robotics; Safety robot behaviour.

On behalf of the Organising Committee,

Iosif Mporas

************************************************

19^th International Conference on Speech and Computer

SPECOM 2017, http://www.herts.ac.uk/specom2017

************************************************

Dr Iosif Mporas, Dipl-Eng, PhD

Senior Lecturer in Information Engineering

Information Engineering and Processing Architectures Group

go.herts.ac.uk/iepa

School of Engineering and Technology

University of Hertfordshire

College Lane Campus

Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK

http://go.herts.ac.uk/iosif_mporas

www.iosifmporas.gr

************************************************

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 ==== Second Call for Participation ====

Germeval Task 2017 - Shared Task on Aspect-based Sentiment in Social Media Customer
Feedback

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/

We invite everyone from academia and industry to submit to the shared task on German
Sentiment Analysis!

 **** Jun 2017 Updates ***
*** Evaluation script for download *** Java baseline system available ****

---- Introduction ----

In the connected, modern world, customer feedback is a valuable source for insights on
the quality of products or services. This feedback allows other customers to benefit from
the experiences of others and enables businesses to react on requests, complaints or
recommendations. However, the more people use a product or service, the more feedback is
generated, which results in the major challenge of analyzing huge amounts of feedback in
an efficient, but still meaningful way.

We conduct a shared task on automatically analyzing customer reviews about ?Deutsche
Bahn? - the German public train operator with about two billion passengers each year. The
task is associated with the GSCL 2017 conference in Berlin, and will take place there as
a workshop on September 12, 2017.


---- Data ----
The data for the task has been annotated as part of a joint project between TU Darmstadt
and Deutsche Bahn, see https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/data for details.
All together it consists of 22,000 messages from various social media and web sources.
The data is annotated with relevance, document sentiment, aspect-based sentiment and
opinion target expressions and is provided in both xml and tsv.

---- Task description ----

To exploit the richness of the data, we subdivided the task into four subtasks.
Participants can freely choose in what and how many sub-tasks they participate.

Subtask A) Relevance Classification
Determine whether a social media post contains feedback about the 'Deutsche Bahn' or if
the post is off-topic/contains no evaluation.
Example: ?Ehrlich die männer in Der Bahn haben keine manieren??
In the given post, the task is to identify that the post is 'relevant'.

Subtask B) Document-level Polarity
Identify, whether the customer evaluates the 'Deutsche Bahn' or travel as positive,
negative or neutral.
Example: 'Ingo Lenßen Guten morgen Ingo...bei mir kein regen aber bahn fehr wieder
nicht...'
In the given post, the task is to identify the posts' polarity : negative

Subtask C) Aspect-level Polarity
Identify all aspects which are positively and negatively evaluated within the review. In
order to increase comparability, the aspects are previously divided into predefined
categories. Consequently, the aim of the subtasks is to identify all contained categories
and their associated polarity.
Example: ?Alle so 'Yeah, Streik beendet'' Bahn so 'Okay, dafür werden dann natürlich die
Tickets teurer' Alle so 'Können wir wieder Streik haben???
In the given post, the task is to identify the aspects and their polarity:
< Ticketkauf#Haupt:negativ> <allgemein#Haupt:positive>

Subtask D) Opinion Target Extraction
Identify the linguistic expression in the posts which are used to express the
aspect-based sentiment (subtask C). The opinion target expression is defined by its
starting and ending offsets.
Example: @m_wabersich IC 2151? Der fährt nicht. Ich habe Ihnen die Alternative bereits
genannt. /je
In the given post the task ist to identify the target expression <fährt nicht> (from='26'
to='37').

The organizers provide a baseline system and an evaluation method that may be used to
lower the obstacles for participation.
For both the baseline system and the evaluation method the organisers release executables
and open-source code to enable an easy integration into the participating systems:
- baseline system + instructions : https://github.com/uhh-lt/GermEval2017-Baseline
- evaluation method + instructions: https://github.com/muchafel/GermEval2017

Data, baseline system, evaluation method as well as the description of the tasks are
distributed to the participants via the website
https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/.

Participating team/participants may submit several runs.

Submissions consist of one TSV or XML file per subtask providing predictions for the test
data and a paper of 4 pages (excluding references) describing the chosen approach and
analyzing the performance. Each participating team/participant should submit only one
paper regardless of how many subtasks they participate in; per subtask, participants can
add 1 page to the paper, up to a maximum of 7 pages. Papers should follow the GSCL 2017
style files. We expect authors to present summaries of their systems at the GSCL workshop
and to participate in the discussions.

---- Important Dates ----

* March 2017 Release of Trial Data
* April 2017 Release of Training Data
* July 24, 2017 Release of Test Data
* August 14, 2017 Submission of System Runs
* August 21, 2017 Submission of System Description papers
* September 1, 2017 Feedback on System Description papers
* September 8, 2017 Final Submission of System Description papers
* September 12, 2017 Workshop co-located with GSCL 2017

---- Organizing committee ----

* Chris Biemann, Language Technology, Uni Hamburg, biemann[at]informatik.uni-hamburg.de
* Eugen Ruppert, Language Technology, Uni Hamburg, ruppert[at]informatik.uni-hamburg.de
* Michael Wojatzki, Language Technology Lab, Uni Duisburg-Essen,
michael.wojatzki[at]uni-due.de
* Torsten Zesch, Language Technology Lab, Uni Duisburg-Essen, torsten.zesch[at]uni-due.de


We encourage all interested teams to join the GermEval 2017 ABSA mailing list at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/germeval2017-absa, which will be the primary
source for updates on dates and test conditions.
To contact the organizing committee, please post to this mailing list or send an e-mail
to Michael Wojatzki for private communication.

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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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 We take great pleasure to invite you to submit research article in the 11th International
Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP-2017) which will be held on October 16-19, 2017 in
Tianjin, China. ISSP is a triennial conference with the aim of providing an
interdisciplinary forum for researchers working on all aspects of speech production from
fields as diverse as phonology, phonetics, prosody, mechanics, acoustics, physiology,
motor control, neuroscience, computer science and human interaction. ISSP has been held
over the word since 1988.

The ISSP-2017 will be hosted by Tianjin University and Institute of Linguistics of
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Tianjin was the ancient port city to Beijing, and is
the 3rd largest city of China with a population of over 15 million. It has a rich history
and remains characteristics of old British and Italian architecture. The famous Italian
concession area has the largest cluster of old Italian architecture outside of Italy.
Located 85 miles east of Beijing, Tianjin is the largest coastal city in northern China.
Tianjin is now a modern, developed city. Tianjin has a reputation throughout China for
being extremely friendly, safe and a place of delicious food. Welcome to Tianjin.

The proceeding will be published by Springer and indexed by EI. Papers with high quality
will be included in a special issue of ?Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing
Research?/ ?Journal of Phonetics? after revision.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not restricted to the following:

?        Perception-action control
?        Intra- and inter-speaker variability
?        Articulatory synthesis
?        Mapping between articulatory and acoustic events
?        Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion
?        Coarticulation
?        Prosody
?        Biomechanical modeling
?        Models of motor control
?        Audiovisual synthesis
?        Aerodynamic models
?        Cerebral organization and neural correlates of speech
?        Disorders of speech motor control
?        Instrumental techniques
?        Speech and language acquisition
?        Audio-visual speech perception
?        Plasticity of speech production and perception

    For more information about ISSP2017, please refer to the conference webpage:
www.issp2017.org.cn


Important Dates:

2-page abstract submission deadline       1 March 2017

Notification of paper acceptance             1 May 2017

Full paper upload deadline                       1 August 2017

Author?s registration deadline                 1 September 2017

best

--
Qiang Fang
Phonetics Lab.
Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
No.5, Jian Guo Men Nei Da Jie, Beijing, China


 

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----------------2nd CALL FOR PAPERS------------------------------------

ESSEM@ACII 2017
3rd International Workshop on
Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM 2017):
User Engagement and Interaction

http://di.unito.it/essem17

Co-located with the seventh International Conference on Affective
Computing and Intelligent Interaction
ACII 2017 (http://acii2017.org/), San Antonio, Texas
October 23, 2017

***Submission deadline: June 15, 2017***

Keynote speaker: Georgios Yannakakis, Institute of Digital Games, Univ.
of Malta

*NEWS*

- ESSEM 2017 is supported by: CELI Language Technology -
https://www.celi.it/en/
- Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Xplore (indexed by Scopus)

  --------------------------------------------------------------------

The role of emotional intelligence is increasing at fast speed in
everyday computer-mediated interactions, thanks to the integration of
more or less explicit affective elements in social networks, apps,
virtual assistants, etc. Expressed through emojis, color, tags or
speech, affect has become part of our relationships with computers,
adding depth and involvement to them. The technical advancement of the
available expressive means, from 3D to language technologies, is one of
the key factors of this process.
ESSEM 2017 addresses the expression of emotions in many-to-many
interaction and in one-to-one interaction as a tool for promoting,
analysing and measuring user engagement. In particular, we are
interested in tools and models that rely on NLP, acoustic and video
analysis; theories and methods that bridge the expression of emotions
from language to media are especially needed to overcome the limitations
of language-specific and media-specific approaches.
ESSEM 2017 focuses on interaction as a testbed for the models and tools
developed for social and expressive media. The ultimate goal is to
devise socio-emotional strategies to foster user engagement. We
encourage contributions on applications that specifically address the
role of sentiment and emotions in the interactions that occur through
social and expressive media, with a special focus on cultural heritage,
artistic expression, education and entertainment (e.g., storytelling,
artistic curation, audience development, games and edutainment). ESSEM
aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners both from
academia and industry. It wants to take an active part in growing a new
field in terms of multidisciplinary research and to investigate open
issues by cross-validating different approaches in emotion research.
Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Affect-related phenomena in social media
- Affect-related phenomena in expressive media
- Affect-related phenomena in the user's engagement process
- Subjectivity, sentiments and emotions in social & expressive media
- Affect and figurative language, stance or deception in social &
expressive media
- Design of engaging agents
- Socio-emotional strategies for user engagement
- User engagement in human-human and human-agent interactions using NLP
& audio-video analysis
- Grounding affect in conversational context
- Affect and regulation of human-agent interaction
- Affect and emotions in embodiment
- Affect in interactive entertainment (drama, storytelling, games, etc.)
and art (artistic curation, audience development, etc.)
- Applications of affective computing in multimodal interaction
- Applications of sentiment analysis and emotion detection in social &
expressive media

*Important dates*

- June 15, 2017: Paper submission deadline
- July 15, 2017: Notification of acceptance
- August 18, 2017: Final manuscripts due (hard deadline for all workshops)
- Workshop date: October 23, 2017)

*Paper submission*

Standard research papers should be a maximum of 6 pages long. We also
encourage submission of short research papers (including opinion
statements) of maximum 3 pages long.
Submissions must be anonymous and follow the ACII 2017 formatting
guidelines: http://acii2017.org/submission

All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the main
conference platform:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ACII2017/, (track ESSEM).

Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Xplore.

*Organizers*

Cristina Bosco, University of Torino, Italy
Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Chloé Clavel, LTCI, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay University, Paris,
France
Rossana Damiano, University of Torino, Italy
Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Italy
Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain

*Programme Committee*

Alexandra Balahur, European Commission Joint Research Centre
Andrea Bolioli, CELI, Italy
Zoraida Callejas, University of Granada, Spain
Lea Canales, Universitat d?Alacant, Spain
Paula Carvalho, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Marc Cavazza, Teesside University, UK
Antonio Chella, University of Palermo, Italy
Giuseppe Riccardi, University of Trento, Italy
Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, India
Berardina Nadja De Carolis, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Guillaume Dubuisson-Duplessis, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay
University, France
Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Carlos A. Iglesias, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Aditya Joshi IITB-Monash Research Academy, Mumbai, India
Emiliano Lorini, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento, Italy
Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Nicole Novielli, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Magalie Ochs, LSIS, University of Aix Marseille, France
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
Austria
Rémi Ronfard, INRIA, France
Saif Mohammad, National Research Council, Canada
Björn Schuller, University of Passau, Germany, Imperial College London, UK
Candace Sidner, WPI, US
Mariët Theune, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Marko Tkalcic, Free University of Bozen, Italy
Serena Villata, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
Emilio Vivancos, UPV, Spain
Gualtiero Volpe, University of Genova, Italy
Enrico Zovato, Nuance Communications, USA

**Follow us!* *

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Essem2017
Spread the news: #essem2017

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Essem2017

*Flyer*

http://www.di.unito.it/~patti/essem17/CFP_ESSEM-flyer2017.pdf

If have any enquiries/comments about the workshop or the submission
procedure, please just contact us via email: essem4acii2017@gmail.com

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The 5th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP 2017) invites researchers to submit poster presentations. SLSP 2017 will be held in Le Mans (France) on October 23-25, 2017. See

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5th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING
 
SLSP 2017
 
Le Mans, France
 
October 23-25, 2017
 
Organized by:
 
Computer Science Lab (LIUM)
University of Le Mans
 
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/SLSP2017/
 
**********************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large, well-known conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2017, significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.
 
VENUE:
 
SLSP 2017 will take place in Le Mans, in the region Pays de la Loire, a city with well-preserved Gallo-Roman remnants. The venue will be:
 
Claude Chappe Informatics Institute
University of Le Mans
Avenue Laënnec
72085 Le Mans Cedex 9
 
SCOPE:
 
The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical models (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
anaphora and coreference resolution
authorship identification, plagiarism and spam filtering
computer-aided translation
corpora and language resources
data mining and semantic web
information extraction
information retrieval
knowledge representation and ontologies
lexicons and dictionaries
machine translation
multimodal technologies
natural language understanding
neural representation of speech and language
opinion mining and sentiment analysis
parsing
part-of-speech tagging
question-answering systems
semantic role labelling
speaker identification and verification
speech and language generation
speech recognition
speech synthesis
speech transcription
spelling correction
spoken dialogue systems
term extraction
text categorisation
text summarisation
user modeling
 
STRUCTURE:
 
SLSP 2017 will consist of:
 
invited talks
peer-reviewed contributions
posters
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: (to be completed)
 
Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Keikichi Hirose (University of Tokyo, JP)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, IE)
Tomi Kinnunen (University of Eastern Finland, FI)
Elizabeth D. Liddy (Syracuse University, US)
Xunying Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, JP)
Marie-Francine Moens (KU Leuven, BE)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, QA)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Holger Schwenk (Facebook, FR)
Phil Woodland (University of Cambridge, UK)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Walid Aransa (Le Mans)
Adrien Bardet (Le Mans)
Abdessalam Bouchekif (Le Mans)
Fethi Bougares (Le Mans)
Nathalie Camelin (Le Mans)
Yannick Estève (Le Mans, co-chair)
Mercedes García Martínez (Le Mans)
Sahar Ghannay (Le Mans)
Anthony Larcher (Le Mans)
Antoine Laurent (Le Mans)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Salima Mdhaffar (Le Mans)
Manuel J. Parra Royón (Granada)
Simon Petitrenaud (Le Mans)
David Silva (London)
Natalia Tomashenko (Le Mans)
Kévin Vythelingum (Le Mans)
 
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, graphics, 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=slsp2017
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNAI 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/SLSP2017/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Extended paper submission: June 18, 2017
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: July 11, 2017
Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNAI proceedings: July 21, 2017
Early registration: July 21, 2017
Late registration: October 9, 2017
Submission to the journal special issue: January 25, 2018
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david.silva409@yahoo.com
 
POSTAL ADDRESS:
 
SLSP 2017
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Université du Maine
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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ACII 2017 – Call for Papers

Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

October 23-26, 2017 San Antonio, Texas

http://www.acii2017.org or follow us on Twitter @acii2017

Call for papers

The Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) invites you to join us at our seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), which will be held in San Antonio, Texas on October 23-26, 2017. The Conference series is the premier international forum for interdisciplinary research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena.

A selection of the best articles will appear in a “Best of ACII2017” special section of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing. Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore. The theme of ACII2017 is “Affective Computing in Action,” highlighting the impact of affective computing technologies in the wider world.

Program

ACII2017 will feature a broad program, with regular talks, posters, demos, workshops, special sessions, a doctoral consortium, special industry panel session on affective computing applications and keynote talks by James Russell (Boston College), Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell University) and Thomas R. Insel (former NIHM). We will have two special sessions: “Emotions in Cognition, Adaptive Behavior and Action Selection” and “Utilising Big Unlabelled and Unmatched Data for Affective Computing”.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Recognition of Human Affect: Uni- or multimodal recognition of affect from face, body, gesture, voice text, or physiology; affective face/body animation; expression and gesture recognition; sentiment analysis
• Synthesis of Human Affect: Affective speech synthesis, modeling and animation, synthesis of auditory affect bursts, synthesis of multimodal affective behavior
• Affective Interfaces: Affective brain-computer interfaces, design of affective loop and affective dialog systems; mobile, tangible, haptic and virtual/augmented interfaces; affectively-smart environments; affectively proactive interfaces
• Social and Behavioral Science Involving Affective Computing: Cognitive affective models; models of moral decision-making; tools for social science research; computational models of emotion; psychological factors in affective computing (personality, culture); ethical issues; dyadic and group affective processes
• Affective and Social Robotics and Virtual Agents: Emotions in robot cognition and action, embodied issues in emotion; affective virtual agents; memory, reasoning, and learning of affective systems; affective architectures for virtual & robotic systems
• Affective Applications: Databases and tools; biometrics; medical; assistive; virtual reality; entertainment; education; ambient intelligence; industrial

Important dates

Proposals for workshops: February 24, 2017

Proposals for tutorials: April 21, 2017

Regular paper submission: May 2, 2017

Doctoral consortium submission: June 9, 2017

Demos submission: July 21, 2017

Organization

General Chairs: Carlos Busso and Julien Epps

Program Chairs: Hayley Hung, Emily Mower Provost and Mohammad Soleymani

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Appel à communication

Colloque « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », 13 et 14 novembre 2017, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3
Lieu : Site de Saint-Charles 2, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3

Le projet CORAL, les laboratoires PRAXILING (UMR 5267) et DIPRALANG (EA 739) organisent conjointement un colloque intitulé « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », qui aura lieu les 13 et 14 novembre 2017 sur le site Saint Charles.

Les conférenciers invités sont Stefan Evert (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Bente Maegaard (Centre for Language Technologie, University of Copenhagen), Damon Mayaffre (BCL UMR 7320, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) et Christophe Parisse (Modyco UMR 7114, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre).

L?objectif de ce colloque est de faire dialoguer ces différentes communautés de chercheurs, qu?ils soient producteurs ou utilisateurs de ressources et/ou d?outils. Les approches méthodologiques qui associent différents modes d?exploitation et d?analyse de corpus oraux et écrits seront particulièrement attendues.
Il s?agira notamment d?aborder les problématiques suivantes :
- Annotation (phonétique, prosodique, gestuelle, morphosyntaxique, sémantique, etc.) ;
- Standardisation des annotations et du balisage ;
- Mise en place d?un format commun aux corpus écrits et oraux, permettant d?assurer l?interopérabilité entre les deux types de données ;
- Exploitation automatique ou semi-automatique et analyse des données ;
- Mutualisation des ressources (corpus annotés, schémas d?annotation, lexiques, patrons ou grammaires?) ;
- Adaptation et/ou création d?applications pour le traitement et l?exploitation des données orales et écrites.

Format des communications :
Les interventions pourront se faire dans trois formats différents : communication orale de 20 minutes, posters et/ou démo (corpus, applications, etc.). Il sera possible de combiner la présentation d?un poster avec une démo. Il est demandé aux auteurs d?exprimer leur préférence au moment de la soumission.

Modalités de soumission :
Les propositions doivent être envoyées à l?adresse suivante : coralmontpellier3@univ-montp3.fr avant le 30 juillet 2017.
Elles prendront la forme d?un résumé anonymisé (en français ou en anglais) d?une longueur maximale de 500 mots (bibliographie non comprise) au format pdf (en Times New Roman 12). Dans le corps du message, doivent être indiqués le nom, prénom et l?affiliation de l?auteur.

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Appel à communication - Extension de la date de soumission des résumés au 31 août 2017

Colloque « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », 13 et 14 novembre 2017, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3
Lieu : Site de Saint-Charles 2, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3

Le projet CORAL, les laboratoires PRAXILING (UMR 5267) et DIPRALANG (EA 739) organisent conjointement un colloque intitulé « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », qui aura lieu les 13 et 14 novembre 2017 sur le site Saint Charles.

Les conférenciers invités sont Stefan Evert (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Bente Maegaard (Centre for Language Technologie, University of Copenhagen), Damon Mayaffre (BCL UMR 7320, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) et Christophe Parisse (Modyco UMR 7114, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre).

L?objectif de ce colloque est de faire dialoguer ces différentes communautés de chercheurs, qu?ils soient producteurs ou utilisateurs de ressources et/ou d?outils. Les approches méthodologiques qui associent différents modes d?exploitation et d?analyse de corpus oraux et écrits seront particulièrement attendues.
Il s?agira notamment d?aborder les problématiques suivantes :
- Annotation (phonétique, prosodique, gestuelle, morphosyntaxique, sémantique, etc.) ;
- Standardisation des annotations et du balisage ;
- Mise en place d?un format commun aux corpus écrits et oraux, permettant d?assurer l?interopérabilité entre les deux types de données ;
- Exploitation automatique ou semi-automatique et analyse des données ;
- Mutualisation des ressources (corpus annotés, schémas d?annotation, lexiques, patrons ou grammaires?) ;
- Adaptation et/ou création d?applications pour le traitement et l?exploitation des données orales et écrites.

Format des communications :
Les interventions pourront se faire dans trois formats différents : communication orale de 20 minutes, posters et/ou démo (corpus, applications, etc.). Il sera possible de combiner la présentation d?un poster avec une démo. Il est demandé aux auteurs d?exprimer leur préférence au moment de la soumission.

Modalités de soumission :
Les propositions doivent être envoyées à l?adresse suivante : coralmontpellier3@univ-montp3.fr avant le 31 août 2017.
Elles prendront la forme d?un résumé anonymisé (en français ou en anglais) d?une longueur maximale de 500 mots (bibliographie non comprise) au format pdf (en Times New Roman 12). Dans le corps du message, doivent être indiqués le nom, prénom et l?affiliation de l?auteur.

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International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)

Glasgow, Scotland. November 13-17th, 2017

https://icmi.acm.org/2017/

Call for Demonstrations and Exhibits

Submissions: August 29th, 2017, Decisions on Sept 14th. Camera ready papers due Sept 22nd and materials (e.g. video) due Sept 25th.

Submit: http://precisionconference.com/~icmi

Confirmed Keynotes

Larry Barsalou, University of Glasgow: http://barsaloulab.org/

Danica Kragic, KTH - Royal Institute of Technology: http://www.csc.kth.se/~danik/

Charles Spence, University of Oxford: https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/crossmodal-research-laboratory

**********

The 19th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland. 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.

The ICMI 2017 Demonstrations & Exhibits session is intended to provide a forum to showcase innovative implementations, systems and technologies demonstrating new ideas about interactive multimodal interfaces. We particularly encourage demonstration of interactive and multimodal analysis systems and sensors. They can also serve to introduce commercial products.

Proposals may be of two types: demonstrations and exhibits. The main difference is that demonstrations include a short paper (2 pages), which will be included in ICMI proceedings, while the exhibits only need to include a short outline (no more than 1 page). We encourage both the submission of early research prototypes and interesting mature systems. In addition, authors of accepted regular research papers are invited to participate in the demonstration sessions as well.

This year will feature a Multimodal Resources track to showcase novel corpora, annotation tools and schemes. Demonstrations in this track will benefit from more exposure to visitors, and will allow visitors to interact with the material.

Demo Submission

A 1-2 page description of the demonstration is required, which must be submitted electronically through the main ICMI conference management system (https://precisionconference.com/~icmi). Demo description(s) must be in PDF format, according to the ACM conference format, of no more than 2 pages in length including references (template available at: http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#aL2). Demo proposals should include a description with photographs and/or screen captures of the demonstration and, if possible, the URL of a website where a live version or video of the proposed demo is available. Please note that the accepted descriptions will be included in ICMI proceedings.

The selection process is juried (curated) by committee, according to criteria such as: suitability as a demo, scientific or engineering feasibility of the proposed demo system, application, or interactivity, alignment with the conference focus, potential to engage the audience, and overall quality and presentation of the written proposal. Authors are encouraged to address such criteria in their proposals (paper submission), along with preparing the short papers mindful of the quality and rigorous scientific expectations of an ACM publication.

The curated demo program will be selected from the submitted proposals as well as invited demos from among full-length papers accepted for presentation at the conference which the committee deems suitable for demonstration.

Exhibit Submission

Exhibit proposals should be submitted following the same guidelines, formatting, and due dates as for demo proposals. The main difference is that exhibits proposals should be shorter in length (up to one page) and more suitable for very mature systems (commercial or almost commercial). Exhibits won't have a paper published in the ICMI 2017 proceedings.

All materials should be prepared in PDF format and submitted through the ICMI submission system via PCS (https://precisionconference.com/~icmi). The demo and exhibit paper submissions should not be anonymous. However, all ACM rules and guidelines related to paper submission should be followed (e.g. plagiarism, including self-plagiarism).

Important Dates

Demonstrations and Exhibits submission deadline: 29th August 2017

Notification of acceptance: 14th September 2017

Camera-ready submission - Papers: 22nd September, 2017

Camera-ready submission - Materials (e.g. Video): 25th September, 2017

Conference dates: 13th-17th November 2017

Further info

For more information and updates on the ICMI 2017 Demos and Exhibits, visit the main conference website: https://icmi.acm.org/2017/index.php?id=cfd

For further questions, contact the Demos and Exhibits co-chairs:

• Cosmin Munteanu (University of Toronto, Canada), cosmin@taglab.ca

• Martin Halvey (University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom), martin.halvey@strath.ac.uk

**********

General Conference Information

The 2017 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2017, which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland between 13th and 17th November 2017. 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. ICMI 2017 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers including Larry Barsalou (http://barsaloulab.org/), Danica Kragic (http://www.csc.kth.se/~danik/) and Charles Spence (https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/crossmodal-research-laboratory), grand challenges, workshops, technical full and short papers, exhibits and doctoral consortium papers and demonstrations . The proceedings of ICMI'2017 will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and Digital Library.

For up to date information, see the conference website: https://icmi.acm.org/2017/

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Workshop on L2 Phonetics & Phonology of L1 Romance Learners (L2PHROL). Turin, Italy.

16-17 November 2017

The University of Turin (Laboratorio Sperimentale di Fonetics ?Arturo Genre?) and the University of Paris 8 (Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage) are pleased to announce that the L2PHROL workshop (L2 Phonetics and Phonology of L1 Romance Learners) will be held in Turin (Italy) on 16-17 November 2017. The L2PHROL workshop is jointly organized by universities in France and Italy and aims at bringing together researchers working on the L2 phonetics and phonology of Romance L1 learners.


Topics of the workshop:

We welcome contributions focusing on Romance L1 learners of any L2, involving any of the following 5 broad themes:

1)      The acquisition of new phonological/phonetic/prosodic features in production and/or perception by speakers of a Romance L1, or by simultaneous bilinguals with at least one Romance language.

2)      Common characteristics and common difficulties encountered by Romance native speakers learning an L2, such as tense-lax vowel contrasts, glottal fricative /h/, aspirated stops, stress-timed rhythm, phonological vowel length, lexical tones, prosodic realisation of contrastive focus.

3)      Other phonetic characteristics of L2 speech by L1 Romance speakers.

4)      The validation of phonetic/phonological theories in the light of L2 data by speakers whose L1 is a Romance language, or by simultaneous bilinguals with at least one Romance language

5)      Teaching techniques or materials addressing L1 pronunciation and phonological awareness for Romance L1 learners of any L2.


Abstract submission

We invite abstracts in English (Times New Roman, 12-point font size, max. 1 page in A4 size plus optionally a second page for references and figures). Anonymous abstracts must be submitted by 1st September 2017 and will be peer-reviewed by members of the scientific committee (see http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ricerca/L2PHROL/committees.html ). More details about the submission procedure will be published on the website.


Registration
Registration will open on 16th September 2017. There will be no registration fee.


For further information, visit our workshop website http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ricerca/L2PHROL/ , or contact L2PHROL2017 AT gmail.com<http://gmail.com/>.

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Pour plus d?informations : www.gipsa-lab.fr/colloque/DeveloppementArticulation

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First call for papers ICNLSP 2017

ICNLSP 2017 is the International Conference On Natural Language Processing and Speech Processing to be held 5-6 December, 2017, In Casablanca ? Morocco

Conference site: http://icnlsp.isga.ma

The main goal of ICNLSP is to provide a forum for presentation, discussion and dissemination of the scientific findings in the area of Natural Language and Speech Processing. The conference welcomes papers describing original works and tool demonstration papers.

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical, experimental, or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

• Signal processing, acoustic modeling.
• Architecture of speech recognition system.
• Switch code and Arabic dialects
• Language processing of social network data
• Deep learning for speech recognition
• Speech comprehension
• Speech Translation
• Speech synthesis.
• Speaker and language identification
• Phonetics, phonology and prosody.
• Cognition and natural language processing
• Information retrieval on social network
• Neural network language models.
• Machine Learning
• Text Mining
• Video processing in social network
• Human-Machine Dialogue
• Text summarization

Invited speakers:

Jean-Paul Haton (Professor Emeritus at university of Lorraine)

Yves Lepage (Professor at University of Waseda ? Japan)

Olivier Siohan (Senior Researcher at Google ? USA)

Imed Zitouni (Senior Researcher at Microsoft ? USA)

 

Program Committee

Frédéric Béchet ( Professor  University Aix-Marseille, France)
Laurent Besacier (Professor  University of Grenoble, France)
Khalid Choukri (Executive director of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA))
Mona Diab (Associate Professor George Washington University)
Yannick Estève (Professor University of Le Mans, France)
Dominique Fohr (researcher  CNRS, France)
Jean-Paul Haton (Professor emeritus, University Lorraine, France)
Salma Jamoussi (Assistant Professor University of Sfax, Tunisia)
Denis Jouvet (Researcher  INRIA Lorraine, France)
David Langlois (Assistant Professor Lorraine University, France)
Chiraz Latiri (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Yves Lepage (Professor University Waseda, Japan)
Mikolaj Leszcuk (Assistant Professor, Poland)
Khalifa Mansouri (Assistant Professor University Hassan II)
Odile Mella (Assistant professor at University of Lorraine)
Franck Poirier (Professor University of Bretagne sud)
Fatiha Sadat (Associate Professor UQAM, Canada)
Khaled Shaalan (Professor The British University in Dubai, UAE)
Olivier Siohan (Researcher  Google, USA)
Yahya Slimani (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Kamel Smaili (Professor University Lorraine, France)
Juan-Manual Torrès (Assistant Professor University of Avignon, France)
Imed Zitouni (Researcher at Microsoft, USA)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages (double column) for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. Submissions will be done via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icnlsp2017


We apologize for cross-posting and kindly ask you to forward this information to interested persons.

Best regards

Pr K. Smaïli
PC chair

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International Conference on Natural Language, Signal and Speech Processing  (ICNLSSP)  will be held on 5^th - 6^thDecember 2017 in Casablanca, Morocco.

Conference site: http://icnlssp.isga.ma

Submission of papers: Friday, 15 September 2017 23.59 GMT

ICNLSSP is an international conference dedicated to Natural Language Processing and Speech recognition. ICNLSSP is a technical conference not only proposing new researches on the concerned topics but also will permit exchanging ideas between researchers from the world which will be very useful for PhD students and developers in this area. The selection criteria will be similar to those used for large conferences such as Interspeech or ICASSP. The committee program has a strong experience in the subjects of ICNLSSP. Researchers are encouraged to propose papers with new ideas, which have not been yet published. Keynote speeches will be given by Professors and Doctors from Google, Microsoft, University of Waseda and IUF (Institut Universitaire de France).
All the selected papers will be published in the proceedings of ICNLSSP and the best papers will be proposed to be published in a special volume of ISGA Journal

SCOPE

Invited speakers:

Jean-Paul Haton (Professor Emeritus at university of Lorraine)

Yves Lepage (Professor at University of Waseda ? Japan)

Olivier Siohan (Senior Researcher at Google ? USA)

Imed Zitouni (Senior Researcher at Microsoft ? USA)

Program Committee

Frédéric Béchet ( Professor  University Aix-Marseille, France)
Laurent Besacier (Professor  University of Grenoble, France)
Khalid Choukri (Executive director of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA))
Mona Diab (Associate Professor George Washington University)
Yannick Estève (Professor University of Le Mans, France)
Dominique Fohr (researcher  CNRS, France)
Jean-Paul Haton (Professor emeritus, University Lorraine, France)
Salma Jamoussi (Assistant Professor University of Sfax, Tunisia)
Denis Jouvet (Researcher  INRIA Lorraine, France)
David Langlois (Assistant Professor Lorraine University, France)
Chiraz Latiri (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Yves Lepage (Professor University Waseda, Japan)
Mikolaj Leszcuk (Assistant Professor, Poland)
Khalifa Mansouri (Professor University Hassan II)
Odile Mella (Assistant professor at University of Lorraine)
Franck Poirier (Professor University of Bretagne sud)
Fatiha Sadat (Associate Professor UQAM, Canada)
Khaled Shaalan (Professor The British University in Dubai, UAE)
Olivier Siohan (Researcher  Google, USA)
Yahya Slimani (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Kamel Smaili (Professor University Lorraine, France)
Juan-Manual Torrès (Assistant Professor University of Avignon, France)
Imed Zitouni (Researcher at Microsoft, USA)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages (double column) for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. Submissions will be done via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icnlsp2017

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DSTC6: Call for Track Proposals
------------------------------

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 ================================================================================= IHCI
2017: 9th International Conference on Intelligent Human-Computer Interaction
Evry, France, December 11-13, 2017, http://ihci2017.sciencesconf.org
================================================================================= The 9th
international conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI 2017) will be
held in Evry, near Paris, France, from 11 to 13 of December 2017.

IHCI allows researchers and practitioners to exchange on recent results in the area of
human-computer interaction, related technologies (including signal processing, multimodal
analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive modelling) and their
applications. The conference will bring together researchers from academia, industry and
research organizations from various disciplines, around theoretical, practical and
application-oriented contributions.

This year, along with usual topics, IHCI 2017 will focus on human cognition modelling for
interaction, including human cognitive process modelling (for task analysis...),
human-robot interaction (for companion robots...), cognition for interaction in virtual
worlds (for autonomous conversational agents...).

Keynotes will be given by :
- Pr. Alain Berthoz, Honorary Professor at Collège de France, member of the French
Academy of Science and Academy of Technology, on 'Simplexity and vicariance. On human
cognition principles for man-machine interaction'
- Pr. Mohamed Chetouani, Professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University, France, on
'Interpersonal Human-Human and Human-Robot Interactions',
- Pr. Antti Oulasvirta, Associate Professor at Aalto University, Finland, on 'Can
Machines Design? Optimizing User Interfaces for Human Performance'.

The IHCI topics include but are not limited to:

Human Cognition Modelling:
- Cognitive models of intelligence
- Modelling perceptual processes
- Modelling of learning and thinking
- Modelling of memory
- Cognitive task analysis

User adaptation and Personalization:
- Adaptive learning
- Affective computing for adaptive interaction
- Reinforcement learning

Brain Computer Interfaces:
- Brain computer integration
- Brain activity understanding for interaction

Machine Perception of Humans:
- Speech detection and recognition
- Natural language processing
- Face and emotion detection
- Body sensors and communication
- Gesture recognition
- Human motion tracking

Tactile interfaces:
- Haptics fundaments
- Haptic feedback for interaction
- Haptic feedback for robot collaboration

Human-Robot Interaction and collaboration:
- Collaborative learning
- Collaborative systems
- Temporal coordination modelling

Applications:
- Natural User Interfaces
- Human-robot interaction
- Virtual and augmented reality
- Remote and face-to-face collaboration
- Embodied conversational agents
- Mobile interfaces
- Interface design for accessibility and rehabilitation
- Interaction and cognition for education
- Health
- Serious games

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**NEW:* The conference proceedings will be published as an open access volume in the
Springer series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and indexed in the ISI
Conference Proceedings Citation Index, Scopus, EI Engineering Index, Google Scholar,
DBLP, etc. Papers can be either long papers (10 to 12 pages) or short papers (4 to 6
pages), and must conform to the LNCS templates (see the guidelines for authors). *
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Papers must be written in English and describe original work that has not been published
and is not under review elsewhere. In order to enforce blind reviewing, papers must be
made anonymous before submitting (by removing the author?s names and institution from the
header).

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: *June 30, 2017 (EXTENDED) *
- Decision notification: September 10, 2017 (tentative)
- Final version due: October 1st, 2017

Patrick Horain (Telecom SudParis), Chair
Catherine Achard (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), Co-Chair
Malik Mallem (Université Evry Val d'Essonne), Co-Chair

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 10 th International Workshop MAVEBA2017.

http://maveba.dinfo.unifi.it/

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 The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is a yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation campaign on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers and system descriptions are presented. The 14th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation will take place in Tokyo, Japan, on December 14-15, 2017.
http://workshop2017.iwslt.org/index.php


Evaluation Campaign

IWSLT 2017 will offer three official evaluation tasks: multilingual text translation of TED talks (including zero-shot translation), text translation of dialogues, speech recognition and speech translation of lectures. Multilingual translation will target English, German, Dutch, Italian and Romanian; translations of dialogues will be from Japanese to English; and speech translation of lectures will be from German to English. Additional unofficial text translations of TED talks will be offered à-la-carte according to expressions of interest by the participants. Training and development data will be released to the participants through the workshop website. For the multilingual task both large and small training data constraints will be defined.

Scientific Papers
The IWSLT invites submissions of scientific papers to be published in the workshop proceedings and presented in dedicated technical sessions of the workshop, either in oral or poster form. The workshop welcomes high quality, original contributions covering theoretical and practical issues in the fields of automatic speech recognition and machine translation that are applied to spoken language translation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  MT and SLT approaches
  Integration of ASR and MT
  MT and SLT evaluation
  Language resources for MT and SLT
  Open source software for ASR, MT and SLT
  Multilingual MT and ASR
  Applications of MT and SLT
  Adaptation in MT, ASR and SLT
  Post- and Pre-processing for ASR, MT and SLT
  Efficiency in ASR, MT and SLT


IMPORTANT DATES

Evaluation Campaign

  June 5: Release of train and dev data (*)
  Sep. 11 - 17: Multilingual task evaluation
  Sep. 11 - 17: Lectures ASR evaluation
  Sep. 18 - 24: Lectures SLT evaluation
  Sep. 18 - 24: Dialogue task evaluation
  Oct. 22: System description paper
  Nov. 12: Review feedback
  Nov. 26: Camera ready
  (*) Release of training data of the Dialogue task will be announced later.

Scientific Papers

  Sep. 30: Paper submissions
  Oct. 31: Notification of acceptance
  Nov. 12: Camera ready

Submitted manuscripts will be subject to a blind peer-reviewed. Authors of accepted papers are requested to present their paper at the workshop.

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ASRU 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop December 16-20, 2017 Okinawa, Japan http://asru2017.org CALL FOR PAPERS The biennial IEEE ASRU workshop has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting to discuss problems of common interest in automatic speech recognition, understanding, and related fields of research. The workshop includes keynotes, invited talks, poster sessions and will also feature challenge tasks, panel discussions, and demo sessions. TOPICS AND FOCUS We invite papers in all areas of spoken language processing, with emphasis placed on the following topics: - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) - ASR in adverse environments - New applications of ASR - Speech-to-speech translation - Spoken document retrieval - Multilingual language processing - Spoken language understanding - Spoken dialog systems - Text-to-speech systems VENUE The ASRU workshop will take place in Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is a subtropical island located roughly 640 kilometers (400 mi) south of the main islands of Japan. It is one of Japanfs main tourist destinations because of its warm weather, its rich natural resources, and its unique blend of cultures that evolved through centuries of trade with China, Korea and other Southeast Asian countries. FORMAT The workshop features one keynote and one or two invited talks a day. Regular papers are presented as posters. ASRU 2017 will also include challenge tasks, panel discussions and demo sessions. SCHEDULE Paper Submission............. June 29, 2017 Paper Notification........... August 31, 2017 Early Registration Period:... August 31 - Oct 5, 2017 Camera Ready Deadline........ Sept 21, 2017 Workshop..................... Dec 16-20, 2017 MORE INFORMATION For updates see http://www.asru2017.org

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                          CALL FOR WORKSHOPS AND SPECIAL SESSIONS

IWSDS 2018: International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology

Place: Singapore

Main Conference Dates: April 18-20, 2018

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The INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY (IWSDS) 2018 invites proposals for Workshops and Special Sessions in any topic related to the main conference theme: 'Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies.'

Authors are requested to submit PDF files (maximum three pages) of their proposal to the following email: iwsds2018@gmail.com

The proposal must indicate:

1. Whether the proposal is for a workshop or for a special session:

• Workshops are half day events collocated either before or after the IWSDS 2018 main program. Registration to workshops is not included with IWSDS registration. Participants only interested in attending the workshops do not need to register for IWSDS.
• Special sessions are 90-minute sessions that are part of the IWSDS main program. Registration to special sessions is included with IWSDS registration.   

2. Workshop / Special Session title

3. Name, affiliation, e-mail and phone number of the organizers

4. Tentative program committee members (only for workshop proposals)

5. A description of the workshop / Special Session including:

• Objectives
• Topics of interest
• Justification
• Expected number submissions
• Tentative program

6. Special audio-visual, internet, computer or equipment requirements

7. Whether the workshop / special session have been run before:

   - Where and when

   - Number of participants

8. Any additional information that might be relevant for the proposal evaluation

Proposal submission deadline: August 15, 2017

Proposal submission notification: September 1, 2017

Important notice:

1. Based on the volume of submissions and other logistic constrains, accepted workshops can be converted into special sessions or vice versa.
2. IWSDS 2018 organization will not provide any kind of financial support to workshop and special session organizers. IWSDS 2018 organization will only cover expenses related to venue, audio-visual equipment and coffee breaks for workshops and special sessions.

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2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
     Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence: Changing the World

                      ICASSP 2018  Seoul KOREA
                          April 22-27, 2018

                    https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/

                 CALL FOR SPECIAL-SESSION PROPOSALS

The program for ICASSP 2018 will include Special Sessions that complement the traditional program with new and emerging  topics of interest to the signal-processing community, particularly those that are in line with the theme of the conference. The aim of a special session is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art as well as to highlight current research directions and challenges in specific fields of signal processing.

Prospective organizers of Special Sessions should submit proposals indicating:

  + Title of the Special Session
  + Motivation, indicating the novelty of the topic and why it is timely.
  + Short biography of the organizers
  + List of six (6) contributed papers (including titles, authors, contact information of the corresponding author, and a short abstract of each contribution). Each organizer may not contribute more than one paper, and organizers should contact the authors of contributed papers and secure their participation prior to submission of the proposal.

Only a maximum of three organizers per Special Session is allowed.

Proposals will be evaluated based on the timeliness and attractiveness of the topic as well as on the qualifications of the organizers and the authors of the contributed papers.

Special session proposals are due by August 4, 2017, and notification of accepted proposals will be on September 8, 2017. Just as with regular conference papers, five page papers for approved Special Sessions must be submitted by October 27, 2017.

The papers in each accepted Special Session will undergo a review process identical to that of regular papers. It is the responsibility of the organizers to ensure that their Special-Session papers meet ICASSP quality standards. In case a paper in a Special Session does not meet the expected quality, it will be rejected, and an effort will be made to draw papers from the regular-submission process to fill the gap. If too few papers for a given Special Session are accepted in the review process, and we are unable to find suitable substitutes from the regular review pool, the Special Session may be canceled?in such a case, the accepted papers from a canceled Special Session will be placed into the regular program.

Inquiries about Special Sessions can be sent to specialsessions@2018.ieeeicassp.org and submissions can be made through https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/SpecialSessions.asp

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LREC 2018, 11th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation -
Phoenix Seagaia Resort, Miyazaki, Japan
7-12 May 2018

Main Conference: 9-10-11 May 2018
Workshops and Tutorials: 7-8 & 12 May 2018

Conference web site: http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/
Twitter: @LREC2018

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 11th edition of LREC, organised with the support of international organisations ? many from Asia: the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), Oriental COCOSDA, the Association of Natural Language Processing - Japan, the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, the Linguistic Data Consortium, the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand, the Korean Society for Language and Information, the Korean Special Interest Group of Human and Cognitive Language Technology, ...

CONFERENCE AIMS
LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies
and tools, communicate on-going and planned activities, identify industrial uses and needs, and address requirements from e-science and e-society, with respect to scientific, technology, policy and organisational issues.

For this edition, which celebrates its 20th anniversary, LREC goes East in order to support a stronger interaction and synergy with the Asian NLP community and to help promoting Asian Language Resources and Language Technologies.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from a wide spectrum of related disciplines to discuss issues and opportunities, find new synergies and promote  initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LTs) and development of corresponding products,
services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS
Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data
* Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
* Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
* Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
* Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
* LRs and Semantic Web
* LRs and Crowdsourcing
* Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications
* Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication
* LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, etc.
* Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
* Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications, digital humanities, social sciences, etc.
* Industrial LRs requirements
* User needs, LT for accessibility

Issues in LT evaluation
* LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
* Validation and quality assurance of LRs
* Benchmarking of systems and products
* Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
* User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
* International and national activities, projects and initiatives
* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
* Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
* Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
* Replicability and reproducibility issues
* Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

LREC 2018 HOT TOPICS

Asian Language Resources
Special attention will be devoted to highlight the wide variety of initiatives for the creation, use and evaluation of Asian Language Resources and Technologies. Special attention will be paid to Less-Resourced Languages in the Asian area, including (local) Sign Languages.

International Contribution to Olympics 2020
LREC 2018 would like to promote all LTs that would support better interactions and communications between the Olympics 2020 visitors and the local hosts. This involves all speech- and text-based computer interactions, speech/sign to speech/sign translations, human-human communications mediated by computers, etc. Assessment of the above mentioned technologies is also an important area within LREC 2018.

Language Resources in the Online World
In a time in which more and more (language) data are generated, either by human beings or by machines, and directly streamed, the question arises how LRs and LTs can cope with this development. A first challenge is to address and to provide for correctives to hate speeches, cyberbullying, fake news, etc. Can LT provide means to process and respond in a timely manner to such language data streamed in a huge amount at high speed? In this context, language technologists have to intensify cooperation with humanities, especially social and political sciences, psychology but also economics, and more.

DESCRIBE AND SHARE YOUR LRs!
In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map ? now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences ? LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community. When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize. We will also organise an Industrial Track.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

General submission page: http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/

Submission of extended abstracts for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 25 September 2017

    LREC 2018 asks for a 3 to 4 pages (references excluded) extended abstract which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet. Extended abstracts must be submitted through START @ https://www.softconf.com/lrec2018/main/ and will be peer-reviewed. Submissions are NOT anonymous.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 25 September 2017

    Workshop and Tutorial Proposals must be submitted online @ http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/ and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.


PROCEEDINGS
The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. Final papers will range from 4 to 8 pages, with no difference in quality between shorter and longer submissions.
There is also no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered. The importance of LREC in Natural Language Processing is reflected by the H5-Index citation ranking in Google Scholar: LREC is ranked 3rd among Computational Linguistics conferences. In addition, since 2010, LREC Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari ? CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri ? ELRA, Paris - France
Christopher Cieri ? Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia - USA
Thierry Declerck ? DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Koiti Hasida ? The University of Tokyo, Tokyo - Japan
Hitoshi Isahara ? Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi - Japan
Bente Maegaard ? Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani ? LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay - France
Asuncion Moreno ? Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain
Jan Odijk ? UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis ? Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece
Takenobu Tokunaga ? Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo ? Japan

CONFERENCE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Sara Goggi, CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa, Italy
Hélène Mazo, ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France

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The 9th Speech Prosody Conference will be held from 13 to 16 June, 2018 at Collegium Iuridicum Novum, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Speech Prosody is the biennial flagship conference of SProSIG with 300 - 400 participants each time. 

The deadline for Workshop, Tutorial &amp; Special Session proposal submission is 15 September. We encourage you to make proposals by sending e-mail to prosodist@gmail.com and jolabachan@gmail.com

The paper submission deadline is 10 December. (Submission page will open on 1 October.)

For details, please go to Speech Prosody 2018 home page http://sp9.home.amu.edu.pl/index.php

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The Sixth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages will be held in Berlin, Germany from Monday June 18 to Wednesday June 20, 2018.  This symposium follows the successful TAL 2016 conference in Buffalo, NY, USA.  TAL 2018 will be organized at Beuth University Berlin conveniently located in the city center close to all major attractions.  TAL 2018 is timed after Speech Prosody 2018 in Poznan, Poland, June 13-16, only a quick train ride away. 

Websites and deadlines:

TAL 2018: http://public.beuth-hochschule.de/~mixdorff/tal2018/

Speech Prosody 2018: http://sp9.home.amu.edu.pl/, paper deadline 10 December 2017

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2018 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

We are pleased to invite one page research proposals for a workshop on Machine Learning for Speech and Language Technology at Johns Hopkins University June 25 to August 3, 2018 (Tentative)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: Monday, October 9th, 2017.

 One-page proposals are invited for the annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Workshop in Speech and Language Technology. Proposals should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT) or related areas of Machine Intelligence, including Computer Vision and Healthcare. Proposals may address emerging topics or long-standing problems. Areas of interest in 2018 include but are not limited to:

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY: Any aspect of information extraction from speech signals; techniques that generalize in spite of very limited amounts of training data and/or which are robust to input signal variations; techniques for processing of speech in harsh environments, etc.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Knowledge discovery from text; new approaches to traditional problems such as syntactic/semantic/pragmatic analysis, machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, summarization, etc.; domain adaptation; integrated language and social analysis; etc. * MULTIMODAL HLT: Joint models of text or speech with sensory data; grounded language learning; applications such as visual question-answering, video summarization, sign language technology, multimedia retrieval, analysis of printed or handwritten text.

* DIALOG AND LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING: Understanding human-to-human or human-to-computer conversation; dialog management; naturalness of dialog (e.g. sentiment analysis).

* LANGUAGE AND HEALTHCARE: information extraction from electronic health records; speech and language technology in health monitoring; healthcare delivery in hospitals or the home, public health, etc.

These workshops are a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series, and will be hosted by various partner universities on a rotating basis. The research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops should serve as good examples for prospective proposers: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/. An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated by October 13th, 2017. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on November 10-12th, 2017. Proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected at this meeting for the 2018 workshop. We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue research on the selected topics. Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students. Authors of successful proposals typically lead these teams. Other senior participants come from academia, industry and government. Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, are rising star seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise. If you are interested in participating in the 2018 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed. If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the topics to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available to participate in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith commitment that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week participation possible.
 Proposals must be submitted to jsalt2018@clsp.jhu.edu by 5PM EDT on Monday, 10/09/2017. 

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