SIGDIAL 2019

11-13 September 2019, Stockholm, Sweden

Second Call for Special Sessions

http://workshops.sigdial.org/conference20

Special Session Submission Deadline: January 28, 2019

Special Session Notification: February 18, 2019

The Special Interest Group on Dialogue and Discourse (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals. A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference, and may be organized as a poster session, a panel session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session. Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions.

The papers submitted to special sessions are handled by the special session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular papers. The reviewers for the special session papers will be taken from the SIGDIAL program committee itself, taking into account the suggestions of the session organizers, and the program chairs will make acceptance decisions. In other words, special session organizers decide what appears in the session, while the program chairs decide what appears in the proceedings and the rest of the conference program.

We welcome special session proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End-to-end systems.

Submissions:

Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate in the session; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral session).

These proposals should be sent to conference[at]sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co-chairs.

Links:

Those wishing to propose a special session may want to look at some of the sessions organized at recent SIGDIAL meetings.

• http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference19/sessions.htm

• https://robodial.github.io/

• http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

SIGDIAL 2019 Organizing Committee

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Milica Gaši

, Cambridge University, UK

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alex Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair:

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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Welcome to INTERSPEECH 2019  - Willkommen in Graz, Austria, Sept 15-19, 2019
http://www.interspeech2019.org

Important Dates Coming Up Soon          

• Proposals due for Survey Presentations: extended to May 12, 2019!
  See Call for Survey Presentations at 

• Sponsoring and Exhibition opportunities: see http://www.interspeech2019.org/sponsorship_and_exhibition/letter_to_our_partnersWhat is new?

INTERSPEECH 2019 is the 20^th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association ISCA and this anniversary edition will introduce several innovative features. These innovations will certainly contribute to raise the attractiveness of the conference beyond the high levels developed already over the past two decades:

Survey presentations have been evolved from the perspective talks at INTERSPEECH 2018 in Hyderabad. The presentations will be scheduled at the start of suitable oral presentation sessions, and will be allocated a 40-minute time slot for presentation and discussion. Presentations should aim to give an overview of the state-of-the-art for a specific topic covered by one or more of the main technical areas of the conference. The presenters will also be invited to submit survey papers to the ISCA supported journals of Computer, Speech and Language and Speech Communication. For further details, see our Call for Survey Presentations further below.

Childcare ? the INTERSPEECH Kids: Bring your family along to Graz, Austria! Childcare will be provided free of charge for conference participants. For terms and conditions, see the conference webpage http://www.interspeech2019.org/venue_and_travel/childcare.  Furthermore, an INTERSPEECH parenting community will be set up on the collaboration platform Slack. To secure a place for your kids, we recommend to apply for either service at your earliest convenience by sending email to childcare@interspeech2019.org

Hackathons will set a stimulating atmosphere for the most creative developers in our community and beyond: through jams and challenges, we will bring together some of our brightest minds, students who are speech science and technology aficionados and who come to Graz as conference participants, as well as students who are representing the highly interdisciplinary community of several partner universities in Graz and beyond. Watch out for details to appear soon on our website http://www.interspeech2019.org or contact directly our hackathon chairs Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Johanna Pirker (TU Graz) at hackathon@interspeech2019.org.

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Welcome to INTERSPEECH 2019 -  Willkommen in Graz, Austria, Sept 15-19, 2019
https://www.interspeech2019.org

INTERSPEECH is the world?s largest and most comprehensive conferen ce on the science and technology of spoken language processing. INTERSPEECH conferences emphasize interdisciplinary approaches addressing all aspects of speech science and technology, ranging from basic theories to advanced a pplications. In addition to regular oral and poster sessions, INTERSPEECH 2 019 will feature plenary talks by internationally renowned experts, tutoria ls, survey presentations, special sessions and challenges, show & tell sessions, and exhibits. A number of satellite events will also take place a round INTERSPEECH 2019.

Crossroads of Speech and Language - Our conference theme comprises three key elements important in speech research today: language diversity, diver sity of applications, and diversity of representation.  A complete lis t of the scientific areas and topics including special sessions is available at www.interspeech2019.org.

Important Dates Coming Up Soon

Proposals due for Survey Presentations: extended to May 12, 2019
See Call for Survey Presentations at https://www.interspeech2019.org/calls/ surveys/

Paper acceptance/rejection notification: June 17, 2019

Graz Convention Bureau hotel booking deadline: August 1, 2019
Rooms will go fast - don't delay your booking! See https://www.interspeech2019.org/venue_and_travel/accomodation/

INTERSPEECH 2019 is the 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association ISCA and this anniversary edition will introduce several innovative features. These innovations will certainly contribute to raise the attractiveness of the conference beyond the high levels developed already over the past two decades:

With the highly appreciated support by our generous sponsors, we are able to lower the fees for both full and student registrations. As ISCA will continue its tradition of supporting a sizeable number of student travel grants, we are confident to raise the number of participants to a new all-time record.

Childcare ? the INTERSPEECH Kids: Bring your family along to Graz, Austria! Childcare will be provided free of charge for conference participants. For terms and conditions, see the conference webpage https://www.intersp eech2019.org/venue_and_travel/childcare/. Furthermore, an INTERSPEECH parenting community will be set up on the collaboration platform Slack. To secure a place for your kids, we recommend to apply for either service at your earliest convenience by sending email to childcare@interspeech2019.org.

For our Show & Tell Demonstrations we have evolved the submission format in order to improve the reviewing process. Therefore, next to a two-page description, we have asked for the upload of a simple video of your demonstration that will help deciding which demonstrations will raise the highest interest at the conference. For more details see https://www.interspeech2019.or g/calls/show_and_tell/.

Survey presentations  are a new addition to the technical program. They will be scheduled at the start of suitable oral presentation sessions, and will be allocated a 40-minute time slot for presentation and discussion. Presentations should aim to give an overview of the state-of-the-art for a specific topic covered by one or more of the main technical areas of the conference. The presenters will also be invited to submit survey papers to the ISCA supported journals of Computer, Speech and Language and Speech Co mmunication. For further details, see our Call for Survey Presentations https://www.interspeech2019.org/calls/surveys/.

Hackathons will set a stimulating atmosphere for the most creative developers in our community and beyond: through jams and challenges, we will bring together some of our brightest minds, students who are speech science and technology aficionados and who come to Graz as conference participants, as well as students who are representing the highly interdisciplinary community of several partner universities in Graz and beyond. Watch out for details to appear soon on our website and if you are interested in particpating, get in touch with our hackathon chairs at hackathon@interspeech2019.org.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to your participation in INTERSPEECH 2019! We strive to make this a memorable event for all of you - one highlight to watch out for will be the Dancing INTERSPEECH Soiree, An Austrian Ballroom Extravaganza at Congress Graz. If you have time to arrive a few days earlier, you can enjoy the 'Aufsteirern' festival of Styrian folk culture https://www.aufsteirern.at/aufsteirern/english-information/
and right after the conference the 'Steirische Herbst' takes over - a contemporary arts festival of all genres https://www.steirischerherbst.at/en.

General Chairs:

Gernot Kubin, TU Graz, Austria
Zdravko Kacic, University of Maribor, Slovenia

Technical Chairs:

Thomas Hain, U Sheffield, UK
Björn Schuller, U Augsburg/Imperial College, Germany/UK

Organising Committee Members:

Michiel Bacchiani, Google NY, USA
Gerhard Backfried, Sail Labs Vienna, Austria
Jamilla Balint, TU Graz, Austria
Eugen Brenner, TU Graz, Austria
Mariapaola D?Imperio, Aix Marseille U, France
Dina ElZarka, U Graz, Austria
Tim Fingscheidt, TU Braunschweig, Germany
Anouschka Foltz, U Graz, Austria
Anna Fuchs, AVL Graz, Austria
Panayiotis Georgiou, USC Los Angeles, USA
Franz Graf, Joanneum Research Graz, Austria
Markus Gugatschka, MU Graz, Austria
Martin Hagmüller, TU Graz, Austria
Petra Hödl, U Graz, Austria
Robert Höldrich, KU Graz, Austria
Mario Huemer, JKU Linz, Austria
Dorothea Kolossa, RU Bochum, Germany
Christina Leitner, Joanneum Research Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, KNOW Centre Graz, Austria
Helen Meng, CU Hong Kong, China
Florian Metze, CMU Pittsburgh, USA
Pejman Mowlaee, Widex/TU Graz, Denmark/Austria
Elmar Noeth, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Franz Pernkopf, TU Graz, Austria
Ingrid Pfandl-Buchegger, U Graz, Austria
Lukas Pfeifenberger, Ognios Salzburg, Austria
Johanna Pirker, TU Graz, Austria
Christoph Prinz, Sail Labs Vienna, Austria
Michael Pucher, ÖAW Vienna, Austria
Philipp Salletmayr, Nuance Vienna, Austria
Barbara Schuppler, TU Graz, Austria
Dagmar Schuller, audEERING, Germany
Jessica Siddins, U Graz, Austria
Wolfgang Wokurek, U Stuttgart, Germany
Kai Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

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 INTERSPEECH 2019: Call for Survey Presentations=NEW

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(updated)INTERSPEECH 2019: Satellite Workshops

Several excellent initiatives organize satellite workshops around INTERSPEECH 2019 and you can find a list of those approved by ISCA at https://www.interspeech2019.org/program/satellite_events/. Please consider contributing both to the main conference and to these important satellite events.

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INTERSPEECH 2021
Brno, Czech Republic, August 30 - September 3, 2021
Chairs : Hynek Hermansky and Honza Cernocky 
22^nd INTERSPEECH event

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Dear Colleagues,

 We are pleased to inform you that the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar will be organizing the 5th edition of ISCA Supported Summer School on Speech Signal Processing (S4P-2019) during July 06-10, 2019.  S4P 2019 is the 5th edition of summer school of its kind in India which is focused this time on speaker biometrics and diarization.
 URL:  https://sites.google.com/site/s4p2019/ 

Early Registration: Before May 06, 2019.

The topic of S4P 2019 is ?Speaker Recognition and Diarization,? the latest topic of research involving understanding challenging field of voice biometrics. With the advent of new smartphones and deployment of voice authentication for banking transactions, it is now possible to answer, in a principled way, the insights about speech production-perception and its link to speaker-specific information, and develop new engineering models for this research problem. S4P 2019 would highlight recent developments in the field from world renowned experts. We expect researchers from IISc/IITs/NITs/DA-IICT/IIITs and other institutions in the country, industry researchers working in speech/audio area and research scholars to participate at the summer school.
 S4P 2019 will have four experts from abroad and seven experts from India to present recent developments in their respective research topics that are related to the theme of summer school.  The experts chosen are Jean-Francois Bonastre (Avignon University, France), Nicholas Evans (EURECOM, France), Thomas F. Zheng (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China),  Dong Wang (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China), Dr. P. K. Saxena (Scientific Consultant, Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA)) to Govt of India, Swaran Lata (Retd. MeitY, New Delhi).  B.Yegnanarayana (Retd. IIT Madras), Swaran Lata (Retd. MeitY, New Delhi), K. Samudravijaya (IIT Guwahati), Hema A. Murthy (IIT Madras), S. R. M. Prasanna (IIT Dharwad), Suryakanth Gangashetty (IIIT Hyderabad)  and K. S. R. Murty (IIT Hyderabad). The program committee of S4P 2016 includes internationally well-known experts from 18 countries across the world.  The S4P 2019 also includes 4th edition 5 minute Ph.D. thesis (5MPT) which provides doctoral students an opportunity to showcase their research work in front of eminent researchers both from academia and industry and possibly win ISCA endorsed cash prizes and DE GRUYTER book prizes. We are also attaching the poster and signed cover letter for call for participation. In addition, this summer school will also have a special session involving renowned experts from speech technology industry, namely. Vikram Vij (Senior Vice President, Voice Intelligence Group, Samsung Research Institute, Bengaluru, India), Sunayana Sitaram from Microsoft Research, Bangalore,  K. Sunilkumar (TCS Innovation Labs, Mumbai) and Pranaw Kumar (C-DAC Mumbai).   
We are writing this letter anticipating that you will participate in this event and we are sure, your participation will make this event enriching. We would also request you to encourage your post doctoral fellows, PhD Scholars and M.Tech. students, Research Associates (RA) and faculty colleagues to submit their application for participation. We are sure, participation at the summer school will help us to get updated on the latest research in the broad areas of speaker recognition and diarization. We will appreciate it very much if you can arrange to place the poster on the notice board of your department /institution / university/ R&D lab.

We look forward to hearing from you.

With best regards,
Prof. Hemant A. Patil,
APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer 2018-2019.
On behalf of the Organizing Committee,  S4P 2019.

 Patron K. S. Dasgupta, Director, DA-IICT GandhinagarOrganizing Committee , S4P 2019 Hemant A. Patil, Chair, DA-IICT Gandhinagar, Suman K. Mitra, Convener, DA-IICT Gandhinagar,
 Yash Vasavada, DA-IICT Gandhinagar,
 Sanjeev Gupta, DA-IICT Gandhinagar,
 Srimanta Mandal, DA-IICT Gandhinagar,
 Soman Nair, DA-IICT Gandhinagar,International Program Committee, S4P 2019 Douglas O'Shaughnessy, McGill University, Canada Sadaoki Furui, Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago, USA Douglas Reylonds, MIT Lincoln Lab, USA Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo, MIT Lincoln Lab, USA Hideki Kawahara, Wakayama University, Japan Odette Scharenborg, Delft University of Technology,The Netherlands Torbjørn Svendsen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Jiri Navratil, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA  Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Greece Tomi H. Kinnunen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland Junichi Yamagishi, National Institute of Informatics, Japan  Eduardo Lleida, University of Zaragoza, Spain  Luis Javier Rodriguez-Fuentes, University of Basque Country,  Euskal Herriko
Unibertsitatea  Lori Lamel, LIMSI, France  Saikat Chatterjee, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm  Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, New York  Kong Aik Lee, NEC Corporation, Japan   Amy Neustein, Verizon, USA  Tanja Schultz, University of Bremen, Denmark   Dong Ming Hui, Institute for Infocomm Research(I2R), A*STAR, Singapore   Eliathamby Ambikairajah, University of New South Wales, Sydney   Dong Wang, Tsinghua University, China   Tara Sainath, AI Google, USA   Tatsuya Kawahara, Kyoto University, Japan    Jianwu Jang, JAIST, Japan   Csapó Tamás Gábor, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary  Bernd Moebius, Saarland University, Germany  Pascal Perrier, GIPSA-Lab,Grenoble-INP, France   Daryush Mehta, Center of Laryngeal and Voice Rehabilitation, Boston, USA

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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2019 CONFERENCE

September 11-13, 2019

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/

The 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019) will be held on September 11-13, 2019 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with Interspeech 2019, which will be held on September 15-19 in Graz, Austria (https://www.interspeech2019.org). 

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing a series of nineteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.

Keynote Speakers:  Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, Helen Meng

TOPICS OF INTEREST

 We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

• Discourse Processing
  Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering and information retrieval.

• Dialogue Systems
  Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications.

• Corpora, Tools and Methodology
  Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.

• Pragmatic or Semantic Modeling
  Pragmatics or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e., beyond a single sentence).

• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

SPECIAL SESSIONS

SIGDIAL 2019 will include two special sessions (TBA).

Please see the individual special session pages (TBA) for additional information and submission details. In order for papers submitted to special sessions to appear in the SIGDIAL conference proceedings, they must undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process.

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be accepted as long papers for oral presentation or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

• Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for appendices containing sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials, such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos and sound files.

Multiple Submissions
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2019 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Blind Review
Building on previous year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2019 will follow the ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

Submission Format
All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. Authors are expected to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Link and Deadlines
Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of their paper before the May 19 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until May 19, 23:59 GMT.

https://www.softconf.com/j/sigdial2019/

IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2019 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review. 

Preserving Double Blind Review
The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of the double-blind reviewing process and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected or withdrawn.

• You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

• If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask that you do not advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

• Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible.

Citations and Comparison
If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

• You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted or is not widely cited).

• In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than three months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation or in-depth analysis.

MENTORING

Acceptable submissions that require language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for mentoring, and accepted with a recommendation to revise with the help of a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2019 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Long, Short & Demonstration PDF Submission: 19 May 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 28 June 2019

• Final Paper Submission: 21 July 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Conference: 11-13 September, 2019

SIGDIAL 2019 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Milica Gasic, Saarland University, Germany

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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SIGDIAL 2019

11?13 September 2019, Stockholm, Sweden

Call for Special Sessions

http://workshops.sigdial.org/conference20

Special Session Submission Deadline: January 28, 2019 Special Session Notification: February 18, 2019

The Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals.

A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference, and may be organized as a poster session, a panel session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session.

Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions.

The papers submitted to special sessions are handled by the special session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular papers. The reviewers for the special session papers will be taken from the SIGDIAL program committee itself, taking into account the suggestions of the session organizers, and the program chairs will make acceptance decisions. In other words, special session organizers decide what appears in the session, while the program chairs decide what  appears in the proceedings and the rest of the conference program.

We welcome special session proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End?to?end systems.

Submissions:

Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate in the session; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral  session).

These proposals should be sent to conference[at]sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co?chairs.

Links:

Those wishing to propose a special session may want to look at some of the sessions organized at recent SIGDIAL meetings.

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference19/sessions.htm

https://robodial.github.io/

http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

SIGDIAL 2019 Organizing Committee

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Milica Ga?i?, Cambridge University, UK

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alex Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair:

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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CALL FOR PAPERS SIGDIAL 2019 CONFERENCE September 11-13, 2019 http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/
 
The 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019) will be held on September 11-13, 2019 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with Interspeech 2019, which will be held September 15-19 in Graz, Austria (https://www.interspeech2019.org).  The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing a series of nineteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. Keynote Speakers:  Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, Helen Meng
 
TOPICS OF INTEREST  We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:  Discourse Processing Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering, and information retrieval.  Dialogue Systems Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications.  Corpora, Tools and Methodology Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting
topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.  Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling Pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence).  Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology
 
SPECIAL SESSIONS SIGDIAL 2019 will include one special session (http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/attend.html#specialsessions):  Implications of Deep Learning for Dialog Modeling (http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/)
Please see the special session page for additional information and submission details. In order for papers submitted to the special session to appear in the SIGDIAL 2019 conference proceedings, they must undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process.
 
SUBMISSIONS  The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be accepted as long papers for oral presentation or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.  Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.  Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.  Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo. Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos, sound files, etc. Multiple Submissions Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2019 cannot accept work for publication or
presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs[at]sigdial.org. Blind Review Building on previous year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2019 will follow the new ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed. Submission Format All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. Authors are expected to use the ACL LaTeX style template or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format. Submission Link and Deadlines Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of their paper before the May 19 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until May 19, 23:59 GMT. https://www.softconf.com/i/sigdial2019/   IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES  As noted above, SIGDIAL 2019 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review.  Preserving Double Blind Review The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.  You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).  If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the nonanonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.
 Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Citation and Comparison If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:  You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).  In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version. Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.   MENTORING Submissions with innovative core ideas that may be in need of language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for 'mentoring' and accepted with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.   BEST PAPER AWARDS In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2019 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.   IMPORTANT DATES  Long, Short & Demonstration PDF Submission: 19 May 2019 (23:59, GMT)  Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 28 June 2019  Final Paper Submission: 21 July 2019 (23:59, GMT)  Conference: 11-13 September, 2019
  SIGDIAL 2019 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE General Chair: Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Technology, Japan   Program Chairs: Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia Milica Gasic, Saarland University, Germany   Local Chair: Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden   Sponsorship Chair: Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan   Mentoring Chair: Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI, USA
 
Publication Chair Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany
 
Publicity Chair: Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
 
SIGdial President: Jason Williams, Apple, USA   SIGdial Vice President: Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA   SIGdial Secretary: Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA   SIGdial Treasurer: Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA
 
SIGdial President Emeritus: Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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HSCR19 - The 3rd International Workshop on the HISTORY OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

13-14 September, 2019 in Vienna, Austria

<https://hscr19.kfs.oeaw.ac.at>

CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are interested in historical aspects of all areas of speech communication research (SCR) with a focus on the interdisciplinary nature of the different fields of research.

A special interest of the 2019 workshop is on the relation between science and technology that can be exemplified through the history of SCR ? including methods from the 20th century that are no longer the state-of-the-art but of historical relevance. Interesting questions in this respect are: How can knowledge transfers between science and technology be exemplified by the history of SCR? What is the relation between SCR and artistic practices? How was speech communication research influenced by the medical sciences?

Like the past HSCR workshops that were held in 2015 in Dresden and 2017 in Helsinki this workshop is a satellite event of the INTERSPEECH conference which will be held in Graz, Austria <https://www.interspeech2019.org/>, a meeting that advertises with the Austro-Hungarian speech communication pioneer Wolfgang von Kempelen.

Invited speaker is Peter Donhauser from the Institute for Media Archeology in Vienna.

Important Dates:

Full paper submission: May 24, 2019

Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2019

Camera-ready paper submission: July 19, 2019

Workshop: September 13-14, 2019

The proceedings will be published in the book series 'Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation' at TUDpress (Technical University Dresden).

Workshop organisation:

Michael Pucher, Acoustics Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

Juergen Trouvain, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany

Carina Lozo, Acoustics Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

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Event: The 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2019)

Location: Graz, Austria

Dates: September 20 - 21, 2019

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/slate2019

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2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
12-17 May 2019 ? Brighton, UK
Special Session Proposal Deadline: 20 August 2018
Tutorial Proposal Deadline: 22 October 2018
Paper Submissions Deadline: 29 October 2018
Signal Processing Letters Deadline: 14 January 2019
Sponsored by IEEE SPS

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Call For Demos:  Systems and Language Resources

http://ltc.amu.edu.pl/content.en.html#call-demos

The call for System and Language Resources demonstrations is addressed to all Language Technology providers for both business and research purposes. Companies as well as individuals are welcome to present their novel or state-of-the-art products in form of demos. We are interested in:

• application-scale language engineering tools,
• applications for production, conservation and maintenance of HLT language resources,
• language resources,
• language technology based products.

The above must fit exactly to the LTC fields of interest (cf. the LTC topics as presented at www.ltc.amu.edu.pl).

Contact: Zygmunt Vetulani (vetulani@amu.edu.pl) and Jacek Marciniak (jacekmar@amu.edu.pl)

Admission
The author teams of accepted papers are invited to present a DEMO without any additional fee if they are in a direct relationship with the original results presented in the paper. This relationship will be a subject of reviewing process. If accepted, the presenters will be entitled to have a 2 pages system presentation description in the companion volumne of the conference proceedings (under the text quality requirements as for the other LTC publications).

DEMOS NOT DIRECTLY RELATED to any LTC accepted publication of the presenters may be accepted according to the general reviewing procedure on the basis of a system presentation description (2 pages, references included). The system presentation will be published in the companion volume of the conference proceedings.

Technical conditions

• provided by LTC: single standard size table, 1 poster (A0 size, vertical) support, 1 power supply socket,
• provided by the Presenter: all presentation tools and devices (computers, screens etc. are to be installed by the Presenters (no technical assistance from the LTC Organizers).

Dates

• submission deadline: April 12, 2019
• deadline for submission of final version of the demo/resource description: April 18, 2019
• duration: as the LTC 2019, i.e. May 17-19, 2019

Place
LTC Exhibition Area

Demo Program Fees
All presenters need to pay the full LTC registration fee (no student discounts), in case of DEMOs not related to a regular LTC accepted paper, the payment rules are as in case of the LTC standard papers, registration and payment of the due Demo Program Fees must be completed by final paper submission (at latest).

Submission procedure
Through the EasyChair system, as for LTC papers (the demo description should be in form of a pdf document), 'DEMO' is a mandatory keyword; it should also be used in the title/subtitle of the presentation.

Acceptance criteria
Proposed demos and presentations of resources must strictly match the LTC scope and objectives, qualification will be based on system descriptions (1-2 pages, according the case - see above).

Responsibility
Presentations must be conform to the EU regulations concerning presentation safety. The Presenter is the sole responsible for the security of the audience during presentation.

More information
Visit the LTC2019 Website at http://ltc.amu.edu.pl

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The 9th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2019), May 17-19, 2019, Poznan, Poland

CALL FOR PAPERS AND WORKSHOPS

CONFERENCE CHAIRS: Zygmunt Vetulani (Poland) and Patrick Paroubek (France)

Yes, we started 24 years ago! Our tradition goes back to the Language and Technology Awareness Days, a meeting organized in 1995 with the assistance of the European Commission (DG XIII). Among the key speakers were Antonio Zampolli (Italy), Dafydd Gibbon (Germany), Dan Tufi? (Romania), Orest Kossak (Ukraina). Today, we refer to this event as the first LTC. Since 2005 LTC is organized every two years as  the ?Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics?. Fostering language technologies and resources remains an important challenge in the dynamically changing, information-saturated world and we invite all concerned people to join us in Pozna? at the LTC 2019 in order to face this challenge together.

Zygmunt Vetulani and Patrick Paroubek

NEW LTC WORKSHOPS

We are pleased to inform that the following LTC workshops have been announced:

• The 6th LTC Workshop on Less-Resourced Languages (LRL 2019)
  
• Prosody Tools Workshop (PTW 2019)
• The 3rd Workshop on Processing Emotions, Decisions and Opinions (EDO 2019)
• Workshop on Turkic and other Agglutinative Languages as a Challenge for Language Industry (TALC 2019)
• Workshop on eHumanities as a Challenge for Linguistics and Language Technologies
•  Workshop on Human Language Technologies in Crisis and Emergency Management

Workshops are accessible to all LTC participants (no extra inscription fees). See www.ltc.amu.edu.pl for details.

 IMPORTANT DATES/DEADLINES

• Deadline for submission of papers for review: March 20, 2019
• Acceptance/Refusal notification: April  2, 2019
• Deadline for submission of final versions of accepted papers: April 15, 2019
• Conference: May 17-19, 2019

 CONFERENCE TOPICS

The conference topics include the following (the ordering is not significant and the list is not exhaustive):

• AI-oriented language modelling
• communicative intelligence
• computational semantics
• computer modeling of language competence
• corpora-based methods in language engineering
• electronic language resources and tools
• formalization of natural languages
• HLT related policies
• HLT standards and best practices
• HLTs as support for Digital Humanuties
• HLTs as support for e-learning
• HLTs as support for foreign language teaching and translation
• HLTs as support for Homeland Security (technology applications and legal aspects)
• language-specific computational challenges for HLTs (especially for languages other than English)
• legal issues connected with HLTs (problems and challenges)
• Logic Programming in Natural Language Processing
• man-machine NL interfaces
• machine translation and translation enhancement tools
• methodological issues in HLT
• neural networks in language engineering
• NL and knowledge representation
• NL applications in robotics
• NL understanding by computers
• NL user modeling
• NLP for cyber-criminality detection and prevention
• paralinguistic phenomena in NLP
• parsing and related NL processing
• question answering
• sentiment, opinion and emotion analysis
• socio-political aspects of HLTs
• speech processing
• statistics-based methods in language engineering
• system prototype presentations
• technological aspects of nonverbal linguistics
• text-based information retrieval and extraction
• tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems
• validation in all areas of HLTs
• visionary papers in the field of HLT
• wordnets and WordNet-like ontologies/taxonomies and their applications

This list is by no means closed and we are open to further proposals. Please do not hesitate to contact us with new suggestions and ideas.

LANGUAGE

The conference language is English

PAPER SUBMISSION

The conference accepts papers in English only. Papers (5 formatted pages in the conference format) are due by March 20, 2019 (midnight, any time zone) and should not disclose the authorship in any manner. In order to facilitate submission we have decided to reduce the formatting requirements as much as possible at this stage. Please, have a look at www.ltc.amu.edu.pl (Paper Submission section).

PUBLICATION POLICY

Acceptance will be based on the reviewers' assessments (double-blinded submission model). The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings (hard copy, with ISBN number) and on CD-ROM. Proceedings will be published by Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje sp. z o.o. indexed by the Polish Ministry of Higher Education. Publication requires full electronic registration and payment of the conference fee (full registration) by at least one of the co-authors in due time (dates will be presented at the conference site). One registration fee entitles publication of one paper.

POST-CONFERENCE PAPERS

We intend to publish a post-conference volume with extended versions of selected papers in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (Springer Verlag). Papers will be selected on the basis of reviewers? reports among the best evaluated papers of general interest with new, innovative results. Preference will be given to papers providing substantial content extension with respect to the paper presented at the conference.

REGISTRATION

Only electronic registration will be possible. Details will be published at www.ltc.amu.edu.pl.

OTHER

Please notice that remaining important information on the general conference and workshops is or will be provided at the conference site www.ltc.amu.edu.pl.

CONTACT

vetulani@amu.edu.pl

mkubis@amu.edu.pl

ltc19@amu.edu.pl

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La prochaine journée du GT ACAI ('Affects, Compagnons Artificiels et  Interactions') sera organisée conjointement avec le GT 8 ?Robotique et Neuroscience? du GDR Robotique. Cette année, le thème de la journée est : Neuroscience et multi-modalité (modalités tactiles, verbales, gestuelles, expressions faciales, etc.) dans les interactions humain-humain, humain-agent ou humain-robot.  L?interdisciplinarité et le dialogue entre Robotique, et Sciences Humaines et Biologiques sont au c?ur à la fois du GT8 (Robotique et neurosciences) et du GT ACAI (Affects, Compagnons Artificiels et Interactions). L?organisation de cette première journée a pour objectif de fédérer les deux communautés autour de leurs problématiques communes. 

Date:  28 Mai 2019 de 10h à 17h 
Lieu : Télécom-ParisTech, 46 rue Barrault 75013 Paris.

Au programme de cette journée : des présentations invitées, des exposés oraux, des posters et une table ronde sur les synergies entre les trois communautés, agents artificiels, robotique et neurosciences. 

Nous encourageons vivement les présentations et posters réalisés sur l'un des thèmes habituels des deux GT.

- GT ACAI (modèles psychologiques computationnels pour l'interaction affective, détection et synthèse de comportements affectifs, annotation et représentation à partir de texte, de son et d'image, études utilisateurs, ergonomie et évaluation des systèmes affectifs, compagnons artificiels, ACA et robots compagnons, ...).
- GT robotique et neurosciences (neuroscience computationnelle, modèles psychologiques computationnels, robotique développementale, robotique biomimétique, psychologie expérimentale, neurobiologie et biologie, interactions homme-robot, ...) 

Les exposés sont au format 10mn + 5mn de questions (en français ou en  anglais).

Le titre et le résumé de l?exposé et/ou du poster sont à envoyer par un mail  avant le 6 Mai 2019 à :
magalie.ochs@lis-lab.org; ghiles.mostafaoui@ensea.fr;  chloe.clavel@telecom-paristech.fr


À très bientôt,

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Call for papers: 14^th PAC conference

(Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain / Phonology of Contemporary English)

PAC AIX 2019

Phonetic and phonological variation in contemporary English:

Xperience-Xperimentation

Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France

June 4-5 2019

Guest Speakers : Dominic Watt (U. York)

&

Emmanuel Ferragne (U. Paris Diderot)

We are pleased to announce the 2019 edition of the annual PAC conference, ‘Phonetic and phonological variation in contemporary English: Xperience / Xperimentation’, due to take place from Tuesday June 4 to Wednesday June 5 2019 and, hosted by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage and Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence. We shall welcome as invited guest speakers Dominic Watt, from the University of York and Emmanuel Ferragne from  The Paris Diderot University of Paris Diderot. Both have worked on varieties of English and are currently working on forensic phonetics, among other topics.

The PAC programme (http://www.pacprogramme.net) gathers researchers interested in the study of variation in contemporary spoken English, adhering to a common protocol for data collection and annotation. The PAC conferences have been organized annually since 2000 and have been willing to welcome researchers studying spoken English worldwide and from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The 2019 edition of the conference will focus on « experience/experimentation », in French « l’expérience » (which is polysemic). People working in the framework of the PAC programme are used to following a field approach. The data collected within the framework of the PAC programme may easily be exploited by experimentalists as well. The idea is to open the conference to researchers working in a more experimental setting. We would like to make the link between the 2 two domains and our guest speakers will show that the two approaches may be complementary in the study of language. Papers concerned by either field work or experimental methods or combining the two domains are welcome. A wide range of issues can be explored, matching the research axes of the PAC programme, such as,  and among others, studies of English in urban contexts, analyses of prosodic variation, of L2 English or papers concerned with tools and annotation strategies..

The audience will consist of colleagues and students working on spoken English corpora and the presentations are all in English.

The deadline for sending a title with a one-page anonymous abstract (excluding references) is January 7, 2019.

Please visit the conference web site, where you can find a template for abstracts and upload your abstract submission: https://pacaix2019.sciencesconf.org/ (you will need to create a sciencesconf account if you don’t already have one).

Notification of acceptance will be sent by mid February 2019.

For any questions, you can contact us at the following address: pacaix2019@sciencesconf.org

Local Organising committee:

Julia Bongiorno

Stéphanie Desous

Sophie Herment

Joëlle Lavaud

Catherine Perrot

Claudia Pichon-Starke

Paul Sartre

Anne Tortel

Gabor Turcsan

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22^nd Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs (RJC 2019 - ED 268)

?Variation in linguistics: approaches, data, uses?

6^th? 7^thJune 2019

University Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 (Maison de la Recherche) 

4, rue des Irlandais - 75005 PARIS

Dear Colleagues,

The «Langage et langues : description, théorisation, transmission» Doctoral School (ED 268, University Sorbonne Nouvelle) is glad to announce the Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs (RJC 2019). The conference will be held from June 6^th- June 7^th 2019 in Paris.

These Rencontres offer junior researchers preparing a Master?s or a Doctorate degree, as well as post-doctorate students, the opportunity to present their work in individual paper or poster sessions.

This year?s theme tackles the issue of:

?Variation in linguistics: approaches, data, uses?

We encourage proposals concerned with this topic from any linguistic discipline. Everyone who is interested in presenting an individual paper or a poster is welcome to submit a 4000 characters abstract in English or French for double-blind review by January 21^st, 2019 at 7pm (Paris time UTC+1). Abstracts must be uploaded on the platform EasyChair at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rjc2019

Individual papers will be allocated 20 minutes, and an additional 10 minutes for discussion.

The size of the posters is A0. Poster authors will be invited to give a short oral presentation of their work.

Agenda

Submission deadline: January 21^st, 2019

Notification of acceptance: March 2019

Conference dates: June 6^th ? 7^th, 2019

Conference location: Maison de la Recherche

Address: 4, rue des Irlandais - 75005 PARIS

Web site: http://www.univ-paris3.fr/rencontres-jeunes-chercheurs-301310.kjsp

Please find attached the call for papers and submission guidelines (in French and in English) for the Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs. 

Please, circulate widely. Many thanks in advance.

Best regards,

---

The RJC Organizing Committee

rjc-ed268@univ-paris3.fr

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SLPAT 2019

Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)

7 June 2019, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2019, Minneapolis, USA

Submission deadline:  10 March 2019

Submission website: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2019/slpat/

====================================================================

We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the Eighth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT) on Thursday 6 June 2019 to be co-located with NAACL-HLT 2019 in Minnesota, USA. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline, and formatting of regular papers are here:

http://www.slpat.org/slpat2019/

This workshop will bring together researchers from all areas of speech and language technology with a common interest in making everyday life more accessible for people with physical, cognitive, sensory, emotional, or developmental disabilities. The workshop will provide an opportunity for individuals from both research communities, and the individuals with whom they are working, to assist to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress. General topics include but are not limited to:

       ? Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments

        ? Speech transformation for improved intelligibility

        ? Speech and language technologies for daily assisted living and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)

        ? Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language

        ? Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC and AT applications

? Personalized voices for ACC based on limited data

? Biofeedback for therapy in neurological disorders.

        ? Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or TTS

        ? Silent speech: speech technology based on sensors without audio

        ? Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication

        ? Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies

        ? Multimodal user interfaces and dialogue systems adapted to assistive technologies

        ? NLP for cognitive assistance applications

        ? Presentation of graphical information for people with visual impairments

        ? Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications

        ? Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications

        ? Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies

        ? Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of AT

        ? Web accessibility; text simplification, summarization, and adapted presentation modes such as speech, signs or symbols

        ? Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field

        ? Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes

        ? Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology

        ? Other topics in AAC and AT

Please contact the conference organizers at slpat2019-organizers@googlegroups.com  with any questions.

Important dates:

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Call for Submissions

The How2 Challenge - New Tasks for Vision and Language

Research at the intersection of vision and language has attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last ten years. Current topics include the study of multi-modal representations, translation between modalities, bootstrapping of labels from one modality into another, visually-grounded question answering, embodied question-answering, segmentation and storytelling, and grounding the meaning of language in visual data. Still, these tasks may not be sufficient to fully exploit the potential of vision and language data.

To support research in this area, we recently released the How2 data-set,¹ containing 2000 hours of how-to instructional videos, with audio, subtitles, Brazilian Portuguese translations, and textual summaries, making it an ideal resource to bring together researchers working on different aspects of multimodal learning. We hope that a common dataset will facilitate comparisons of tools and algorithms, and foster collaboration.

We are organizing a workshop, “The How2 Challenge - New Tasks for Vision and Language” at ICML 2019, to bring together researchers and foster the exchange of ideas in this area. We seek submissions in the following two categories:

• Papers that describe work on the How2 data, either on the “shared challenge tasks”, e.g. multi-modal speech recognition, machine translation, or video summarization challenge, described on the How2 web site² (a leader-board will be provided), or creating “un-shared”, novel tasks.

• Papers that describe other related and relevant work to further vision and language ideas by proposing new tasks, or analyzing the utility of existing tasks and data sets in interesting ways
  
  

The organizers encourage both the publication of novel work that is relevant to the topics of discussion, and late-breaking results on the How2 tasks in a single format. The workshop will also feature a number of invited talks, and a moderated discussion around the challenges and opportunities that current tasks in vision and language present. We aim to stimulate discussion around new tasks that go beyond image captioning and visual question answering, and which could form the basis for future research in this area. We seek to create a venue to encourage collaboration between different sub-fields and help establish new research directions that we believe will sustain multimodal machine learning research for years to come.

The How2 Challenge uses the How2 Corpus (https://srvk.github.io/how2-dataset/)

Invited speakers:

• Katerina Fragkiadaki (Carnegie Mellon University)

• Lisa Anne Hendricks (UC Berkeley)

• Qin Jin (Renmin University)

• Angeliki Lazaridou (DeepMind)

• Devi Parikh (Georgia Tech)

• Kate Saenko (Boston University)

• Bernt Schiele (Max Plank Institute for Informatics)

Important dates:

Challenge starts: March 15, 2019

Paper submission: May 15, 2019

Notification: May 22, 2019
Workshop date: June 14 or 15, 2019

For more information, visit https://srvk.github.io/how2-challenge/

Contact us at how2challenge@gmail.com.

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Dear SProSIG member,

Here are details of a workshop on 'Prominence between Cognitive Functions and Linguistic Structures“ (COFLIS, http://ifl.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/coflis.html ) that might be of interest to you. The workshop is a satellite of the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) 2019 Conference and will be held immediately after PaPE on 20th June 2019 in Bari, a two-hour train ride from the venue of the main conference (Lecce). Abstract submission deadline for posters: 15th March 2019.

Description:

In the workshop, we capitalise on several decades of research on prosodic prominence to unravel the key components of the notion of prominence. By exploring the contribution of the signal, of meaning and of linguistic structure to the definition of prominence, and by relating prominence to basic cognitive concepts such as chunking and attention, we aim to provide a renewed understanding of prominence. The workshop will feature four invited talks, covering the measurable, structural and functional components of prominence. Rather than share new experimental evidence, invited speakers will be asked to focus on the theoretical implications of their use of prominence in their research. Invited talks will be complemented by regularly submitted and peer-reviewed submissions for poster presentations on prominence in phonetics and phonology. Submissions emphasising the challenges in defining and using the notion of prominence will be particularly welcome.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Francesco Cangemi, Stefan Baumann, Michelina Savino, Martine Grice

(Sent via to the sprosig list.  To subscribe/unsubscribe, please mail list@sprosig.org.  Alternative contact: Nigel Ward, Speech Prosody SIG Chair, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso,  +1-915-747-6827, nigel@utep.edu    http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/ )  

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2019 42nd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP)
July 1-3, 2019, Budapest, Hungary
Web: http://tsp.vutbr.cz/

Full Paper Submission: March 18, 2019 @ 6PM CET (EXTENDED DEADLINE)

************************************************************************************
Technical co-sponsors: IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and Africa), IEEE Hungary Section, IEEE Czechoslovakia Section, and IEEE Czechoslovakia Section SP/CAS/COM Joint Chapter.

The TSP 2019 Proceedings, containing presented papers at the Conference, will be submitted for indexing to the IEEE Xplore® Digital Library - IEEE Conference Record #46676, SCOPUS, Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) of Thomson Reuters, DBLP, and Google Scholar databases.

After the conference, authors of about 25% highest rated papers will also be invited to submit the extended version for publishing in Special Journal Issues (papers to be published after significant extension and new review process):
- Special Issue Selected Papers from the 2019 42nd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP) of an Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417), an international peer-reviewed open access journal on all aspects of applied natural sciences published by MDPI and indexed by Web of Science (2017 JCR Q3; current Impact Factor: 1.689)
- International Journal of Advances in Telecommunications, Electrotechnics, Signals and Systems (IJATES) (ISSN 1805-5443), indexed by Google Scholar, CrossRef, WorldCat, EZB Elektronischen Zeitschriftenbibliothek, and Directory of Open Access Journals
- Selected high-quality papers submitted to Workshop WS1 will be invited for publication in Special Issue ?Recent Advances in Biometrics and its Applications? in Electronics journal (ISSN 2079-9292), published by MDPI and indexed by Web of Science (2017 JCR Q2; Impact Factor: 2.110)
************************************************************************************

Dear Colleague,

You are kindly invited to participate in the 2019 42nd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP - http://tsp.vutbr.cz/), which will be held on July 1-3, 2019, in Budapest, Hungary.

The TSP Conference serves as a premier annual international forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in telecommunication technology and signal processing. The aim of the Conference is to bring together both novice and experienced scientists, developers, and specialists, to meet new colleagues, collect new ideas, and establish new cooperation between research groups from universities, research centers, and private sectors from the whole Europe, America, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

TOPICS:

TSP 2019 has opened Call for Papers for Full Paper Submissions with an EXTENDED deadline set for March 18, 2019 @ 6PM CET. We look forward to your innovative contributions in any of the following areas:

AREA 1: Telecommunications

1. Information Systems
2. Network Services
3. Network Technologies
4. Telecommunication Systems
5. Modelling, Simulation and Measurement

AREA 2: Signal Processing

6. Analog Signal Processing
7. Audio, Speech and Language Processing
8. Biomedical Signal Processing
9. Digital Signal Processing
10. Image and Video Signal Processing

For more details please visit the Conference website at http://tsp.vutbr.cz/?page_id=121 .

WORKSHOPS AND SPECIAL SESSIONS:

Prospective Organizers are invited to submit proposals for Workshops and Special Sessions held during the TSP 2019 Conference. The following Workshop and Special Sessions were approved so far:

- WS1: 3rd International Workshop on Recent Advances in Biometrics and its Applications by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Larbi Boubchir and Prof. Boubaker Daachi (both with the LIASD ? University of Paris 8, France). Selected high-quality papers submitted to this workshop will be invited for publication in Special Issue ?Recent Advances in Biometrics and its Applications? in Electronics journal (SJR Q1, IF: 2.11).
- SS1: Special Session on Internet of Things Communication Networks by Dr. Jorge Crichigno (University of South Carolina, U.S.A.) and Dr. Gautam Srivastava (Brandon University, Canada)
- SS2: Special Session on Photonic Fibre Networks and their Applications (Theory, Design, Modeling, Operation, Trials) by Dr. Josef Vojtech (CESNET a.l.e., Czech Republic) and Dr. Tomas Horvath (Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic)
- SS3: Special Session on Signal Processing and Classification for Building Intelligent Recognition Systems by Prof. Dr. Corneliu Burileanu and As. Prof. Dr. Anamaria Radoi (both with the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania)

Organizing guidelines are available at http://tsp.vutbr.cz/?page_id=3492 .

STUDENT BEST PAPER AWARD:

In cooperation with IEEE Czechoslovakia Section SP/CAS/COM Joint Chapter, to recognize outstanding technical contributions by students, as evidenced by the quality of papers, their presentations, and their technical excellence, the authors of the Best 5 Student Papers will be awarded during the conference by the Technical Committee. The Best Student Paper Award consists in a Plaque and a Certificate of Appreciation.

ORGANIZERS:

The TSP 2019 is IEEE technically co-sponsored Conference organized in cooperation with eighteen universities:

- Brno University of Technology, Department of Telecommunications, Brno, Czech Republic
- Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest, Hungary
- Czech Technical University in Prague, Department of Telecommunication Engineering, Prague, Czech Republic
- Isik University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sile/Istanbul, Turkey
- Istanbul Technical University, Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, Istanbul, Turkey
- Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology Osijek, Osijek, Croatia
- Karadeniz Technical University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Trabzon, Turkey
- National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Taipei, Taiwan
- Seikei University, Graduate School and Faculty of Science and Technology, Information Networking Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
- Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Institute of Multimedia Information and Communication Technologies, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
- Tecnocampus, Escola Universitaria Politecnica de Mataró, Mataró, Spain
- Technical University of Sofia, Faculty of Telecommunications, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Université Paris 8, UFR MITSIC, Laboratoire d'Informatique Avancée de Saint-Denis (LIASD), France
- University ?Politehnica? of Bucharest, Center for Advanced Research on New Materials, Products and Innovative Processes (?CAMPUS?)
- University of Ljubljana, Laboratory for Telecommunications, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- University of Patras, Physics Department, Patras, Greece
- VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Department of Telecommunications, Ostrava, Czech Republic
- West Pomeranian University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Szczecin, Poland

COMMITTEES:

- Miloslav Filka, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? Full Professor, TSP Conference Founder - Honorary Chair
- Norbert Herencsar, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? IEEE Czechoslovakia Section CAS/COM/SP Joint Chapter Chair, IEEE Senior Member - General Co-Chair
- Attila Vidacs, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary ? Deputy Head of Department - General Co-Chair
- Jiri Hosek, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? IEEE Member - Publications & Student Paper Contest Chair
- Aslihan Kartci, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? IEEE Graduate Student Member - Publicity & Social Media Chair
- Nandor Matrai, Asszisztencia Congress Bureau, Hungary ? Finance Chair
- Csilla Fulop, Asszisztencia Congress Bureau, Hungary ? Registrations Chair

Steering Committee:

- Larbi Boubchir, Universite Paris 8, France ? Associate Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Escola Universitaria Politecnica de Mataro, Tecnocampus, Spain ? Full Professor, Dean
- Izzet Cem Goknar, Isik University, Turkey ? Institute of Science Director & Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society Turkey Chapter Chair, Full Professor, IEEE Life Fellow
- Ray-Guang Cheng, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), Taiwan ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Ismail Kaya, Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey ? Full Professor
- Jaroslav Koton, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? Vice-dean for Research, IEEE Senior Member
- Sridhar Krishnan, Ryerson University, Canada ? Full Professor & Associate Dean, IEEE Senior Member
- Mario Kusek, University of Zagreb, Croatia ? IEEE Croatia Section Communications Chapter Chair, IEEE Member
- Antonio Luque, University of Seville, Spain ? IEEE Region 8 Vice Chair Member Activities 2017, IEEE Spain Section Chair 2016-2017, IEEE Senior Member
- Shahram Minaei, Dogus University, Turkey ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Jiri Misurec, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? Full Professor, Department Chair
- Ram M. Narayanan, The Pennsylvania State University, USA ? Full Professor, IEEE Fellow
- Kimio Oguchi, Seikei University, Japan ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Serdar Ozoguz, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey ? Full Professor, Associate Chair
- Jakub Peksinski, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Poland
- Hector Perez-Meana, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Vladimir Poulkov, Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria ? Full Professor, Dean, IEEE Senior Member
- Costas Psychalinos, University of Patras, Greece ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Markus Rupp, Vienna University of Technology, Austria ? Full Professor, Dean, IEEE Fellow
- Zdenek Smekal, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic ? Full Professor, IEEE Senior Member
- Attila Vidacs, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary ? Deputy Head of Department
- Miroslav Voznak, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic ? Full Professor, Department Chair, IEEE Senior Member
- Drago Zagar, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia ? Full Professor, Dean, IEEE Senior Member

IMPORTANT DATES:

Full Paper Submission: March 18, 2019 @ 6PM CET (EXTENDED DEADLINE)
Notification of Paper Acceptance: April 15, 2019
Final Paper Submission: April 30, 2019
Authors' Early Registration and Payment: May 10, 2019
Authors' Late Registration and Payment: May 20, 2019
Listeners' Registration: July 1, 2019
Conference: July 1-3, 2019

CONTACTS:

For more information please visit the Conference website at http://tsp.vutbr.cz/. We are also ready to answer your questions emailed to tsp@feec.vutbr.cz .

Looking forward to meeting you in Budapest, Hungary.

With best regards,

Norbert Herencsar and Attila Vidacs
TSP 2019 General Co-Chairs

Web: http://tsp.vutbr.cz/
E-mail: tsp@feec.vutbr.cz

Follow us on:
- Facebook https://www.facebook.com/tspconf/
- Twitter https://twitter.com/tspconf/
===================================================
doc. Ing. Norbert Herencsar, Ph.D.
Department of Telecommunications
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication
Brno University of Technology
Technicka 3082/12
616 00 Brno
Czech Republic

&

Assoc. Prof. Attila Vidacs, Ph.D.
Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Magyar tudosok korutja 2.
1117 Budapest
Hungary

************************************************************************************
TSP Organizers reserve the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the Conference (e.g., non-indexing in IEEE Xplore® and other databases) if the paper is not presented at the Conference.

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*APPEL A CONTRIBUTION : Atelier Enseignement des langues et TAL ­
ELTAL 2019 (TALN-RECITAL 2019)*

Site web : https://eltal2019.frama.site/

Aujourd¹hui, l¹usage des TICE devient incontournable dans le domaine de
l¹enseignement et de l¹apprentissage des langues. Les applications de
partage de connaissances, et de nouvelles formes de e-learning (MOOC ou
SPOC), ainsi que la banalisation des appareils mobiles connectés
contribuent à la prolifération des outils numériques destinés aux
apprenants de langues (ALAO). Ces outils sont généralement conçus dans
une optique de simple adaptation des contenus pédagogiques traditionnels
au support numérique, sans creuser les possibilités offertes grâce au
traitement automatique des langues, comme dans toute application ayant
trait au langage naturel. A travers cet atelier, nous souhaitons mettre
en évidence ces possibilités en rassemblant les travaux de toute la
communauté francophone autour de cette thématique.

Après l¹atelier TAL et ALAO organisé à Louvain (TALN 2006) et la
première édition de l'atelier ELTAL à Paris (JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016),
l'atelier ELTAL 2019 sera l'occasion de faire un nouvel état de l¹art
des interactions entre didactique des langues
(enseignement/apprentissage) et TAL. L'objectif sous-jacent reste la
présentation des outils et des ressources brutes ou annotées pour
l¹enseignement/l'apprentissage des langues au sens large, sans
restriction à une aire linguistique ou géographique. Pour cette seconde
édition, nous espérons également resserrer les liens interdisciplinaires
et interuniversitaires initiés lors de la première édition.

Nous souhaitons regrouper les contributions autour de deux axes majeurs
: d'une part, celles qui présentent des ressources brutes ou annotées et
des outils 'clé en main' et, de l'autre, celles qui traitent des
applications et des méthodologies dans une visée
d'enseignement/d'apprentissage des langues. Nous voudrions consacrer une
attention particulière aux approches qui mobilisent des corpus à travers
des outils et des plateformes numériques (ENT, MOOC, SPOC etc.), mais
aussi aux questions d'ordre éthique, prenant en compte les
recommandations de la RGPD.

*Axe 1 : Outils, ressources brutes ou annotées*

   * Lexiques et dictionnaires généraux et spécialisés
   * Corpus généraux ou de spécialité
   * Corpus écrits, oraux ou multimodaux
   * Corpus d'apprenants
   * Jeux sérieux et Jeux avec un but (GWAP - Games With A Purpose)
   * Outils de génération automatique d'exercices (morphologie,
     syntaxe etc.)
   * Outils de diagnostic automatique des erreurs
   * Outils d'exploration des données brutes ou annotées
   * etc.

*Axe 2 : Applications et méthodologies à visée didactique et
  pédagogique*

   * Automatisation de la correction des productions
   * Génération automatique de sujets (outils d'évaluation et de test)
   * Application didactique des outils de génération (outils de
     flexion, de dérivation, etc.)
   * Evaluation et amélioration de la lisibilité des textes
   * Apport de l'intelligence artificielle pour la didactique des
     langues
   * Approche par compétences (selon le CECRL) : outils et méthodes
   * etc.


*Modalités de soumission : *

*Deux formats d'articles peuvent être soumis :*

   * articles longs (de 12 pages plus 2 pages maximum pour les
     références)
   * articles courts (6 pages plus 2 pages maximum pour les références)

Les articles acceptés donneront lieu à une communication orale de 20
minutes suivie d'une discussion de 10 minutes au cours de la journée
réservée à l'atelier (lundi 1er ou mardi 2 juillet 2019). Les articles
sélectionnés seront publiés dans les actes de l'atelier ELTAL
(publication en ligne). Les critères de sélection sont conformes à ceux
de la conférence principale. Les soumissions doivent être conformes aux
lignes directrices de style officielles (télécharger les fichiers de
style) et doivent être en format PDF. Les soumissions en anglais sont
acceptées dès lors qu'un co-auteur n'est pas francophone.

*Feuilles de style* :

Vous pouvez télécharger les feuilles de style à partir de ce lien :
https://www.irit.fr/pfia2019/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/style_taln2019.tar.gz


*Dépôt des contributions :*

Le dépôt des contributions se fait via EasyChair à l¹adresse suivante :
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eltal2019

*Dates importantes :*

   * 12 avril 2019 : date limite de soumission des propositions
   * 3 mai 2019 : notification d'acceptation ou de refus aux auteurs
     (avec relecture)
   * 17 mai 2019 : date limite de retour des versions définitives des
     articles
   * 1 ou 2 juillet (à confirmer) : date de l'atelier ELTAL 2019

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2nd Call for Papers ? ACM Intelligent Virtual Agents Conference - IVA 2019

2-5 July 2019, Paris, France

https://iva2019.sciencesconf.org

The 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) will be held on July 2-5 2019 in Paris, France. The conference is organized by CNRS, Sorbonne University and Paris-Saclay University (France), and sponsored by ACM-SIGAI.

The IVA conference started in 1998 as a workshop on Intelligent Virtual Environments at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Brighton, UK, which was followed by a similar one in 1999 in Salford, Manchester, UK. Then dedicated stand-alone IVA conferences took place in Madrid, Spain, in 2001, Irsee, Germany, in 2003, and Kos, Greece, in 2005. Since 2006 IVA has become a full-fledged annual international event, which was first held in Marina del Rey, California, then Paris, France, in 2007, Tokyo, Japan, in 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2009, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, in 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2011, Santa Cruz, USA, in 2012, Edinburgh, UK, in 2013, Boston, USA, in 2014, Delft, The Netherlands, 2015, Los Angeles, USA, 2016, Stockholm, Sweden, 2017. IVA 2018 was held in Sydney, Australia.

PAPER SUBMISSION

We invite submissions of research full papers on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: theoretical foundations of virtual agents, agent modeling and evaluation, agents in games and simulations, and applications of virtual agents. Extended abstracts presenting late breaking work are also welcome.

IVA 2019 is the 19th meeting of an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main leading scientific forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. IVAs are interactive digital characters that exhibit human-like qualities and can communicate with humans and each other using natural human modalities like facial expressions, speech and gesture. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action that allow them to participate in dynamic social environments. In addition to presentations on theoretical issues, the conference encourages the showcasing of working applications.

IVA 2019?s special topic is ?Social Learning?, that is learning while interaction socially; agents can learn from the humans and humans can learn from the agents. Agents can take different roles such as tutors, peers, motivators, coaches in training and in serious games. They can act as job recruiter, virtual patient, and nurse to name a few applications. With this topic in mind we are seeking closer engagement with industry and also with social psychologists.

For more information, please visit the IVA 2019 website:

https://iva2019.sciencesconf.org

The papers and extended abstracts will be published in the ACM digital library. All submissions will be reviewed via a double-blind review process.

IMPORTANT DATES (23h59 UTC/GMT)

Full papers

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2019

Notification of Acceptance: April 8, 2019

Camera Ready: April 22, 2019

Extended abstracts

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2019

Notification of Acceptance: April 8, 2019

Camera Ready: April 22, 2019

INVITED SPEAKERS

Beatrice de Gelder (Maastricht University)

Rachael Jack (Glasgow University)

Verena Rieser (Heriot-Watt University)

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (INRIA - Bordeaux)

COMMITTEE

Conference Chairs

Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS-ISIR, Sorbonne University, France

Jean-Claude Martin, CNRS-LIMSI, University Paris Saclay, France

Program co-chairs

Gale Lucas, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA

Hendrik Buschmeier, Bielefeld University, Germany

Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University, Germany

SCOPE AND LIST OF TOPICS

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

List of Topics

Socio-emotional agent models: 

• Cognition, machine learning and adaptation

• Emotion, personality and cultural differences

• Model of emotionally communicative behavior

• Model of conversational behavior

• Model of social skills

• Machine learning for endowing virtual agents with social skills

Multimodal interaction:

• Verbal and nonverbal coordination

• Engagement

• Interpersonal relation

• Multi-party interaction

• Model driven by theoretical foundations from psychology

• Data driven model

Social agent architectures:

• Design criteria and design methodologies

• Real-time human-agent interaction

• Incremental agent control

• Real-time integrated system

Evaluation methods and studies:

• Evaluation methodologies and user studies

• Ethical considerations and societal impact

• Applicable lessons from other fields (e.g. robotics)

• Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

Applications:

• Social skills training

• Virtual agents in games and simulations

• Applications in education, health, games, art

Social learning:

• Learning in social interaction

• Social skills acquisition model

• Learning in interaction with agents

WARNING: There is a conference called ICIVA 2019 that claims to be the 21st International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents in Bali in October 2019. This conference is not the official IVA and is launched by an organization World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology that is unfortunately very famous for its predatory publishing practices.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Academy_of_Science,_Engineering_and_Technology)

Please note that no paper submitted to ICIVA 2019 in Bali will be published in the IVA 2019 proceedings.

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The 12th Annual International Conference on Languages & Linguistics is organanized on 8-11 July 2019, Athens, Greece (Academic Responsible: Dr. Valia Spiliotopoulos, Associate Professor of Professional Practice & Academic Director Centre for English Language Learning, Teaching, and Research (CELLTR), Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada). You are more than welcome to submit a proposal for presentation. The abstract submission deadline is 11 March 2019. You may also send us a stream-panel proposal to be organized as part of the conference.

https://euagenda.eu/events/2019/07/08/12th-annual-international-conference-on-languages-linguistics-811-july-2019-athens-greece

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ACM SIGIR 2019

The 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on

Research and Development in Information Retrieval

July 21-25, 2019, Paris, France

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Full Papers

The annual SIGIR conference is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results, and the demonstration of new systems and techniques, in the broad field of information retrieval (IR). The 42nd ACM SIGIR conference, to be held in Paris, France, welcomes contributions related to any aspect of information retrieval and access, including theories, foundations, algorithms, applications, evaluation, and analysis. The conference and program chairs invite those working in areas related to IR to submit original papers for review.

Important Dates  (timezone: anywhere on earth)

Committees

Program chairs

• Yoelle Maarek, Amazon Research, Haifa, Israel
• Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada
• Falk Scholer, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

General chairs

• Max Chevalier, CNRS &  Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
• Eric Gaussier, CNRS & Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France
• Benjamin Piwowarski, CNRS, LIP6, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

Contact

All questions about full paper submissions should be emailed to sigir2019-pcchairs AT easychair DOT org.

follow us on twitter : @sigir2019

follow us on our web site : http://sigir.org/sigir2019/

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HISTORY: On July 20, 1969 at 20:17 UTC, Earth witnessed one of the most challenging technology accomplishments by mankind to date of NASA Apollo-11 with over 600M people witnessing both the landing and first steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Next July 2019 marks the 50^th Anniversary of the historical Apollo-11 lunar landing and first steps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

NSF CRSS-UTDallas Project: With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF-CISE), CRSS-UTDallas has spent the last six years developing a hardware/software solution to digitize and recover all 30-track analog tapes from Apollo-11 (plus Apollo-13 and other missions), as well as development of speech diarization technologies to advance speech technology for such data. A total of 19,000 hours of data consisting of all NASA air-to-ground, mission control, and backroom support team discussions was released this year (news releases from this NSF sponsored project this year include: NSF, NASA, BBC, AIP (Acoustical Society of America), NPR, many on-line news sites, and involvement in a planned CNN documentary where this data is contributing, etc.). To date, this will be the largest publically available audio corpus of time synchronized, team based (~600 people) naturalistic communications to accomplish a real-world task.

ANNOUNCEMNT: This email is to announce the release of the FEARLESS STEPS CHALLENGE corpus, which is being shared for a proposed Special Session at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019. The attached flyer details the 5 challenge tasks involved:

1. SAD: Speech Activity Detection

2. Speaker Diarization

3. SID: Speaker Identification

4. ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition

5. Sentiment Detection

This challenge corpus consists of 100hours from 5 of the 30-track channels spanning three phases of Apollo-11 mission: (i) lift off, (ii) landing, (iii) lunar walk. All data for this challenge will be available soon via a download option for all to participate (this site has sample audio from the NSF funded project: https://app.exploreapollo.org/ ). In addition, any lab/group wishing to have access to the entire 19,000 hours can do so without charge (this is public data, so it will be available via download, or a small fee for a hard-disk and shipping to your lab).   

While diarization efforts in the past have concentrated on single channel broadcast news, interviews, etc. These all represent typically a single speaker, or small group discussing topics of interest. The FEARLESS STEPS CORPUS is all time synchronized (with IRIG Time Channel) across 30 channels, with loops containing anywhere from 3-33 speakers working collaboratively to solve challenging problems. CRSS-UTDallas has produced full diarization output for the entire 19,000hrs of data (SAD, SID, DIAR/ASR) which is available with the corpus.

REQUEST:  We are proposing a Special Session at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019. If you have interest in getting access to the FEARLESS STEPS CORPUS and potentially participating in the CHALLENGE, please reply to this email Hansen, John' <john.hansen@utdallas.edu>(an expression of interest does not obligate you to submit, we are simply trying to collect a list of interested researchers for the data). 

Many thanks for your interest!

CRSS-UTDallas Fearless Steps Team

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3^rd INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON DEEP LEARNING
 
DeepLearn 2019
 
Warsaw, Poland
 
July 22-26, 2019
 
Co-organized by:
 
Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
 
IRDTA ? Brussels/London
 
http://deeplearn2019.irdta.eu/
 
***************************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
DeepLearn 2019 will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning. This is a branch of artificial intelligence covering a spectrum of current exciting machine learning research and industrial innovation that provides more efficient algorithms to deal with large-scale data in neurosciences, computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, human-computer interaction, drug discovery, biomedical informatics, healthcare, recommender systems, learning theory, robotics, games, etc. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.
 
Most deep learning subareas will be displayed, and main challenges identified through 2 keynote lectures, 24 four-hour and a half courses, and 1 round table, which will tackle the most active and promising topics. The organizers are convinced that outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event.
 
An open session will give participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes. Moreover, there will be two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
Master's students, PhD students, postdocs, and industry practitioners will be typical profiles of participants. However, there are no formal pre-requisites for attendance in terms of academic degrees. Since there will be a variety of levels, specific knowledge background may be assumed for some of the courses. Overall, DeepLearn 2019 is addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who want to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends. All will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.
 
STRUCTURE:
 
3 courses will run in parallel during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they wish to attend as well as to move from one to another.
 
VENUE:
 
DeepLearn 2019 will take place in Warsaw, whose historical Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The venue will be:
 
tba
 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES: (to be completed)
 
Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications to the Natural Sciences
 
Christopher Bishop (Microsoft Research Cambridge), [introductory] Introduction to the Key Concepts and Techniques of Machine Learning
 
Aaron Courville (University of Montréal), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Generative Models
 
Sergei V. Gleyzer (University of Florida), [introductory/intermediate] Feature Extraction, End-end Deep Learning and Applications to Very Large Scientific Data: Rare Signal Extraction, Uncertainty Estimation and Realtime Machine Learning Applications in Software and Hardware
 
Tomas Mikolov (Facebook), [introductory] Using Neural Networks for Modeling and Representing Natural Languages (with Armand Joulin)
 
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University), [intermediate/advanced] Speech Recognition and Machine Translation: From Statistical Decision Theory to Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks
 
Navraj Pannu (GoDaddy), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning and Maximum Likelihood in Structural Biology
 
Jose C. Principe (University of Florida), [intermediate/advanced] Cognitive Architectures for Object Recognition in Video
 
Björn Schuller (Imperial College London), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning for Intelligent Signal Processing
 
Alex Smola (Amazon), tba
 
Ponnuthurai N Suganthan (Nanyang Technological University), [introductory/intermediate] Learning Algorithms for Classification, Forecasting and Visual Tracking
 
Johan Suykens (KU Leuven), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning, Neural Networks and Kernel Machines
 
Alexey Svyatkovskiy (Princeton University), [introductory/intermediate] From Natural Language Processing to Machine Learning on Source Code
 
Gaël Varoquaux (INRIA), [intermediate] Representation Learning in Limited Data Settings
 
OPEN SESSION:
 
An open session will collect 5-minute voluntary presentations of work in progress by participants. They should submit a half-page abstract containing title, authors, and summary of the research to david@irdta.eu by July 14, 2019.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A session will be devoted to 10-minute demonstrations of practical applications of deep learning in industry. Companies interested in contributing are welcome to submit a 1-page abstract containing the program of the demonstration and the logistics needed. At least one of the people participating in the demonstration must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by July 14, 2019.
 
EMPLOYER SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in deep learning will have a space reserved for one-to-one contacts. It is recommended to produce a 1-page .pdf leaflet with a brief description of the company and the profiles looked for, to be circulated among the participants prior to the event. At least one of the people in charge of the search must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by July 14, 2019.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
?ukasz Kobyli?ski (Warsaw, co-chair)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel J. Parra-Royón (Granada)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
http://deeplearn2019.irdta.eu/registration/
 
The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an estimation of the respective demand for each course. During the event, participants will be free to attend the courses they wish.
 
Since the capacity of the venue is limited, registration requests will be processed on a first come first served basis. The registration period will be closed and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue is exhausted. It is highly recommended to register prior to the event.
 
FEES:
 
Fees comprise access to all courses and lunches. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline.
 
ACCOMMODATION:
 
Suggestions for accommodation will be available in due time.
 
CERTIFICATE:
 
A certificate of successful participation in the event will be delivered indicating the number of hours of lectures.
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david@irdta.eu
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA) ? Brussels/London

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The 1st Workshop on Conversational Interaction Systems (WCIS)

=== Call for Papers ===

You are invited to participate in the 1st Workshop on Conversational Interaction Systems (WCIS), to be held as part of 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019) in Paris, France on 25th July 2019.

=== Important Dates ===

- Submissions due: May 3, 2019

- Paper Notification: May 31, 2019

- Camera Ready Papers due: June 30, 2019

- Workshop Day: July 25, 2019

=== Aim of the Workshop ===

Conversational interaction systems such as Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana have become very popular over the recent years. Such systems provide a conversational interface to a wide variety of content and on the web and in turn for IR systems. Some interactive systems like Facebook Portal and Echo Show also involve challenges with language understanding in combination with vision. Research challenges such as Dialogue System Technology Challenges and Amazon Alexa Prize have continued to inspire research in conversational AI bringing together researchers from different communities such as speech recognition, spoken language understanding, reinforcement learning, information retrieval, language generation, and multi-modal question answering.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and future of conversational agents and interactive systems. We will highlight applications like recommendation systems, search, knowledge graph induction, multi-modal interaction and web question answering. The workshop will include talks from senior technical leaders and researchers to share insights associated with building conversational systems at scale. We will issue an open call for papers and will prioritize innovative and impactful contributions. Accepted papers will be presented through contributed talks or poster presentations. We will end the workshop with an open panel discussion consisting of leading researchers.

=== Workshop Topics ===

We invite contributions in the following areas:

• End to end approaches for multi-turn dialog and retrieval systems

• Reinforcement and imitation learning for dialog and retrieval systems

• Dialog systems:

• Speech recognition

• Language understanding

• Dialog manager and state tracking

• Language generation and dialog evaluation

• Conversational approaches for information retrieval:

  • Knowledge grounding

  • Multi-turn interactions for addressing complex queries

  • Conversational recommendation systems and personalization

  • Surfacing and realization of search results

• Visual dialog and question answering

• Human-human, human-machine and multi-modal interactions

• Usability, interpretability and explain ability of conversational AI and IR models

• User modeling, user context, and personalization

• Dialog datasets and innovative data collection techniques

=== Submission Information ===

The submissions of research papers must be in PDF format and must be at most 6 pages (including figures, excluding references). The submissions should follow the current ACM two-column conference format. The templates are available on the ACM website (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template). Please note that our workshop is non-archival, but accepted submissions will be hosted on the workshop website. Submissions can be optionally anonymous (posting on arXiv is allowed) and should be submitted electronically via the conference submission system by the due date.

Workshop Website: https://sites.google.com/view/wcis

Submission Link : https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wcis2019

Templates : https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

=== Organizing Committee ===

- Chandra Khatri, Uber AI

- Rahul Goel, Amazon Alexa AI

- Abhinav Rastogi, Google AI

- Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI

Advisory Committee -

Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon Alexa AI), Rushin Shah (Facebook Conversational AI), Gokhan Tur (Uber AI), Zhou Yu (UC Davis), Arindam Mandal (Amazon Alexa AI), Jan Sedivy (Czech Technical University), Panagiotis Papadakos (FORTH -ICS), Raefer Gabriel (Amazon Alexa AI)

Program Committee -

Semih Yavuz (University of California, Santa Barbara), Alessandra Cervone (University of Trento), Angeliki Metanillou (Amazon Alexa AI), Bhenam Hedayatnia (Amazon Alexa AI), Sanghyun Yi (Caltech), Huaixiu Zheng (Uber AI), Marco Damonte (University of Edinburgh), Tagyoung Chung (Amazon Alexa AI), Raghav Gupta (Google AI), Tanmay Rajpurohit (Genpact AI), Dian Yu (UC Davis), Pararth Shah (Facebook AI)

Thanks!

Abhinav, Chandra, Rahul, Alex

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CfP 21st International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2019), Istanbul, Turkey

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

SPECOM-2019 – SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

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

21st International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2019)

Venue: Istanbul, Turkey, August 20-25, 2019

Web: http://www.specom.nw.ru

ORGANIZERS

The conference is organized by Bogazici University (BU, Istanbul, Turkey) in cooperation with St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Science (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU, Moscow, Russia).

SPECOM-2019 CO-CHAIRS

Albert Ali Salah - Bogazici University, Turkey / Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Alexey Karpov - SPIIRAS, Russia

Rodmonga Potapova - MSLU, Russia

INVITED SPEAKERS

Hynek Hermansky - Johns Hopkins University, USA - 'If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them'

Odette Scharenborg - Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands - 'The representation of speech in the human and artificial brain'

Vanessa Evers - University of Twente, the Netherlands - 'Socially intelligent robotics'

CONFERENCE TOPICS

SPECOM conference is dedicated to issues of speech technology, human-machine interaction, machine learning and signal processing, particularly:

Affective computing

Applications for human-computer interaction

Audio-visual speech processing

Automatic language identification

Computational paralinguistics

Corpus linguistics and linguistic processing

Deep learning for sound and speech 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 and language resources

Speech analytics and audio mining

Speech dereverberation

Speech driving systems in robotics

Speech enhancement

Speech perception and speech disorders

Speech recognition and understanding

Speech translation automatic systems

Spoken dialogue systems

Spoken language processing

Text-to-speech and Speech-to-text systems

Virtual and augmented reality

SATELLITE EVENT

4th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2019: http://www.specom.nw.ru/icr2019

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event is English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited talks, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 10 pages formatted in the LNCS style. Those accepted will be presented either orally or as posters. The decision on the presentation format will be based upon the recommendation of several independent reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specom2019

Papers submitted to SPECOM-2019 must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

PROCEEDINGS

SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS) series listed in all major citation databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, DBLP, etc. SPECOM Proceedings are included in the list of forthcoming proceedings for August 2019.

IMPORTANT DATES

April 22, 2019 ............ Submission of full papers (extended deadline)

May 22, 2019 ............ Notification of acceptance (extended)

June 01, 2019 ............ Camera-ready papers and early registration

Aug. 20-25, 2019 ......... Conference dates

VENUE

The conference will be organized at the Bogazici University, South campus, Albert Long Hall.

CONTACTS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

SPECOM-2019 Secretariat:

E-mails: specom@iias.spb.su; salah@boun.edu.tr

SPECOM-2019 web-site: http://www.specom.nw.ru

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2019 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 ÉTS (École de Technologie Supérieure) in Montreal, CA June 24 to August 2, 2019 (Tentative)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: Monday, November 5th, 2018.
 
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 2019 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 - a nswering, video summarization, sign language technology, multimedia retrieval, analysis of printed or handwritten text. * DIALOG AND LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING: U n d e r s t a n din g h u m a n - to - h u m a n o r h u m a n - to - computer conversation; dialog manag ement; 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 November 9th, 2018. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on December 7-9th, 2018. 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 2019 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 2019 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 jsalt2019-planning@jhu.edu by 23:59PM EDT on Monday, 11/05/2018. 

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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
                       EUSIPCO 2019
          27th European Signal Processing Conference
                     A Coruña, Spain
                   September 2-6, 2019
                   www.eusipco2019.org
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

IMPORTANT DATES

- Satellite Workshop Proposals ? February 4, 2019
- Full Paper Submission ? February 18, 2019
- Notification of Acceptance ? May 17, 2019
- Final Manuscript Submission - May 31, 2019

The 2019 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) will be held in the charming
city of A Coruña, Spain, from September 2 to September 6, 2019. This flagship conference
of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) will feature a comprehensive
technical program addressing all the latest developments in research and technology for
signal processing. EUSIPCO 2019 will feature world-class speakers, oral and poster
sessions, plenaries, exhibitions, demonstrations, tutorials, and satellite workshops, and
is expected to attract many leading researchers and industry figures from all over the
world.


TECHNICAL SCOPE

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

- Audio and acoustic signal processing
- Speech and language processing
- Image and video processing
- Multimedia signal processing
- Signal processing theory and methods
- Sensor array and multichannel signal processing
- Signal processing for communications
- Radar and sonar signal processing
- Signal processing over graphs and networks
- Nonlinear signal processing
- Statistical signal processing
- Compressed sensing and sparse modelling
- Optimization methods
- Machine learning
- Bio-medical image and signal processing
- Signal processing for computer vision and robotics
- Computational imaging /spectral imaging
- Information forensics and security
- Signal processing for power systems
- Signal processing for education
- Bioinformatics and genomics
- Signal processing for big data
- Signal processing for the internet of things
- Design/implementation of signal processing systems


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

- General Co-Chairs: Mónica F. Bugallo, Stony Brook University, USA; Luis Castedo,
University of A Coruña, Spain
- Technical Program Chairs: Maria Sabrina Greco , University of Pisa, Italy; Marius
Pesavento, University of Darmstadt, Germany
- Publications Co-Chairs: Andrea Ferrari, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France;
Luca Martino, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
- Financial Chair: Ignacio Santamaría, University of Cantabria, Spain
- Special Sessions Co-Chairs: Markus Rupp, Vienna University of Technology, Austria;
Danilo Mandic, Imperial College London, UK
- Tutorials Co-Chairs: Aleksandar Dogand?i?, Iowa State University, USA; Mario A.T.
Figueiredo, University of Lisboa, Portugal
- Satellite Workshops Chair: Wolfgang Utschick, Technical University of Munich, Germany
- Students Activities Co-Chairs: Pau Closas, Northeastern University, USA; Jordi
Vilà-Valls, University of Toulouse / ISAE-SUPAERO, France
- Industrial Program Chair: Víctor Elvira, IMT Lille Douai, France
- Publicity Chair: Javier Vía, University of Cantabria, Spain
- International Liaisons: Ke Guan, Beijing Jiaotong University, China; Henry Argüello,
Industrial University of Santander, Colombia
- Local Chair: Roberto López-Valcarce, atlanTTic, University of Vigo, Spain


_______________________________________________
Announcements mailing list
https://lists.eurasip.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements

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*********** CALL FOR PAPERS ***********

Text Mining and Applications (TEMA?19) Track of EPIA?19

TeMA 2019 will be held at the 18th Portuguese Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (EPIA 2018) taking place at Vila Real, Portugal, from 3rd
to 6th September 2019. This track is organized under the auspices of
the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA).
EPIA 2019 URL http://www.epia2019.utad.pt/index.php/call-for-papers
This announcement contains the following information:
[1] Track description; [2] Topics of interest; [3] Important dates;
[4] Paper submission; [5] Track fees; [6] Organizing Committee; [7]
Program Committee and [8] Contacts.

[1] Track Description

The 8th edition of the Text Mining and Applications (TeMA 2019) track
will be a forum for researchers working in Human Language
Technologies, i.e. Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational
Linguistics (CL), Natural Language Engineering (NLE), Text Mining
(TM), Information Retrieval (IR), and related areas.

The most natural form of sharing knowledge is indeed through textual
documents. Especially on the Web, a huge amount of textual information
is openly published every day, on many different topics and written in
natural language, thus offering new insights and many opportunities
for innovative applications of Human Language Technologies.

Following recent advances in general IA sub?fields such as Natural
Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), text mining is
now even more valuable as tool for bridging the gap between language
theories and effective use of natural language contents, for
harnessing the power of semi?structured and unstructured data, and to
enable important applications in real?world heterogeneous
environments. Both hidden and new knowledge can be discovered by using
text mining methods, at multiple levels and in multiple dimensions,
and often with high commercial value.

Authors are invited to submit their papers on any of the issues
identified in section [2]. Papers will be blindly reviewed by at least
three members of the Program Committee. All accepted papers will be
published by Springer in a volume of Springer?s Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) corresponding to the proceedings of the
19th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2019.

[2] Topics of Interest

 Topics include but are not limited to:

Text Mining Natural Language Processing, and Social Media Content Analysis

?       Entity Recognition and Disambiguation
?       Relation Extraction
?       Analysis of Opinions, Emotions and Sentiments
?       Text Clustering and Classification
?       Machine Translation
?       Summarization
?       Word Sense Disambiguation
?       Co?Reference Resolution
?       Language Modeling
?       Syntax and Parsing
?       Distributional Models and Semantics
?       Multi?Word Units
?       Lexical Knowledge Acquisition
?       Spatio?Temporal Text Mining
?       Entailment and Paraphrases
?       Natural Language Generation
?       Language Resources: Acquisition and Usage
?       Cross?Lingual Approaches
?       Algorithms and Data Structures for Text Mining

Applications:

?       Information Retrieval
?       Information Extraction
?       Question?Answering and Dialogue Systems
?       Text?Based Prediction and Forecasting
?       Web Content Annotation
?       Computational Social Science
?       Computational Journalism
?       Health and Well?being
?       Big Data Analysis

[3] Important dates

April 15, 2019: Paper submission deadline
May 31, 2019: Notification of paper acceptance
June 15, 2019: Deadline for camera?ready versions
September 3?6, 2019: Conference dates

[4] Paper submission

Submissions must be full technical papers on substantial, original,
and previously unpublished research. Papers can have a maximum length
of 12 pages. All papers should be prepared according to the formatting
instructions of Springer LNAI series. Authors should omit their names
from the submitted papers, and should take reasonable care to avoid
indirectly disclosing their identity. References to own work may be
included in the paper, as long as referred to in the third person. All
papers should be submitted in PDF format through the conference
management website at:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=epia2019

[5] Track Fees:

 Track participants must register at the main EPIA 2019 conference. No
extra fee shall be paid for attending this track.

[6] Organizing Committee:

Joaquim F. Ferreira da Silva. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.
Altigran Soares da Silva, Universidade Federal do Amzonas

[7] Program Committee:

Adeline Nazarenko ? University of Paris 13, France
Alberto Diaz ? Universidade Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Alberto Simões ? Algoritmi Center - University of Minho, Portugal
Alexandre Rademaker ? IBM / FGV, Brazil
Altigran Silva ? Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Brasil
Aline Villavicencio ? Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Antoine Doucet ? University of Caen, France
António Branco ? Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Béatrice Daille ? University of Nantes, France
Belinda Maia ? Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Bruno Martins ? Instituto Superior Técnico ? Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Eric de La Clergerie ? INRIA, France
Fernando Batista ? Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal
Francisco Couto ? Faculdade de Ciências ? Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Gaël Dias ? University of Caen Basse-Normandie
Hugo Oliveira ? Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
Irene Rodrigues ? Universidade de Évora, Portugal
Jesús Vilares ? University of A Coruña, Spain
Joaquim Ferreira da Silva ? Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia ?
Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Katerzyna Wegrzyn-Wolska ? ESIGETEL, France
Luciano Baebosa ? Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
Luisa Coheur ? Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal
Manuel Vilares Ferro ? University of Vigo, Spain
Mário Silva ? Instituto Superior Técnico ? Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Mohand Boughanem ? University of Toulouse III, France
Nuno Marques ? Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Pablo Gamallo ? Faculdade de Filologia, Santiago de Compustela, Spain
Paulo Quaresma ? Universidade de Évora, Portugal
Pavel Brazdil ? University of Porto, Portugal
Pável Calado ? Instituto Superior Técnico ? Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Sebastião Pais, Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal
Sérgio Nunes ? Faculdade de Engenharia ? Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Vitor Jorge Rocio ? Universidade Aberta, Portugal

 [8] Contacts
Joaquim Francisco Ferreira da Silva, DI/FCT/UNL, Quinta da Torre,
2829?516, Caparica, Portugal. Tel: +351 21 294 8536 (ext. 10732) ?
Fax: +351 21 294 8541 ? E?mail: jfs [at]fct [dot] unl [dot] pt

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Call for Papers

CBMI 2019 - Dublin, Ireland, 4-6 Sept 2019
International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing
http://cbmi2019.org/

CBMI is the annual conference that brings together the various communities
involved in all aspects of content-based multimedia indexing for retrieval,
browsing, management, visualization and analytics. After 15 successful
editions of the CBMI workshop, CBMI became a conference in 2018 and the next
edition will take place in Dublin, Ireland from 4-6 September 2019. The
scientific program will include invited keynote talks, regular papers,
demonstration papers and three special sessions on ?Medical Image Mining and
Health? (MIME), ?Signals And Multimedia? (SAM), and ?Multimedia Indexing for
Comics? (MIC).

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished research papers in the
broad field of content-based multimedia indexing and applications using the
CBMI 2019 submission system: https://www.conftool.org/cbmi2019/. We wish to
highlight significant contributions addressing the main problems of search and
retrieval but also the related and equally important issues of multimedia
content management, user interaction, large-scale search, machine learning in
retrieval, social media indexing and retrieval.

Authors can submit full length (6 pages ? to be presented as oral
presentation) or short papers (4 pages ? to be presented as posters) to the
regular or special sessions. All paper limits are assumed to include
references. Additionally demonstration papers (up to 4 pages) may also be
submitted that highlight interesting and novel demos of CBMI-related
technologies. The submissions are peer reviewed in a single blind process. The
language of the conference is English. The CBMI 2019 conference adheres to the
IEEE paper formatting guidelines. When preparing your submission, please
follow the IEEE guidelines given by IEEE at the Manuscript Templates for
Conference Proceedings.

The CBMI proceedings are traditionally indexed and distributed by IEEE Xplore
and ACM DL. In addition, authors of the best papers of the conference will be
invited to submit extended versions of their contributions to a special issue
of a leading journal in the field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
                ? Audio,visual and multimedia indexing;
                ? Multimodal and cross-modal indexing;
                ? Deep learning for multimedia indexing;
                ? Visual content extraction;
                ? Audio (speech, music, etc.) content extraction;
                ? Identification and tracking of semantic regions and events;
                ? Social media analysis;
                ? Metadata generation, coding and transformation;
                ? Multimedia information retrieval (image, audio, video,
text);
                ? Mobile media retrieval;
                ? Event-based media processing and retrieval;
                ? Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for multimedia
retrieval;
                ? Multimedia data mining and analytics;
                ? Multimedia recommendation;
                ? Large scale multimedia database management;
                ? Summarization, browsing and organization of multimedia
content;
                ? Personalization and content adaptation;
                ? User interaction and relevance feedback;
                ? Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools;
                ? Evaluation and benchmarking of multimedia retrieval systems;
                ? Applications of multimedia retrieval, e.g., medicine,
lifelogs, satellite imagery, video surveillance;
                ? Cultural heritage applications.

Important dates:
Full/short paper submission:             May 04, 2019
Demo paper submission:                   May 04, 2019
Special sessions paper submission: May 04, 2019
Notification of acceptance:                June 18, 2019
Camera-ready papers due:                June 29, 2019

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                      TSD 2019 - LAST CALL FOR PAPERS
**************************************************************************

               The twenty-second International Conference on
                   TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2019)
                            Ljubljana, Slovenia
                           September 10-13, 2019
                       http://www.tsdconference.org


IMPORTANT

The submission deadline March 31 is approaching. We will not extend the deadline.
However, in case you need some extra days, please let us know and do
the following: Register yourself and submit your paper with a valid abstract.
Put 'UNFINISHED' as the first word in the abstract (both in the system
and in the paper). We need at least the abstract to organize the reviews.
When you finish your work, please, update the paper. 


TSD HIGHLIGHTS

* Keynote speakers:
    Denis Jouvet (Loria, Nancy, France),
    Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex, UK),
    Bhiksha Raj (Carnegie Mellon University, USA),
    Ryan Cotterell (University of Cambridge, UK).

* TSD is traditionally published by Springer-Verlag and regularly listed in
  all major citation databases: Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings
  Citation Index, DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, COMPENDEX, etc.

* The TSD2019 conference is officially recognized as an INTERSPEECH 2019
  satellite event.

* The TSD2019 conference is supported by the International Speech
  Communication Association (ISCA). It holds the status of an ISCA
  Supported Event.

* TSD offers a high-standard transparent review process - double blind,
  final reviewers' discussion.

* TSD is going to take place in the beautiful centre of Ljubljana, the
  capital of Slovenia.

* The conference is organized in cooperation with the Faculty of Electrical
  Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

* TSD provides an all-service package (conference access and material, all
  meals, one social event, etc.) for an easily affordable fee.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 31, 2019 ............... Deadline for submission of contributions
May 10, 2019 ................. Notification of acceptance or rejection
May 31, 2019 ................. Deadline for submission of camera-ready papers

September 10-13, 2019 ........ TSD2019 conference date

The proceedings will be provided on flash drives in form of navigable
content. Printed books will be available for extra fee.


TSD SERIES

The TSD series has evolved as a prime forum for interaction between
researchers in both spoken and written language processing from all over
the world. Proceedings of the TSD conference form a book published by
Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI)
series. The TSD proceedings are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters
Conference Proceedings Citation Index. LNAI series are listed in all major
citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, or COMPENDEX.


TOPICS

Topics of the 22nd conference will include (but are not limited to):

    Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional speech,
    handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words, alternative way of
    feature extraction, new models for acoustic and language modeling).

    Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual, text, and
    spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation, specialized
    lexicons, dictionaries).

    Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high fidelity
    speech synthesis, computer singing).

    Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech (multilingual
    processing, sentiment analysis, credibility analysis, automatic text
    labeling, summarization, authorship attribution).

    Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information extraction,
    information retrieval, data mining, semantic web, knowledge
    representation, inference, ontologies, sense disambiguation, plagiarism
    detection).

    Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing (machine
    translation, natural language understanding, question-answering
    strategies, assistive technologies).

    Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
    question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in dialogues).

    Multimodal Techniques and Modeling (video processing, facial animation,
    visual speech synthesis, user modeling, emotion and personality
    modeling).


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

All programme committee members are listed on the conference web pages
https://www.kiv.zcu.cz/tsd2019/index.php?page=committees


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event is English, however, papers on issues
related to text and speech processing in languages other than English are
strongly encouraged.


LOCATION

Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital - a city, whose name means `The beloved',
is a great place to visit, although you will not find world renowned
attractions here. Nevertheless, it has history, tradition, style, arts
& culture, an atmosphere that is both Central European and Mediterranean;
many also add the adjectives multilingual and hospitable. Being close to
many of the major sights and attractions of Slovenia, Ljubljana can also be
your starting point to discover the country's diversity.

Ljubljana is situated about halfway between Vienna and Venice. Its
character and appearance have been shaped by diverse cultural influences
and historical events. While in winter it is remarkable for its dreamy
Central European character, it is the relaxed Mediterranean feel that
stands out during summer.

Ljubljana is a picturesque city full of romantic views, with a medieval
castle towering over its historical city centre and a calm river spanned by
a series of beautiful bridges running right through it. It's a city with
a medieval heart, a city of the Baroque and Art Nouveau, with an old castle
resting above it like a sleeping beauty.

In Ljubljana eastern and western cultures met; and the Italian concept of
art combined with the sculptural aesthetics of Central European cathedrals.
The city owes its present appearance partly to Italian baroque and partly
to Art Nouveau, which is the style of the numerous buildings erected
immediately after the earthquake of 1895.

The central point of interest in Ljubljana is the Ljubljana Castle,
watching over the city from the centrally located castle hill. The
beginnings of the medieval castle go back to the 9th century, although the
castle building is first mentioned only in 1144. It gained its present
image after the earthquake of 1511 and following further renovations at the
beginning of the 17th century. At present, a funicular connects the Old
Town to the castle hill, adding an even more convenient access alternative
to the tourist train.

Ljubljana lies at the centre of Slovenia. In the morning you can visit the
stunningly beautiful Lake Bled, Lake Bohinj or Soca Valley in the high
mountainous region of the Alps, and in the evening enjoy the sunset in one
of the charming little towns on the Adriatic coast.
It only takes minutes to reach the peaceful and unspoiled countryside of
the city's green surrounding areas, which offer endless opportunities for
hiking, cycling, fishing and horse riding.

We are very excited of the fact that the TSD conference leaves the Czech
Republic for the first time within its 22-year history and that the TSD2019
is going to take place in such a wonderful location as Ljubljana.


ABOUT CONFERENCE

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University
of West Bohemia, Pilsen, the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University,
Brno, and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana.


VENUE

    Faculty of Electrical Engineering - University of Ljubljana
    Trzaska cesta 25
    SI-1000 Ljubljana


CONTACT

The preferred way of contacting the conference organizing committee is
writing an e-mail to:

    Ms Lucie Tauchenova, TSD2019 Conference Secretary
    E-mail: tsd2019@tsdconference.org
    Phone: +420 702 994 699

All paper correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

    TSD2019 - NTIS P2
    Fakulta aplikovanych ved
    Zapadoceska univerzita v Plzni
    Univerzitni 8
    CZ-306 14 Plzen
    Czech Republic

    Fax: +420 377 632 402 - Please, mark the faxed material with large
    capitals 'TSD' on top.

TSD2019 conference website: http://www.tsdconference.org/

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CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2019 CONFERENCE

September 11-13, 2019

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/

The 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019) will be held on September 11-13, 2019 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with Interspeech 2019, which will be held September 15-19 in Graz, Austria (https://www.interspeech2019.org). 

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing a series of nineteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.

Keynote Speakers:  Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, Helen Meng

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

• Discourse Processing
  Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Explainable AI. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering, and information retrieval.

• Dialogue Systems
  Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications.

• Corpora, Tools and Methodology
  Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.

• Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
  Pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence).

• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

SPECIAL SESSIONS

SIGDIAL 2019 will include one special session (http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/attend.html#specialsessions):

• Implications of Deep Learning for Dialog Modeling (http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/)

Please see the special session page for additional information and submission details. In order for papers submitted to the special session to appear in the SIGDIAL 2019 conference proceedings, they must undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process.

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be accepted as long papers for oral presentation or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

• Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos, sound files, etc.

Multiple Submissions
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2019 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Blind Review
Building on previous year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2019 will follow the new ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

Submission Format
All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. Authors are expected to use the ACL LaTeX style template or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Link and Deadlines
Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of their paper before the May 19 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until May 19, 23:59 GMT.

https://www.softconf.com/j/sigdial2019/

IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2019 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review. 

Preserving Double Blind Review
The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

• You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

• If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

• Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible.

Citation and Comparison
If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

• You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).

• In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

MENTORING

Submissions with innovative core ideas that may be in need of language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for 'mentoring' and accepted with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2019 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Long, Short & Demonstration PDF Submission: 19 May 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 28 June 2019

• Final Paper Submission: 21 July 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Conference: 11-13 September, 2019

SIGDIAL 2019 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Milica Gasic, Saarland University, Germany

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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ICNLSP 2019  , the third edition of the International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing, which will be held at the  University of Trento  on September 12th, 13th 2019.

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Call for Abstracts: Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop 2019

What it is about:

The Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop (YFRSW) is a workshop for women undergraduate and masters students who are currently working in speech science and technology. It is designed to foster interest in research in our field in women at the undergraduate or master level who have not yet committed to getting a PhD in speech science or technology areas, but who have had some research experience in their college and universities via individual or group projects.

The workshop is to be held prior to Interspeech 2019 on SaturdaySeptember 14th, 2019, in Graz, Austria. It will feature panel discussions with PhD students and senior researchers in the field, student poster presentations and a mentoring session. Student poster presentations should give an overview of a current or planned research project in which the student is involved, with an emphasis on promoting discussion.

The workshop is the fourth of its kind, after a successful inaugural event  YFRSW 2016, at Interspeech 2016 in San Francisco, USA, YFRSW 2017 at Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden,  and YFRSW 2018 at Interspeech in Hyderabad, India.

Travel funds are available for students accepted to attend the workshop.

How to submit:

To attend the workshop please send an abstract describing your (planned) research (maximum of 300 words). This abstract should be submitted by email to yfrsw2019@gmail.com by June 1, 2019.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the committee and applicants will be notified as soon as possible. We will emphasize inclusivity although all submissions should be in the core scientific domains covered by Interspeech.

Please direct any questions to: yfrsw2019@gmail.com

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Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019: TTS without T

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