IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Compact Deep Neural Networks with
Industrial Applications

Artificial neural networks have been adopted for a broad range of tasks in areas like multimedia analysis and processing, media coding, data analytics, etc. Their recent success is based on the feasibility of processing much larger and complex deep neural networks (DNNs) than in the past, and the availability of large-scale training data sets. As a consequence, the large memory footprint of trained neural networks and the high computational complexity of performing inference cannot be neglected. Many applications require the deployment of a particular trained network instance, potentially to a larger number of devices, which may have limitations in terms of processing power and memory e.g., for mobile devices or Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For such applications, compact representations of neural networks are of increasing relevance.

This special issue aims to feature recent work related to techniques and applications of compact and efficient neural network representations. It is expected that these works will be of interest to both academic researchers and industrial practitioners, in the fields of machine learning, computer vision and pattern recognition, media data processing, as well as fields such as AI hardware design etc. In spite of active research in the area, there are still open questions to be clarified concerning, for example, how to train neural networks with optimal performance while achieving compact representations, and how to achieve representations that do not only allow for compact transmission, but also for efficient inference.  This special issue therefore solicits original and innovative works to address these open questions in, but not limited to, following topics:

• Sparsification, binarization, quantization, pruning, thresholding and coding of neural networks
• Efficient computation and acceleration of deep convolutional neural networks
• Deep neural network computation for low power consumption applications
• Exchange formats and industrial standardization of compact & efficient neural networks
• Applications e.g. video & media compression methods using compressed DNNs
• Performance evaluation and benchmarking of compressed DNNs

Prospective authors should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpages and submit their manuscript to the web submission system.

Guest Editors Diana Marculescu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Lixin Fan, JD.COM, Silicon Valley Labs, USA (Lead GE) Werner Bailer, Joanneum Research, Austria Yurong Chen, Intel Labs China, China

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ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)

Special Section on Computational Modeling and Understanding of Emotions in Conflictual Social Interactions 

Call for Papers: https://toit.acm.org/pdf/ACM-ToIT-CfP-ECSI-ext.pdf

Paper Submission Deadline: 31st March 2019

Author Guidelines and Templates: https://toit.acm.org/authors.cfm 

Paper Submission Website: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/toit 

The expression of social, cultural and political opinions in social media often features a strong affective component, especially when it occurs in highly-polarized contexts (e.g., in discussions on political elections, migrants, civil rights, and so on). In particular, hate speech is recognized as an extreme, yet typical, expression of opinion, and it is increasingly intertwined with the spread of defamatory, false stories. Current approaches for monitoring and circumscribing the spread of these phenomena mostly rely on simple affective models that do not account for emotions as complex cognitive, social and cultural constructs behind linguistic behavior. 

In particular, moral emotions possess a potential for advancing sentiment analysis in social media, especially since they provide insights on the motivations behind hate speech. Understanding these affective dynamics is important also for modelling human behavior in social settings that involve other people and artificial agents, as well as for designing socially-aware artificial systems.

How can we include finer grained accounts of emotions in computational models of interpersonal and social interactions, with the goal of monitoring and dealing with conflicts in social media and agent interactions? How can we leverage the recent advances in machine learning and reasoning techniques to design more effective computational models of interpersonal and social conflict? We invite contributions that address the foregoing questions by presenting enhanced computational models and processing methods.

INDICATIVE TOPICS OF INTEREST 

Computational models of emotions 

Moral emotions (e.g. contempt, anger and disgust) in conflictual social interactions

Affective dynamics in human-human and human-agent conflictual interactions 

Interplay of emotions in conflictual interactions

Dimensional and categorical emotion models in conflict representation

Automatic processing of affect in polarized debates on social media

Stance and hate speech detection

Affect in online virality and fake news detection

Opinions and arguments on highly controversial topics

Linguistic and multimodal corpora for affect analysis in conflictual interactions

Figurative and rhetorical devices in social contrasts

Applications

Conflict detection and hate speech monitoring in political debates

Conflict-aware and conflict-oriented conversational agents

Integration of social cues in human-agent interaction strategies 

Conflict-aware agents in pedagogical and coaching applications 

SUBMISSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES

Author guidelines for preparation of manuscript and submission instructions can be found at: https://toit.acm.org/authors.cfm 

Please select ?Computational Modeling and Understanding of Emotions in Conflictual Social Interactions? under Manuscript Type dropdown in the Manuscript Central website.

Submission: 31 Mar 2019

First decision: 1 July 2019

Revision: 15 Aug 2019

Final decision: 1 Oct  2019

Final manuscript:  1 Nov  2019

Publication date: 1 Mar  2020

SPECIAL SECTION EDITORS

Chloé Clavel, Institut-Mines-Telecom, Telecom-ParisTech, LTCI,  France

http://clavel.wp.mines-telecom.fr

Rossana Damiano, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

http://www.di.unito.it/~rossana/

Viviana Patti, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

http://www.di.unito.it/~patti

Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

http://users.dsic.upv.es/~prosso

ACM TOIT Editor-in-Chief

Ling Liu, Department of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

CONTACT

Please send any queries about this CfP to ecsi.toit@gmail.com.

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Special Issue on Speech & Dementia,

Computer Speech and Language.

The CfP is online here:
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-speech-and-language/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-speech-dementia

Organizers:

Heidi Christensen (University of Sheffield, GBR),

Frank Rudzicz (University of Toronto, CAN),

Johannes Schröder (University Heidelberg, DEU)

Tanja Schultz (University of Bremen, CDEU)

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Call for papers – TIPA journal vol. 36, 2020

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Special issue of Language and Speech

The goal of this special issue of Language and Speech is to highlight recent work exploring sociolinguistic variation in prosody. The papers will be based in part on talks and poster presentations from the recent “Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody” conference (ETAP4, etap4.krisyu.org) which featured a special theme entitled: “Sociolectal and dialectal variability in prosody.” Note, however, that this is an open call and submissions are not restricted to papers presented at the conference.

As in many language fields, studies of prosody have focused on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in social structures. The goal of this special issue is to diversify prosody research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The issue brings together prosody researchers and researchers exploring sociological variation in prosody, with a focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and prosodic differences based on gender and sexuality.

We invite proposals for papers that will:

• Establish the broad questions in sociolinguistics that would especially benefit from prosodic research

• Address the theoretical and methodological challenges and opportunities that come with studying sociolinguistic prosodic variation

• Share best practices for engaging in prosodic research of understudied languages and social groups to address linguistic bias

We especially encourage proposals for papers that focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and prosodic differences based on gender and sexuality.

The editors of the special issue will be Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, Mara Breen, Shelome Gooden, Erez Levon, and Kristine Yu.  The editors will review submitted paper proposals and then invite authors of selected proposals to submit full papers. Each invited paper will be handled by one of the editors and reviewed by 2-3 additional reviewers. Based on the reviews, the editors plan to accept 10-12 papers for publication in this special issue. Please note that publication is not guaranteed in this special issue. Invited papers will undergo the standard Language and Speech review process and be subject to Language and Speech author guidelines (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/language-and-speech#submission-guidelines). Invited papers can be short reports or full reports (see author guidelines, section 1.2).

Paper proposals in PDF file format must be sent to etap4umass@gmail.com by May 15, 2019. Proposals must not be more than 1 page (with an additional page allowed for figures, examples, and references). Authors of selected proposals will be invited to submit their full papers, which will be due by 12/15/19. Acceptance/rejection notifications will be sent in early 2020 with editorial comments. We are hoping to submit our final proofs to the journal by summer 2020.

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IT-Information Technology

Call for papers

Special Issue:

Scope of the Journal: IT - Information Technology is a strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal. It is the oldest German journal in the field of information technology. Today, the major aim of IT - Information Technology is highlighting issues on ongoing newsworthy areas in information technology and informatics and their application. It aims at presenting the topics with a holistic view It addresses scientists, graduate students, and experts in industrial research and development.

Aim of the Special Issue: Analysis of human behaviours and emotions based on affective computing techniques have received considerable attention in the relevant literature in recent years. The main aim of this interest is to endow computers with the human traits of adequately recognising and responding to emotion or affect. One particularly interesting field of applying affective computing technologies is in healthcare scenarios. In clinical psychology and psychotherapy settings, affective computing can be used to provide objective diagnostic information, accurately track changes in patients? mood or emotion regulations in therapy, or enable Virtual Therapists to have the ability to empathise and appropriately respond to their patients' needs. As in most areas based heavily on Artificial Intelligence, deep learning solutions are the pre-eminent approach in many affective computing applications.

This special issue aims to solicit papers which contribute ideas, methods and case studies for how affective computing technologies can aid healthcare. In particular, these include, but are not limited to, solutions utilising:

• State-of-the-art deep learning techniques
• Adversarial training paradigms
• Attention models
• End-to-end learning
• Explainable AI
• Multitask learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Longer-term user adaptation
• Transfer learning

Authors are asked to kindly submit their manuscript online at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/itit/.

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Call for papers: Pluricentric Languages in Speech Technology

Pluricentric languages (PLCLs) are a common type among the languages of the world. Presently 43 languages have been identified to belong to this category. Languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu etc. fall into this category. A language is identified as pluricentric if it is being used in at least two nations where it is also having an official function and if it is forming national varieties of their own with specific linguistic and pragmatic features. In addition to the variation on the level of national standard varieties, there is also so called “second level variation” on a regional and local level that is often being used in diglossic speech situations where code switching is a salient feature with two or more varieties being used within the same utterance. The amount of linguistic variation in pluricentric languages is considerable and poses a challenge for speech recognition in particular and human language technology in general.

The topic of pluricentric languages overlaps in some aspects with the topic of low-resourced languages. In contrast to “low-resourced” languages, pluricentric languages may already have plenty of resources (e.g., English, French, German), but variant sensitive or variant-independent technology is likely to be absent. In contrast to activities in the field of dialect recognition, the “non-dominant” varieties of pluricentric languages are the standard language in the respective countries and thus are also printed and spoken in media, parliaments and juridical texts.

The motivation for this special issue is the observation that pluricentric languages have so far mainly been described linguistically but not sufficiently been dealt with in the field of speech technology. This is particularly the case with the so-called “non-dominant varieties”. Given the current state of research in the field, we are especially interested in contributions which:

– investigate methods for creating speech and language resources, with a special focus on “non-dominant varieties” (e.g., Scots, Saami, Karelian Finnish, Tadczik, Frisian as well as diverse American and African languages: Aymara, Bamabara, Fulfulde, Tuareg, etc.).

– develop speech technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech for the national varieties of pluricentric languages; on the level of standard varieties and on the level of so-called “informal speech”.

– investigate novel statistical methods for speech and language technology needed to deal with small data sets.

– study the (automatic) processing of speech for code-switched speech in national varieties of pluricentric languages.

– investigate methods on how to use speech technology to aid sociolinguistic studies.

– present empirical perception and production studies on the phonetics and phonology of national varieties of pluricentric languages.

– present empirical perception and production studies on learning a pluricentric language as a second language and on developing computer aided language learning (CALL) tools for pluricentric languages.

– study effects on speech technology on language change for pluricentric languages (e.g., compare developments of non-dominant varieties in comparison of dominant varieties for which speech and language technologies are available).

This special issue is inspired by the Sattelite Workshop of Interspeech “Pluricentric Languages in Speech Technology” to be held in Graz on September 14, 2019 (http://www.pluricentriclanguages.org/ndv-interspeech-workshop-graz-2019/?id=0). The special issue invites contributions from participants of the workshop as well as from others working in related areas. Papers of interdisciplinary nature are especially welcome! Manuscript submission to this Virtual Special Issue is possible between December 1, 2019 and November 30, 2020.

Editors:

Rudolf Muhr (University of Graz, Austria), rudolf.muhr@uni-graz.at

Barbara schuppler (Graz University of Technology, Austria), b.schuppler@tugraz.at

Tania Habib (University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Pakistan), tania.habib@uet.edu.pk

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Call for Papers: Special issue on Advances in Automatic Speaker Verification Anti-spoofing

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We would like to announce  the Call for Papers for a Special Issue on Vocal Accommodation
in Speech Communication in Journal of Phonetics, co-edited by Jennifer Pardo, Elisa
Pellegrino, Volker Dellwo and Bernd Möbius.

We especially invite contributions which:

- examine and ideally compare instances of vocal accommodation in human-human and
human-computer interactions according to their underlying mechanism (e.g. automatic
perception production link) and social functions (e.g. to signal social closeness or
distance; to become more intelligible; to sound dominant, trustworthy or attractive);

- investigate the effect of task-specific and talker-specific characteristics (gender,
age, personality, linguistic and cultural background, role in interaction) in degree and
direction of convergence towards human and computer interlocutors;

- integrate articulatory and/or perceptual/neurocognitive/multimodal data to the analysis
of vocal accommodation in interactive and non-interactive speech tasks;

- investigate the contribution of short/long-term accommodation in human-human and
human-computer interactions to the diffusion of linguistic innovation and ultimately
language variation and change;

- explore the implications of accommodation for human and machine speaker recognition,
language learning technologies, and speech rehabilitation.

Important Dates and Timeline

Deadline for submission of 1-page abstract: 31 July 2019

Invitation for full paper submission: 31 August 2019

Deadline for submission of full paper: 31 December 2019

Further information
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-phonetics/call-for-papers/call-for-papers-vocal-accommodation-in-speech-communication With best wishes from the
editors

Jennifer Pardo (pardoj@montclair.edu <mailto:pardoj@montclair.edu&gt;), Elisa Pellegrino
(elisa.pellegrino@uzh.ch <mailto:elisa.pellegrino@uzh.ch&gt;), Volker Dellwo
(volker.dellwo@uzh.ch <mailto:volker.dellwo@uzh.ch&gt;), Bernd Möbius
(moebius@coli.uni-saarland.de <mailto:moebius@coli.uni-saarland.de&gt;)

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Call for Papers
IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Deep Learning for Multi-modal Intelligence across
Speech, Language, Vision, and Heterogeneous Signals

In the past years, thanks to the disruptive advances in deep learning, significant progress has been made in speech processing, language processing, computer vision, and applications across multiple modalities. Despite the superior empirical results, however, there remain important issues to be addressed. Both theoretical and empirical advancements are expected to drive further performance improvements, which in turn would generate new opportunities for in-depth studies of emerging novel learning and modeling methodologies. Moreover, many problems in artificial intelligence involve more than one modality, such as language, vision, speech and heterogeneous signals. Techniques developed for different modalities can often be successfully cross-fertilized. Therefore, it is of great interest to study multimodal modeling and learning approaches across more than one modality. The goal of this special issue is to bring together a diverse but complementary set of contributions on emerging deep learning methods for problems across multiple modalities. The topics of this special issue include but not limit to the following:

Topics of interest in this special issue include (but are not limited to):

• Fundamental problems and methods for processing multi-modality data including language, speech, image, video, and heterogeneous signals
• Pre-training, representation learning, multitask learning, low-shot learning, and reinforcement learning of multimodal problems across natural language, speech, image, and video
• Deep learning methods and applications for cross-modalities, such as image captioning, visual question answering, visual story-telling, text-to-image synthesis, vision-language navigation, etc.
• Evaluation metrics of multimodal applications

Prospective authors should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpages and submit their manuscript to the web submission system.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue on

Optimization is now widely reckoned as an indispensable tool in signal processing and machine learning. Although convex optimization remains a powerful, and is by far the most extensively used, paradigm for tackling signal processing and machine learning applications, we have witnessed a shift in interest to non-convex optimization techniques over the last few years. On one hand, many signal processing and machine learning applications-such as dictionary recovery, low-rank matrix recovery, phase retrieval, and source localization-give rise to well-structured non-convex formulations that exhibit properties akin to those of convex optimization problems and can be solved to optimality more efficiently than their convex reformulations or approximations.

On the other hand, for some contemporary signal processing and machine learning applications-such as deep learning and sparse regression-the use of convex optimization techniques may not be adequate or even desirable. Given the rapidly-growing yet scattered literature on the subject, there is a clear need for a special issue that introduces the essential elements of non-convex optimization to the broader signal processing and machine learning communities, provides insights into how structures of the non-convex formulations of various practical problems can be exploited in algorithm design, showcases some notable successes in this line of study, and identifies important research issues that are motivated by existing or emerging applications. This special issue aims to address the aforementioned needs by soliciting tutorial-style articles with pointers to available software whenever possible. 

White paper due: August 1, 2019
Invitation notification: September 1, 2019
Manuscript due: November 1, 2019
First review to authors: January 1, 2020

Guest Editors:

• Anthony Man-Cho So, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Prateek Jain, Microsoft Research India
• Wing-Kin Ma, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Gesualdo Scutari, Purdue University

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 Call for submission : https://tal-61-1.sciencesconf.org/

TAL Journal: regular issue

2020 Volume 61-1

Editors : Cécile Fabre, Emmanuel Morin, Sophie Rosset and Pascale Sébillot

Deadline for submission: 15/11/2019

--

TOPICS

The TAL journal launches a call for papers for an open issue of the
journal. We invite papers in any field of natural language processing,
including:

- lexicon, syntax, semantics, discourse and pragmatics;
- morphology, phonology and phonetics;
- spoken and written language analysis and generation;
- logical, symbolic and statistical models of language;
- information extraction and text mining;
- multilingual processing, machine translation and translation tools;
- natural language interfaces and dialogue systems;
- multimodal interfaces with language components;
- language tools and resources;
- system evaluation;
- terminology, knowledge acquisition from texts;
- information retrieval;
- corpus linguistics;
- use of NLP tools for linguistic modeling;
- computer assisted language learning;
- applications of natural language processing.

Whatever the topic, papers must stress the natural language processing
aspects.

'Position statement' or 'State of the art' papers are welcome.

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. Submissions in
English are accepted only if one of the co-authors is a non French-speaking
person.

THE JOURNAL

TAL (http://www.atala.org/revuetal - Traitement Automatique des Langues
/ Natural Language Processing) is an international journal
published by ATALA (French Association for Natural Language Processing) since 1960
with the support of CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). It
has moved to an electronic mode of publication, with printing on
demand.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submission: 15/11/2019
Notification to authors after first review: 29/02/2020
Notification to authors after second review: 2/05/2020
Publication: September 2020


FORMAT SUBMISSION

Papers should strictly be between 20 and 25 pages long.

TAL performs double-blind review: it is thus necessary to anonymise the manuscript and the name of the pdf file and to avoid self references.

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal
(http://www.atala.org/content/instructions-aux-auteurs-feuilles-de-style-0).

Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to upload your
contribution via the menu 'Paper submission' (PDF format). To do so, you
will need to have an account on the sciencesconf platform. To create an
account, go to the site http://www.sciencesconf.org and click on 'create
account' next to the 'Connect' button at the top of the page. To
submit, come back to the page (soon available) http://tal-61-1.sciencesconf.org/,
connect to you account and upload your submission.

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Call for Papers
IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Deep Learning for Multi-modal Intelligence across
Speech, Language, Vision, and Heterogeneous Signals

Extended deadline to September 15th

In the past years, thanks to the disruptive advances in deep learning, significant progress has been made in speech processing, language processing, computer vision, and applications across multiple modalities. Despite the superior empirical results, however, there remain important issues to be addressed. Both theoretical and empirical advancements are expected to drive further performance improvements, which in turn would generate new opportunities for in-depth studies of emerging novel learning and modeling methodologies. Moreover, many problems in artificial intelligence involve more than one modality, such as language, vision, speech and heterogeneous signals. Techniques developed for different modalities can often be successfully cross-fertilized. Therefore, it is of great interest to study multimodal modeling and learning approaches across more than one modality. The goal of this special issue is to bring together a diverse but complementary set of contributions on emerging deep learning methods for problems across multiple modalities. The topics of this special issue include but not limit to the following:

Topics of interest in this special issue include (but are not limited to):

• Fundamental problems and methods for processing multi-modality data including language, speech, image, video, and heterogeneous signals
• Pre-training, representation learning, multitask learning, low-shot learning, and reinforcement learning of multimodal problems across natural language, speech, image, and video
• Deep learning methods and applications for cross-modalities, such as image captioning, visual question answering, visual story-telling, text-to-image synthesis, vision-language navigation, etc.
• Evaluation metrics of multimodal applications

Prospective authors should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpages and submit their manuscript to the web submission system.

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Call for Papers
IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Tensor Decomposition for Signal Processing
and Machine Learning

Tensor decomposition, also called tensor factorization, is very useful for representing and analyzing multidimensional data. Tensor decomposition has been applied in signal processing (speech, audio, communications, radar, biomedicine), machine learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, latent factor models, subspace learning), and beyond. Tensor decomposition helps us to learn a variety of models, including community models, probabilistic context-free-grammars, the Gaussian mixture model, and two-layer neural networks.
 
The multidimensional nature of the signals and even ?bigger? data provide a good opportunity to exploit tensor-based models and tensor network, with the aim of meeting the strong requirements on flexibility, convergence, and efficiency. Although considerable research has been done on this subject, there are many challenges still outstanding that need to be explored, like high computational cost of algorithms, tensor deflation, massive tensor decomposition, etc. The goal of this special issue is to attract high quality papers containing original research on tensor methods, tensor decompositions for signal processing and machine learning, and their applications in big data, social network, biomedical and healthcare, advanced data-driven information and communication technology (ICT) systems and others.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• New tensor decompositions and uniqueness issues of tensor models
• Low-rank approximations
• Fast and robust tensor decompositions
• Novel algorithms for existing tensor decomposition models
• Optimization problems related to tensor models
• Tensor-based detection and parameter estimation
• Tensor decomposition for 5G/B5G wireless communications
• Tensor-based data-driven networking
• Tensor processing and analysis in social networks
• Tensor decomposition for industry internet of things
• Spatial temporal data via tensor factorization
• Computer vision with tensor method
• Biomedical, healthcare, and audio signal processing with tensors
• Pattern recognition and neural networks with tensor decomposition

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpages and submit their manuscript to the web submission system.

Guest Editors Hongyang Chen (Lead GE), Fujitsu Ltd, Japan (hongyang.chen@fujitsu.com) Sergiy Vorobyov, Aalto University, Finland (svor@ieee.org, sergiy.vorobyov@aalto.fi) Hing Cheung So, City University of Hong Kong, China (hcso@ee.cityu.edu.hk) Fauzia Ahmad, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA (fauzia.ahmad@temple.edu) Fatih Porikli, Australian National University, Australia (fatih.porikli@anu.edu.au)

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Special issue of the TAL journal on 'NLP and health'

tal-61-2.sciencesconf.org

The medical application domain and the discipline of Natural Language Processing have been interacting for a good half century now, to mutual benefit. NLP techniques have helped in medical knowledge discovery and clinical practice improvements.  At the same time, the medical field has contributed meaningful tasks, sizeable document collections (e.g., MIMIC for patient records, MEDLINE for scientific abstracts), and detailed lexical resources (UMLS), and these have helped advancements in the discipline of NLP in general.

Language is prevalent throughout the care process. It is used to encode institutional knowledge and health information, patient language productions can be analyzed for diagnosis (speech and/or voice disorders, language disorders, mental illnesses), it conveys patient and health professional interactions (consultations, consensus meetings), and also encodes clinical descriptions of pathologies and their management from the perspective of patients and health professionals (social networks, patient records). These language productions all address the specialiazed theme of health while exhibiting great diversity in terms of medium (written or spoken language), register (written material published in journals, professional note-taking in clinical documents, spontaneous production on social networks), language (English for literature, any language for other types of documents), etc.

As computer science goes through rapid changes (deep learning, big data, internet of things), and the medical field is seeing its own opportunities (precision medicine, drug discovery) and pressures (chronic diseases, an aging population), interactions between these fields are more relevant than ever.

This special issue of TAL aims to provide an overview of current NLP research on all aspects of health, including fundamental work and applications.

Authors are invited to submit papers on all aspects of NLP for health, in particular regarding, but not limited
to, the following issues and tasks:

- general vs. in-domain pre-trained language models
- general pre-trained vs. in-domain embeddings
- analytics of social media related to health
- analysis of speech for medical purposes: speech pathology, interactions between medical professionals and patients
- accessibility of health information: NLP for improving text comprehension, text simplification, machine translation, systematic review support
- Automatic processing in the context of speech and language impairment: Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) solutions (from or to speech, text, symbols, sign language), Automatic characterization of disorders, assessment of their severity, decision support
- Conversational Agents (CA) in health and medical care (e-learning, virtual assistants, ...)

We particularly welcome submissions reporting work on languages other than English and inclusive of vulnerable groups.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission deadline: March 15, 2020?
- Notification to the authors after the first review May 30 2020
- Notification to the authors after the second review: mid-July 2020
- Final version: October 2020
- Publication: December 2020

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking authors are requested to submit their contributions in French.

JOURNAL

Traitement Automatique des Langues is an international journal published since 1960 by ATALA (Association pour le traitement automatique des langues) the French association for NLP with the support of CNRS. It is now published online, with an immediate open access to published papers, and annual print on demand. This does not
change its editorial and reviewing process.

FORMAT

Papers must be between 20 and 25 pages, references and appendices included (no length exemptions are possible). Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to click the menu item 'Paper submission' (PDF format). To do so, they will need to have an account, or create it, on the sciencesconf platform (go to http://www.sciencesconf.org and click on 'create account' next to the 'Connect' button at the top of the page). To submit, come back to the page http://tal-61-2.sciencesconf.org/, connect to the account and upload the submission.

From now on, TAL will perform double-blind review: it is thus necessary to anonymize the manuscript and the name of the pdf file. Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal (http://www.atala.org/English-style-files).


SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORIAL BOARD

Guest editors:
- Aurélie Névéol, LIMSI-CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay, France
- Berry de Bruijn, Conseil national de recherches Canada
- Corinne Fredouille, LIA/Avignon Université, France

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Xiao-Lei Zhang, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Lei Xie, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Eric Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State University, USA
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria, France

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Special issue of the TAL journal on 'NLP and health'

The medical application domain and the discipline of Natural Language
Processing have been interacting for a good half century now, to mutual
benefit. NLP techniques have helped in medical knowledge discovery and
clinical practice improvements.  At the same time, the medical field has
contributed meaningful tasks, sizeable document collections (e.g., MIMIC
for patient records, MEDLINE for scientific abstracts), and detailed
lexical resources (UMLS), and these have helped advancements in the
discipline of NLP in general.

Language is prevalent throughout the care process. It is used to encode
institutional knowledge and health information, patient language
productions can be analyzed for diagnosis (speech and/or voice
disorders, language disorders, mental illnesses), it conveys patient and
health professional interactions (consultations, consensus meetings),
and also encodes clinical descriptions of pathologies and their
management from the perspective of patients and health professionals
(social networks, patient records). These language productions all
address the specialiazed theme of health while exhibiting great
diversity in terms of medium (written or spoken language), register
(written material published in journals, professional note-taking in
clinical documents, spontaneous production on social networks), language
(English for literature, any language for other types of documents),
etc.

As computer science goes through rapid changes (deep learning, big data,
internet of things), and the medical field is seeing its own
opportunities (precision medicine, drug discovery) and pressures
(chronic diseases, an aging population), interactions between these
fields are more relevant than ever.

This special issue of TAL aims to provide an overview of current NLP
research on all aspects of health, including fundamental work and
applications.

Authors are invited to submit papers on all aspects of NLP for health,
in particular regarding, but not limited to, the following issues and
tasks:

- general vs. in-domain pre-trained language models
- general pre-trained vs. in-domain embeddings

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Call for Papers
IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Reconstruction of Audio from Incomplete
or Highly Degraded Observations

The restoration of audio content, in particular speech and music from degraded observations, is a challenging and long-standing problem in audio processing. In particular this holds for severe degradations and incomplete observations. Traditional restoration techniques are often not applicable or perform poorly in this case. The advent of sparse signal processing in the beginning of this century and, even more recently, of (deep) machine learning has opened wide new research and design opportunities for audio restoration, among many other signal processing problems. With the aid of such contemporary tools, researchers have recently been able to achieve unprecedented success in recovering or significantly improving quality of severely degraded audio. As the field advances very quickly, the potential for improvement, as well as exploration, is hardly exhausted.

Audio restoration addresses a large number of important degradation scenarios. Further, audio restoration can be performed with varied tools. The proposed issue will serve both as a comprehensive primer on the state-of-the-art, and a showcase of current developments within the field, targeting newcomers as well as already experienced researchers.

Topics of interest in this special issue include (but are not limited to):

• Restoration problems:
  packet loss concealment; inpainting; declipping; dequantization; phase recovery; bandwidth extension; coding artifact removal; compressive sampling recovery; dynamic range decompression; reconstructing audio signals from features,
• Methodological frameworks:
  time-frequency representations; (non-)convex optimization; operator and dictionary learning; nonnegative matrix/tensor factorization; (end-to-end) artificial neural networks; generative networks (e.g., generative adversarial nets and variational autoencoders); graph signal processing; psychoacoustics.

Excellent articles that cannot be accommodated in the special issue will be automatically transferred (without re-submission) and considered for regular publication in IEEE/ACM TASLP.
 
This special issue encourages reproducible research: authors are invited to provide their code and data, to use available material for benchmarking (e.g. SMALL dataset), and to contribute by any means (e.g., high-quality datasets and code, challenges) to the sustainability, the reproducibility and the reliability of the research works in the proposed topics.

Accepted articles are immediately published as Early Access and do not wait until the entire special issue is closed.

Prospective authors should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpages and submit their manuscript to the web submission system.

Important Dates

• Manuscript submission:  May 1, 2020 (Extended)

• Decision notification:  July 1, 2020

• Revised manuscript due:  August 1, 2020

• Second reviews completed:  September 15, 2020

• Final manuscript due:  November 1, 2020

Guest Editors

• Pavel Rajmic  (Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic), rajmic@vutbr.cz, lead guest editor

• Valentin Emiya  (Aix-Marseille University, France), valentin.emiya@univ-amu.fr

• Nicki Holighaus  (Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), nicki.holighaus@oeaw.ac.at

• Nancy Bertin  (Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France), nancy.bertin@irisa.fr

• Alexey Ozerov  (InterDigital, Cesson Sevigne, France), alexey.ozerov@interdigital.com

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CFP: Special Issue on ?Behavior and Usability Analysis for Multimodal User Interfaces? in JMUI

Joint analysis of different modalities of user inputs such as text, speech, voice, facial expressions, gesture, and physiological signals, is an important area of research, and highly beneficial in more natural and effective forms of intelligent human computer interaction. With the recent dramatic advances in machine learning, signal processing, computer vision, and natural language processing, variety of multimodal applications increases every day. Application areas include healthcare, autonomous driving, robotics, sports analytics, neuromarketing, psychological and physiological assessment, surveillance, gaming, and augmented/virtual reality. Consequently, in the era of intelligent systems, reliable interpretation of human behavior and detailed analysis of usability for multimodal user interfaces gain further importance.  

We solicit contributions to a special issue of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces on ?Behavior and Usability Analysis for Multimodal User Interfaces.? For this special issue, we welcome technical and empirical studies that focus on (a) interpretation and modeling of behavioral patterns, and (b) analysis and assessment of usability for multimodal human computer interaction. The topics include, but are not restricted to:

- Usability analysis
- User-centered interaction
- Human activity analysis
- Social signal processing
- Facial expression and gesture recognition
- Face and body tracking
- Speech recognition and voice analysis
- Text analysis
- Psychological and physiological assessment
- Multimodal fusion
- Spatio-temporal dynamics of actions and behavior
- Benchmarking studies on novel databases


SUBMISSIONS:
Submissions must represent original material. Papers are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has been neither submitted to, nor published in, another journal or conference. All manuscripts will undergo a rigorous review process. Please indicate in your cover letter that you are submitting to the special issue. The authors are required to follow the Submission Guidelines of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces:
https://www.springer.com/journal/12193/submission-guidelines

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for paper submission: 10 May 2020
Notification of review outcome: 5 July 2020
Camera-ready version of accepted papers: 9 August 2020
Estimated publication date: Autumn 2020  

EDITOR IN CHIEF:
Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI/CNRS - University Paris South XI

GUEST EDITORS:
Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Bilkent University
Elif Surer, Middle East Technical University
Albert Ali Salah, Utrecht University
Thierry Dutoit, University of Mons

To submit a manuscript, visit https://www.springer.com/journal/12193

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Computer Speech and Language

Computer Speech & Language publishes reports of original research related to the recognition, understanding, production, coding and mining of speech and language.

The speech and language sciences have a long history, but it is only relatively recently that large-scale implementation of and experimentation with complex models of speech and language processing has become feasible. Such research is often carried out somewhat separately by practitioners of artificial intelligence, computer science, electronic engineering, information retrieval, linguistics, phonetics, or psychology.

The journal provides a focus for this work, and encourages an interdisciplinary approach to speech and language research and technology. Thus contributions from all of the related fields are welcomed in the form of reports of theoretical or experimental studies, tutorials, reviews, and brief correspondence pertaining to models and their implementation, or reports of fundamental research leading to the improvement of such models.

The Editors of Computer Speech and Language are currently seeking high-quality new proposals for special issues. The topic of a special issue should be relevant to the aims and scope of Computer Speech and Language, as detailed above.,

Preparing a Proposal for a Special Issue Those wishing to propose a special issue of Computer Speech and Language should prepare a proposal that:

• Sets out the importance of the area that the special issue will focus on
• Explains the anticipated contribution of the special issue in advancing understanding in this area

1. Identifies papers and authors for possible inclusion in the special issue, with a brief description of each paper. (These papers do not need to have been written at this time, although our assumption is that most will be based on work already in progress.) Where a given author(s) has published extensively on a subject already, it is necessary to indicate the new contribution to be made by the proposed paper
2. Indicates the schedule in which the special issue could be produced (paper writing, reviewing, submission of final copy to the journal), assuming the proposal is accepted

• Includes a short biography of all authors and the Guest Editors

Please send proposals to our Special Issues Co-ordinator for initial approval and discussion: csl-si@elsevier.com.

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