TSD 2021 - FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
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The twenty-fourth International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD2021)
              Olomouc, Czech Republic, September 06-09, 2021
                       http://www.tsdconference.org

We are taking advantage of this opportunity to wish you Merry Christmas and
a Happy New Year! Stay safe and healthy during these uncertain and
unprecedented times.

IMPORTANT

TSD2021 is going to take place in the beautiful city of Olomouc, Czech
Republic. Thus, it is nicely colocated with Interspeech 2021 which is going
to be held in Brno, Czech Republic. Olomouc is only 77 km (48 mi) away from
Brno (30-45 min by car, 1 hour by public transport).

COVID-19 CONSIDERATIONS

As the situation in September 2021 cannot be easily predicted, the TSD2021
organizing committee is ready to organize a virtual conference, if necessary.

    * PC members have a good experience with it since TSD2020,
    * A virtual conference would mean significantly decreased conference
      fees.
    * If the majority of participants could travel to the Czech Republic,
      the onsite mode of the conference is preferred. For others, there
      would be special virtual sessions. Organizers will record all the
      sessions.

All measures have been taken to ensure that the organization of the TSD
2021 conference in September 2021 is not threatened by the COVID-19
pandemic.


TSD HIGHLIGHTS

* Keynote speakers: Olga Vechtomova (University of Waterloo, Canada), Kate
  Knill (University of Cambridge, UK). Other speakers are currently under
  discussion and will be announced at the latest in the next Call for
  papers.
* The TSD2021 conference is officially recognized as an INTERSPEECH 2021
  satellite event.
* The TSD2021 conference is supported by the International Speech
  Communication Association (ISCA). It holds the status of an ISCA
  Supported Event.
* The TSD book of proceedings is traditionally published by Springer and
  regularly listed in all major citation databases: Thomson Reuters
  Conference Proceedings Citation Index, DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC,
  COMPENDEX, etc.
* TSD offers a high-standard transparent review process - double blind,
  final reviewers' discussion.
* TSD 2021 is going to take place in the beautiful city of Olomouc, Czech
  Republic.
* The conference is organized in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts,
  Palacky university, Olomouc.
* TSD provides an all-service package (conference access and material, all
  meals, social events, etc.) for an easily affordable fee.


IMPORTANT DATES

April 18, 2021 ........... Deadline for submission of contributions
May 21, 2021 ............. Notification of acceptance or rejection
May 31, 2021 ............. Deadline for submission of camera-ready papers

September 06-09, 2021 .... TSD2021 conference time

The TSD conference will take place as usual during the week following
Interspeech 2021 (August 30 - September 3, 2021, Czech Republic).

Unfortunately, this year there is a collision with the RANLP conference
(September 6-8, 2021, Bulgaria). We discussed the possibility of changing
the date of the conference, however, as Interspeech 2021 and TSD alike are
held in the Czech Republic (altogether close to each other), we decided to
adhere to the dates and resolve the collision differently.

If you want to attend both conferences, let us know and we will do our best
to provide you with most of the TSD2021 program virtually.


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.

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


TOPICS

Topics of the 24th 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/tsd2021/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

Olomouc is a beautiful place on the Morava river with more than
a thousand-year-long history. Once a capital of Moravia - one of the three
historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown - nowadays, it still somehow waits
to be rediscovered. The world-renowned tourist guide Lonely Planet alerted
to this fact by putting Olomouc onto the list of TOP 10 tourist
destinations not to be missed during a visit to Europe. It even claimed
Olomouc is one of the most unappreciated destinations in the Czech
Republic.

By its beauty, Olomouc can, however, easily compete with not only Prague
but any other most sought spots around Europe. It certainly deserves our
attention.

One can find there the second most important urban conservation zone in the
Czech Republic, surrounded by splendorous parks, an incredible
concentration of ecclesiastical structures, UNESCO-protected monuments, and
even a horolog with a history maybe more interesting than the Prague one.
All together safe from the neverending bustle of large cities.

The most important monument in Olomouc is the Holy Trinity Column standing
in the central square. It represents the largest group of Baroque statues
in one structure in Central Europe. Apart from many historical buildings
such as Olomouc castle with the gothic cathedral of St. Wenceslas or the
former Olomouc fortress, another interesting point about Olomouc is the
astronomical clock, designed in the spirit of Socialist Realism.

The city of Olomouc has a convenient location close to the geographic
centre of Moravia (a historical region in the east of the Czech Republic),
on the banks of the river Morava. The place forms an important highway and
railroad junction; thus, it is easily accessible using both individual and
public means of transport.

Olomouc lies 260 km (162 mi) eastwards from the Czech capital Prague, and
210 km (130 mi) from both the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Austrian
capital Vienna. The closest international airports are 77 km (48 mi) away
in Brno, and 202 km (126 mi) away in Katowice in Poland.


We are very excited about the fact that the TSD2021 is going to take place
in such a fabulous, unique and rich in history city as Olomouc.

 
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 Arts, Palacky University, Olomouc.

VENUE

Faculty of Arts, Palacky University, Olomouc
Biskupske nam. 842/1
77900 Olomouc
Czech Republic


CONTACT

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

    Ms Lucie Tauchenova, TSD2021 Conference Secretary
    E-mail: tsd@kiv.zcu.cz
    Phone: +420 730 851 103

All paper correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

    TSD2021 - 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.

TSD2021 conference website: http://www.tsdconference.org/