META-FORUM 2021 invites Language Technology experts to discuss European Language Grid & Language-centric AI

Only a few days are left until the start of META-FORUM 2021, the international conference series on powerful and innovative Language Technologies for the multilingual information society. The online conference is the place to be to learn about most recent developments and achievements in European Language Technology, both from industry and research and including language-centric AI.

From 15-17 November, Language Technology researchers and industry representatives are invited to learn all about ?Using the European Language Grid? and discussing the state of play in the European LT landscape.

Search engines, voice assistants, translation services ? Language Technology is everywhere. That is, if used in English. Many other languages, especially those with few speakers, lack the technological support that could help preserving them in the digital world and promoting their use, which instead increases their risk for abandonment and digital extinction. The European Language Grid (ELG) aims to prevent exactly this by becoming the primary Language Technology platform for all European languages, big and small. However, supporting digital language equality is only one of the ELG?s goals.

At META-FORUM 2021, taking place virtually from 15-17 November, participants can learn about all the different aspects of the European Language Grid in its function as a marketplace for the European LT industry, as a cloud platform for research data and tools and as a point of contact and exchange for the Language Technology community in the EU. Titled ?Using the European Language Grid?, this year?s META-FORUM features many news and updates from the ELG project and initiative, the outcome of the ELG pilot projects, first results and findings of the European Language Equality project and much more.

As one of the highlights, META-FORUM 2021 will present an overview and first demo of the upcoming Release 3 of the European Language Grid, which will launch in early 2022. Further ones include the project expo, opening on day 1, as well as reports from the industry, information on current EU-funded projects in Language Technology and discussions on building bridges to Artificial Intelligence.

'META-FORUM 2021 will be a special edition of our conference series, summing up all the work achieved in the past three years of the ELG project and giving an outlook on the upcoming months. I especially look forward to the presentation of ELG Release 3, the results of the pilot projects at the virtual expo and the session on the European Language Equality project, which guides one of the main ideas of ELG towards a realistic future ? digital language equality in Europe by 2030.? says Georg Rehm, coordinator of the ELG project.

The registration for META-FORUM 2021 is, as usual, free of charge.

For further information, the full programme and timetable and the option to sign up, please visit our website at https://www.european-language-grid.eu/meta-forum-2021. Current updates about META-FORUM, the ELG and ELE projects as well as the European Language Technology landscape are shared through the European Language Technology social media channels on Twitter and LinkedIn and featured in the ELT Newsletter.

Overview
META-FORUM 2021 - Using the European Language Grid
15-17 November, 2021 Online Conference
Free of charge
Programme, info and registration:
https://www.european-language-grid.eu/meta-forum-2021

Contact
Prof. Dr. Georg Rehm
Coordinator European Language Grid
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Speech and Language Technology (SLT)
Georg.Rehm@dfki.de
+49 30 23895 1833

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PerceptiO

Perception and the living

La perception et le vivant

University of Strasbourg, France

UR 1339 LiLPa – Linguistics, Languages and Speech Research Unit

Chair of the USIAS Language Sciences – University of Strasbourg, Institute for

Advanced Study

University of Haute-Alsace, France

UR 4363 ILLE – Research Institute for European Languages and Literatures

IdEx Symposium 2021

17-20 November

The University of Strasbourg (France), through its Linguistics, Languages and Speech Research Unit 1339 LiLPa, as well as the USIAS Chair of Language Sciences (University of Strasbourg, Institute for Advanced Study), and the University of Haute-Alsace (France), through its Institute for Research in European Languages and Literatures Re- search Unit 4363 ILLE, will host in Alsace the symposium 'PerceptiO: Perception and the living' from the 17th to the 20th of November, 2021.

Chaired by the Alsatian University duo, the international organising committee of the event will also include in its ranks (in alphabetical order of the partner countries): the Institute for Research in Language Sciences and Technologies – IRSTL of the University of Mons (Belgium), First People’s Hospital in Chengdu, First People’s Hospital in Zigong and Binzhou Medical University (China), the Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky (United States of America), Chair of French Language of the University of Opole (Poland), Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor (Senegal) and the Department of Romance Studies of Matej Bel University of Banská Bystrica, LICoLab – Language, Information and Communication Laboratory and Department of British and American Studies of the Faculty of Arts of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (Slovakia).

• Argument

The symposium, which will bring together specialists from all horizons (both in terms of continents and fields of specialisation), will be devoted to perception and the living, a theme that will have to be tackled under its various disci-plinary seams, whether they fall within the commonly accepted classification established since the 20th Century in the Sciences (formal, physical, life, social) or that of the Arts (architecture, sculpture, visual arts, music, literature, perform-ing arts, cinema).

The general objective of the congress will thus entail addressing the question of how (the world of) the living caters for perceptions, both in terms of apprehension, feeling, understanding, analysis, construction, of profiling, of transmis-sion as of reception, to try to uncover the still quite vague outlines of the very notion of perception and related phenom-ena, in order to further the study of known properties and/or specificities or, moreover, to shed light on novel ones. More specifically, the major tack will notably involve, from the observation of how these properties or specificities fit into the living (world), means of highlighting the duality of the ontologies of perception (sensory vs intellectual).

In practice, we shall question, starting from the living (world), in particular the matrices, the molds, the frames, the actants, the circumstances, the ins and outs of perception through, preferably, inter, trans, multi, pluri or intradisciplinary approaches – even if the mono or uni-disciplinary approach will not be excluded. Note that all types of languages, be they natural or artificial, can serve as empirical bases and that, regardless of the approach considered, experimental and/or clinical approaches will be highly appreciated, as well as contrastive ones.

To this end, whether theoretical or applied, systematic or experimental, contextual or independent, synchronic or diachronic, prescriptive, descriptive or programmatic, intra or interdisciplinary, proposals thus requested will fit into at least one pair of disciplines from the Sciences and/or the Arts, such as: mathematics-linguistics, painting-music, biol-ogy-anthropology, medicine-linguistics, anthropology-music, physics-painting, sociology-linguistics, philosophy-mathematics, psychology-anthropology, computer science-linguistics, etc.

Regarding the official classification of the High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCERES) disciplinary fields, the symposium includes all disciplines: Mathematics, Physics, Earth and Universe Sci-ences, Chemistry, Engineering Sciences, Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies, Biology, Health, Agronomy, Ecology, Environment, Markets and Organisations, Standards, social institutions and behaviours, Space, environment and societies, Human spirit, language, education, Languages, Texts, Arts and cultures, Ancient and contemporary Worlds.

• Confirmed plenary speakers (other invitations are pending)

- Professor Alain Berthoz (Collège de France, Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action)

- Professor Luc Fraisse (Institut Universitaire de France & University of Strasbourg)

- Research Director Anne Giersche (University of Strasbourg & Inserm – Cognitive neuropsychology, pathophysiol-ogy of schizophrenia)

- Professor Bernard Harmegnies (Institute for Research in Language Sciences and Technology, University of Mons)

- Professor Karine Lacombe (Sorbonne University, Inserm, Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, St An-toine’s Hospital, Paris)

- Professor David Poeppel (Department of Neuroscience, Max-Planck-Institute Frankfurt & New York University)

- Professor Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, Chair of Chemical Topology and Molecular Machines)

- Research Director Jean-Luc Schwartz (GIPSA-Lab, Speech-Cognition Department, Grenoble Alpes University)

• Useful information

Proposals for papers, based on the PropCom framework below (Annex 1), will be sent simultaneously to Fabrice Marsac (f.marsac@unistra.fr) and Rudolph Sock (sock@unistra.fr) before March 31st, 2021 (indicate 'Symposium Per-ceptiO 2021' as the subject).

Notifications of acceptance or rejection of proposals will be sent to the authors by 30 April 2021 at the latest, and a first provisional programme of the event will follow around 15th of May.

The D-Day, oral communications, organised around the plenary lectures, will not exceed 15 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions). Poster sessions, which are scientifically equivalent in importance to the oral communications, will also be organised. The language of presentation will be either French or English.

After the symposium, the written contributions selected by the scientific committee will be published in 2023 as volume(s)/thematic volume(s) or varia in international journal(s).

Registration fees (150 € for permanent staff and 50 € for doctoral students) include the gala dinner on the second day (Thursday 18), the traditional paracolloquial activities (including a guided tour of the magnificent Strasbourg and its main cultural and tourist attractions, as well as the European Institutions) and the publication of contributions. Ac-commodation and other catering costs are the sole responsibility of participants.

The meeting will take place at the University of Strasbourg (Accueil – Université de Strasbourg (unistra.fr)) and at the Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme, Alsace – MISHA (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme – Alsace (MISHA)).

Depending on the sanitary context in November 2021, the symposium will be held in praesentia or will be par-tially/completely dematerialised.

• Scientific committee

Currently being set up, the scientific committee of PerceptiO 2021 will be responsible for both the scientific review of proposals, carried out, as usual, by peers on a double-blind basis, and for reviewing subsequent submitted articles, also conducted on a double-blind basis by peers, in view of their publication in the course of 2023.

• Organising committee

- Linguistics, Languages and Speech Research Unit UR 1339 LiLPa (University of Strasbourg, France)

- USIAS Chair of Language Sciences (University of Strasbourg, Institute for Advanced Study)

- Institute for Research in European Languages and Literatures Research Unit 4363 ILLE (University of Haute-Alsace, France)

- Institute for Research in Language Sciences and Technologies – IRSTL (University of Mons, Belgium)

- First People’s Hospital in Chengdu (China)

- First People’s Hospital in Zigong (China)

- Binzhou Medical University (China)

- Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures Department (University of Kentucky, United States of Amer-ica)

- Chair of French language (University of Opole, Poland)

- Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor (Senegal)

- Department of Romance Studies (Matej Bel University of Banská Bystrica, Slovakia)

- LICoLab – Language, Information and Communication Laboratory & Department of British and American Studies of the Faculty of Arts (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia)

• Reminder of key dates

- Submission of proposals: 31st March 2021 (deadline)

- Notification of paper acceptance or refusal: 30th April 2021 (deadline)

- Publication of the programme: around 15th of May 2021 (first provisional programme)

- Symposium: 17-20 November 2021

- Publication of accepted articles: in 2023

***

• • Annex n° 1: PropCom outline (2 pages maximum)

1. Title of the proposal

2. Object(s) of study, research issues

3. Objective(s), theoretical framework(s) and research hypothesis(es)

4. Methodology

5. Results

6. Five key words

7. References

8. Last name, first name and academic affiliation(s) of the author(s)

9. E-mail address(es) for correspondence

10. Specify if it is a doctoral research (if applicable, indicate the name of the thesis supervisor(s))

• • Annex n° 2: scientific committee (in the process of being set up)

The scientific committee of PerceptiO 2021 will be composed, among other members, of (teacher-)researchers from the various disciplinary fields established by the High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCERES).

For the International Organising Committee,

Fabrice MARSAC et Rudolph SOCK

University of Strasbourg, France

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Les membres de l'axe 'Multimodaltié et Interactions' du GdR TAL ont le plaisir de vous inviter à une demi journée de travail le 22 novembre 2021 de 14h à 16h. Cette activité regroupe deux présentation d'orateurs invités, et aura lieu à distance (les informations techniques vous seront communiquées plus tard).

Inscription obligatoire : https://framaforms.org/inscription-journee-multimodalite-et-interaction-du-22-novembre-1634633603

Programme :

14h-15h : Gwénolé Lecorvé, Orange Labs, « Traitement automatique du style dans l'oral et l?écrit. »

Gwénolé Lecorvé est chercheur chez Orange. Il obtient un doctorat en informatique à l'INSA Rennes en 2010 et est titulaire de l'habilitation à diriger des recherches depuis 2020. Son domaine de recherche est le traitement automatique des langues et de la parole. Il a tout d'abord travaillé sur la modélisation linguistique dans les systèmes de reconnaissance automatique de la parole, comme doctorant à l'IRISA/INRIA, puis comme chercheur post-doctoral à l'Idiap Research Institute (Martigny, Suisse). De 2012 à 2021, il travaille comme maître de conférences de l'Université de Rennes 1 à Lannion au sein de l'IRISA. Ses activités de recherche portent alors principalement sur l'intégration de facteurs stylistiques en synthèse de la parole, puis en génération de langage écrit. Aujourd'hui, il travaille sur des problématiques liées au dialogue en langage naturel.

Naomi is an Associate Professor in Digital Media Systems in the School of Engineering in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is Co-PI and a founding member of the ADAPT SFI Centre. There she has led a research theme centred on Multimodal Interaction, involving researchers from Universities across Ireland. She is also a lead academic of the hugely successful Sigmedia Research Group in the School of Engineering. Prior to returning to academia in 2008, Naomi worked in high-tech start-ups in the field of DSP Systems Development, including her own company. She also previously worked in McMaster University in Canada. She was a Visiting Professor at ICSI, Berkeley in 2015, and became a Fellow of TCD in 2017. She earned a Google Faculty Award in 2018 and was shortlisted for the AI Ireland Awards in 2019.

Naomi's research centres around Human Speech Communication. She likes to consider speech as something we both hear and see, with a strong multimodal aspect to her work. Her research involves the design and application of mathematical algorithms to enhance or augment speech communication between humans and technology. Much of that work is underpinned by signal processing and machine learning, but also requires an understanding of how humans interact. Her current research projects include audio-visual speech recognition, speech synthesis evaluation, multimodal speech analysis, and birdsong. Her industrial background brings a real-world approach to her research.
     

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CFP: ACM MULTIMEDIA ASIA 2021
_____________________________

ACM MULTIMEDIA ASIA 2021
1 - 3 Dec, 2021, Gold Coast, Australia
https://mmasia2021.uqcloud.net/

_________________
 
IMPORTANT DATES
_________________

- Workshop/Grand Challenge Proposals Submission: 28 Jun, 2021
- Workshop/Grand Challenge Proposals Notification: 18 July, 2021
- Regular Paper Submission (Full/Applied Track): 19 July, 2021
- Short/Demo/Brave New Idea Paper Submission: 2 Aug, 2021
- Tutorial Proposals Submission: 30 Aug, 2021
- Tutorial Proposals Notification: 15 Sep, 2021
- Regular Paper Notification (Full/Applied Track): 27 Sep, 2021
- Short/Demo/Brave New Idea Paper Notification: 12 Oct, 2021

The submission deadline is at 11:59 p.m. of the stated deadline date Anywhere on Earth.

________________

CALL FOR PAPERS
________________

ACM Multimedia Asia 2021 invites the submission of research papers presenting novel theoretical and algorithmic solutions addressing problems across the domain of multimedia and related applications. The conference also encourages visionary papers on new and emerging topics; papers presenting novel ideas with promising (preliminary) results in realizing these ideas; application-oriented papers that make innovative technical contributions to social good, healthcare, etc.  The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Multimedia and Vision
- Multimodal Analysis and Description
- Deep Learning for Multimedia
- Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia
- Multimedia Search and Recommendation
- Social Multimedia
- Multimedia HCI and Quality of Experience
- Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture
- Music and Audio Processing in Multimedia
- Mobile Multimedia
- Multimedia Systems
- Multimedia Transport and Delivery
- Multimedia for Collaboration in Education
- Multimedia Virtual/Augmented Reality
- Multimedia for Social Goods
- Multimedia for HealthCare

____________________________

HIGHLIGHTS OF ACMMM ASIA 2021
____________________________

- Multimedia for Social Good: ACMMM ASIA2021 recognises high-quality research that showcases the benefit to the general public. The conference brings to the audience practices that are beneficial for the environment, health, aged care, and overall society.
- Inspirations from Collaborations: ACMMM ASIA2021 encourages novel ideas from industry and government partners to identify emerging topics in real-world applications.
- Empowering Women in Technology: ACMMM ASIA2021 focuses on providing networking and learning environment for female researchers in multimedia community at different stages of their careers.
- Twin-City (Gold Coast / Shen Zhen) PhD School: The joint PhD School targets at providing PhD students and ECRs a platform to talk with senior researchers and establish their social networks.

__________________________________

Conference venue: GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
__________________________________

Located within walking distance of Southport’s cutting-edge Health and Knowledge Precinct---including the Gold Coast University Hospital---our world-class Gold Coast campus is home to 21,000 students. As our largest campus, teaching and research span almost all study areas, with a strong focus on medicine, dentistry and health. Centrally based and just minutes from world-famous beaches, you’ll be able to enjoy a vibrant, enviable student lifestyle, with more than 80 student clubs to explore as well as a variety of sporting and fitness amenities, on-campus services, retail outlets, and cafes.

__________________________________

GENERAL, PROGRAM, AND LOCAL CHAIRS
__________________________________

- General Chairs
Chang Wen Chen, SUNY at Buffalo
Helen Huang, The University of Queensland Jun Zhou, Griffith University

- Program Chairs
Tatsuya Harada, The University of Tokyo
Jianfei Cai, Monash University
Wu Liu, JD AI Research
Dong Xu, The University of Sydney

- Local Chairs
Sen Wang, The University of Queensland
Tony Chen, The University of Queensland

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2nd International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS II) 2021

Theme: Articulation and Prosody: Between Interface and Integration

Date: 2-4 December 2021, Sonderborg, Denmark

The links between articulation and prosody are a subject of growing interest. It is driven, among other things, by increasingly powerful measurement, analysis and recording techniques, by the discovery of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures in prosody and the simultaneous undermining of strictly linear-segmental models in articulation, as well as the by rapid rise of speech technology and the associated increasing relevance of the emotions, speaking styles, attitudes, social hierarchies, social-role marking, etc. But, how far have we really come in understanding the links between articulation and prosody?

The 2nd International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS II) will be a forum to discuss these questions. Reflecting the development of the articulation-prosody research and continuing the successful concept of the first SEFOS, SEFOS II shall again be a strongly interdisciplinary event. We therefore cordially invite not only all members of the speech-science community to take part in SEFOS II, but also interested members from related fields such as general linguistics, medicine, audiology, psychology, rhetoric, pedagogy, language/speech technology and engineering sciences.

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the organizing committee decided to conduct the conference in the form of a HYBRID CONFERENCE combining a live in person event with a virtual component.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Prof. Dr. Cécile Fougeron
Directrice de Recherche
Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie
CNRS-Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Paris, France

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Birkholz
Chair of Speech Technology and Cognitive Systems
Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication
TU Dresden
Dresden, Germany

IMPORTANT DATES:

01 Aug 2021: Full paper submission deadline (will NOT be extended!) 
05 Sep 2021: Notification of acceptance (revised papers can be submitted until after the conference)
03 Oct 2021: Early bird registration deadline 
02-04 Dec 2021: SEFOS II conference 
27 Feb 2022:  Deadline for the resubmission of revised full papers 

NOTE THAT SEFOS II has teamed up with the proceedings branch of deGruyter, 'Sciendo', to publish widely visible (open access) article-length proceedings papers OF UP TO 15 PAGES (ABOUT 10,000 WORDS)

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE SEE: https://my.eventbuizz.com/event/2--international-seminar-on-the-foundation-of-speech-8992/detail

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1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI) 2021

Date: 6-9 December 2021, Sonderborg, Denmark

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 Second Call for contributions

GdR LIFT (the Research Group on Computational Linguistics, Field Linguistics and Formal
Linguistics) presents a two-day meeting to bring together computational linguists,
applied linguists and formal linguists, in order to develop and improve exchanges between
these fields.
A theme is put on the spotlight for this year's gathering: negation.

We invite researchers to present their work by submitting an extended abstract (2 pages
maximum + unlimited references, using the provided template). Selected abstracts will be
presented with either an oral or a poster presentation and will published in the
meeting's proceedings.

# Important dates

- Abstract submission deadline: October 1st, 2021.
- Acceptance notification: November 1st, 2021.
- Camera ready deadline: November 15th, 2021.
- Conference date: December 6th-7th, 2021.

# Topics

Any topic of LIFT, including the following non-exhaustive list:

- machine learning and linguistic modelling;
- linguistics and open science;
- formal and computational linguistic modelling (formal languages, unification grammars,
etc.);
- computational approaches to the analysis of low-resource and/or unwritten languages;
- opinion pieces;
- feedback about the use or development of computational tools for linguistics;
- contolled language.

We want to encourage this year submissions related to negation in computational
linguistics, field linguistics or formal linguistics, but this theme is not a constraint.


The presentation of alreary published work as well as in-progress work is welcome.
The meeting mainly aims at fostering discussions and initiating potential collaborations.

# Format

Submissions should be 2-page pdf files (without counting the bibliography) following the
Latex or Word template available
at:https://gdr-lift.loria.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/LIFT_styles_2021.zip

The submissions should be uploaded at:https://lift2021.sciencesconf.org/

# Venue:

The LIFT scientific meeting will take place at the ground floor of the IMAG building on
Grenoble Alpes University campus.

In case an in-person meeting is impossible due to the pandemic, the meeting will take
place virtually.

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A S R U 2021 C a r t a g e n a

December 13rd - 17th

IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop

The IEEE ASRU Workshop is a biennial flagship event of the IEEE Speech

and Language Processing Technical Committee.

The workshop will be held on December 13-17, 2021. Since the global

situation is still uncertain and given the slow vaccination progress

worldwide, it is likely that the workshop will be virtual. We are making

several efforts to make it in-person, but we depend on external

unpredictable factors. In any case appropriate and timely information

will be published in the website and widely distributed using all

possible ways. Even if the workshop is virtual, we hope that sometime

soon we will be able to welcome you all in Cartagena.

Topics

All papers related to automatic speech recognition and understanding

are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Automatic speech recognition

ASR in adverse enviroments

New applications of ASR

Speech-to-speech translation

Spoken document retrieval

Speaker/Language recognition

Speech emotion recognition

Methods and models leveraging

multi-lingual resources

Spoken language understanding

Spoken dialog systems

Text-to-speech systems

Important dates

Paper submission opens: May. 7, 2021

Regular & Challenge paper submission (abstract): Jun 25, 2021

Regular & Challenge paper submission (final paper): Jul 2, 2021

Paper reviews returned: Aug. 18, 2021

Author response due: Aug. 25, 2021

Paper acceptance notification: Sep. 10, 2021

Author registration due: Oct. 8, 2021

Early registration due: Oct. 15, 2021

Demo submission due: Oct. 15, 2021

Demo selection notification: Oct. 29, 2021

ASRU Workshop: Dec. 13-17, 2021

Submission details

Authors are invited to prepare papers of 4-6 pages of content and

figures, plus up to 2 pages containing only references, to the ASRU

2021 website: www.asru2021.org

This is the link to download the paper submission kit:

https://asru2021.org/calls-for-papers/

Organizing Committee

General Chair:

Elmar Nöth

General Co-Chair:

Juan Rafael Orozco Arroyave

Technical Program Chairs:

Carlos Busso, Ville Hautamäki, Kate Knill, Helen

Meng, Michael Picheny, Bhuvana Ramabhadran,

Dayana Ribas, Korbinian Riedhammer, Isabel

Trancoso

Panel and Invited Speaker Chairs:

Sebastian Möller, Odette Scharenborg

Challenge, Special Session & Demonstration Chairs:

Heidi Christensen, Jesús Francisco Vargas-Bonilla,

Juan Camilo Vásquez Correa

Finance Chairs:

Sofía Aristizabal, Mauricio Correa

Publication Chair:

Tobias Bocklet

Satellite Workshop Chairs:

Carlos Ariel Ferrer, Heidi Christensen, María

Claudia González Rátiva

Publicity Chairs:

Julie Mauclair, Daniela Castaño

SLTC Liaison:

Antonio Texeira

International Liaison:

Sadaoki Furui, Hynek Hermansky, Aline

Villavicencio

Sponsorship Chairs:

Jimmy Kunzmann, Mathew Magimai Doss, Richard

Stern

Local Arrangement Chairs:

Daniela Castaño, Mauricio Correa, Andrea

Peñaloza

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Call for Participation: The Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC9)

Website: https://sites.google.com/dstc.community/dstc9/home
 Background
 

The DSTC shared tasks have provided common testbeds for the dialog research community since 2013. From its sixth edition, it has been rebranded as 'Dialog System Technology Challenge' to cover a wider variety of dialog related problems.

 For this year's challenge, we opened the call for track proposals and selected the following four parallel tracks by peer-reviews:
 - Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access (Amazon Alexa AI): This track aims to allow users to have requests that are out of the scope of APIs/DB but potentially available in external knowledge sources. Track participants will develop task-oriented dialogue systems to understand relevant domain knowledge, and generate system responses with the relevant selected knowledge. In addition, the track includes evaluation on generalization over unseen domains and modalities (i.e. moving from written to spoken conversations).
 - Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialog Challenge II (Microsoft Research AI & Tsinghua University): This track follows its success in DSTC-8 continuing with the effort of building dialog systems under a multi-domain setting. This time extending the task by incorporating new datasets, creating new sub-tasks, and providing a new development platform. The new task specifically focuses on two aspects of dialog systems: language portability and end-to-end system complexity. 
 
- Interactive Evaluation of Dialog (CMU & USC): This track targets the creation of systems that can be effectively used in interactive settings by real users. The task is intended to move research beyond datasets, and evaluate models in interactive environments with real users allowing several valuable properties of dialog to be measured: consistency, adaptiveness and user-centric development. DialPort, a platform for interactive assessment with real users will be used for evaluation. 
 
- SIMMC: Situated Interactive Multi-Modal Conversational AI (Facebook Assistant & Facebook AI): This track aims to tackle grounding dialog in an evolving multi-modal contextual input. Unlike previous multimodal track challenges, where the context from the non-textual modalities (video and audio) remains unchanged as the dialog progresses, this track encompasses a rich, situated multi-modal user context in the form of a shared image or VR environment that evolves fluidly based on the dialog flow.
 Participation is welcomed from any research team (academic, corporate, non-profit, government).
 Important Dates
 

- Jun 15, 2020: Training data is released

- Sep 21, 2020: Test data is released

- Oct 5, 2020: Entry submission deadline
- Nov 2020: Paper submission deadline
- Spring 2021: DSTC9 workshop (venue: TBD)
 DSTC9 Organizing Committee
 

- Chulaka Gunasekara - IBM Research AI, USA

- Abhinav Rastogi - Google Research, USA
- Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen - National Taiwan University, Taiwan 
- Luis Fernando D'Haro - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Seokhwan Kim - Amazon Alexa AI, USA
 DSTC9 Track Organizers
Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access 
- Seokhwan Kim, Mihail Eric, Behnam Hedayatnia, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-tur (Amazon Alexa AI)
 Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialog Challenge II 
- Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Jinchao Li, Lars Liden, Minlie Huang, Qi Zhu, Runze Liang, Ryuichi Takanobu, Shahin Shayandeh, Swadheen Shukla, Zheng Zhang (Microsoft Research AI & Tsinghua University)
 Interactive Evaluation of Dialog 
- Shikib Mehri, Carla Gordon, David Traum, Maxine Eskenazi (CMU & USC)
SIMMC: Situated Interactive Multi-Modal Conversational AI 
- Ahmad Beirami, Eunjoon (EJ) Cho, Paul A. Crook, Ankita De, Alborz Geramifard, Satwik Kottur, Seungwhan Moon, Shivani Poddar, Rajen Subba (Facebook Assistant & Facebook AI)
 DSTC Steering Committee

- 

 Koichiro Yoshino - Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan 
- Chiori Hori - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), USA 
- Rafael E. Banchs - Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore 
- Michel Galley - Microsoft Research AI, USA
 Contact Information
 Join the DSTC mailing list to get the latest updates about DSTC9:
- To join the mailing list: visit https://groups.google.com/a/dstc.community/forum/#!forum/list/join
- To post a message: send your message to list@dstc.community
- To leave the mailing list: visit https://groups.google.com/a/dstc.community/forum/#!forum/list/unsubscribe
 For specific enquiries about DSTC9: Please feel free to contact dstc9-organizing-committee@dstc.community

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 We are pleased to announce the 'II Brazilian Prosody Conference', supported by the Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences, to be held in March, 2022, totally online. The event aims to create a space for training and research on Experimental Prosody and its interfaces for students and professionals whose work involves speech, voice, singing, speech communication technologies, speech pathologies, sound production and perception, oral communication, vocal aesthetic, acoustics, language teaching and other related areas.

To better organize the conference and allow the participation of as many people as possible, we created a form that can be accessed through the links below in Portuguese, English and Spanish.
The form is simple and straightforward, so it might take less than 5 minutes to complete.
https://forms.office.com/r/BHB6qrzW7c
We would really appreciate it if you could get back to us till May 25th, 2021. 

Thank you very much in advance for your kind collaboration.

Organizing committee
Cristiane Conceição Silva (UFSC) - President
Leila Rechenberg (UFRGS) - Vice-president
Maryualê Malvessi Mittmann (Univali) - Secretary
André Nogueira Xavier (UFPR) - Treasurer

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 JEP2022 - 34e Journées d'Études sur la Parole
1er Appel à Communication
**13-17 Juin 2022**, Noirmoutier, France.
[site web en préparation]

Pour recevoir toutes les informations, inscrivez-vous à la liste de
diffusion dédiée :
http://sympa.univ-nantes.fr/sympa/subscribe/infos-jep2022

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Les 34e Journées d'Études sur la Parole (JEP2022) seront organisées
**sur l'île de Noirmoutier (France) du 13 au 17 Juin 2022**, en
présentiel (nous y croyons) et sous un format résidentiel (conférence,
activités sociales, hébergement et repas sur un même lieu).

Les Journées d?Études sur la Parole (JEP) réunissent depuis près de
cinquante ans une centaine de chercheurs de la communauté francophone
en sciences et technologies de la parole venant de différents horizons
scientifiques : linguistique et phonétique, informatique, ingénierie,
technologie, médecine, psychologie, didactique, physique,
neurosciences... Ces Journées visent à diffuser des travaux de
recherche originaux et à activer des échanges entre chercheurs
confirmés et jeunes chercheurs dans ce domaine. Elles ont une vocation
internationale, voulant réunir la communauté francophone au-delà du
territoire français. Pour cette édition, un coloriage thématique sera
proposé sans évidemment exclure les thèmes récurrents accueillis aux
JEP :

    'Parole, Geste, Musique : des unités à leur organisation'.

Nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir les conférenciers invités suivants
(liste non exhaustive en cours d'élaboration):

- Christophe d'Alessandro (CNRS, UMR 7190 - Institut Jean le Rond
  d'Alembert)
- Marion Blondel (CNRS, UMR 7023 - Structures Formelles du Langage)
- Barbara Tillman (CNRS, UMR 5292 - Centre de Recherches en
  Neurosciences de Lyon)

Placée sous les auspices de l'AFCP (Association Francophone de la
Communication Parlée, http://www.afcp-parole.org), l'organisation de
la 34e édition des JEP est portée par le Laboratoire de Linguistique
de Nantes (LLING - Université de Nantes / CNRS, UMR 6310) avec le
support de l'équipe EXPRESSION de l'IRISA (UMR 6074) et de l'équipe
LST (_Language and Speech Technology_) du Laboratoire d'Informatique
de l'Université du Mans (LIUM, EA 4023).


**Thématiques**

Les communications porteront sur la communication parlée et le
traitement de la parole dans leurs différents aspects. Les thèmes de
la conférence incluent, de façon non limitative :

Acoustique de la parole -- Acquisition de la parole et du langage --
Analyse, codage et compression de la parole -- Applications à
composantes orales (dialogue, indexation, etc) -- Apprentissage d'une
langue seconde -- Communication multimodale -- Dialectologie --
Évaluation, corpus et ressources -- Langues en danger -- Modèles de
langage -- Parole audio-visuelle -- Pathologies de la parole --
Phonétique et phonologie -- Phonétique clinique -- Production /
Perception de la parole -- Prosodie -- Psycholinguistique --
Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole -- Reconnaissance de la
langue -- Reconnaissance du locuteur -- Signaux sociaux,
sociophonétique -- Synthèse de la parole...



**Dates importantes**

* La date limite de soumission des propositions de communication sous
  forme d'articles complets pour la conférence est fixée au
  **20/01/2022** avec une semaine de délai supplémentaire pour
  finaliser le texte de la version soumise ;
* Notification aux auteurs : **21/03/2022** ;
* La date limite de soumission des propositions d'atelier est fixée au
  **30/11/2021** (un appel séparé sera diffusé) ;
* La conférence se tiendra du **Lundi 13 au Vendredi 17 Juin 2022**
  (ateliers la journée du Lundi 13 Juin), avec possibilité d'accueil
  le Dimanche 12 Juin en fin de journée ;


L'île de Noirmoutier et le centre de conférences sont facilement et
régulièrement desservis par les transports publics (autocar) depuis la
gare SNCF de Nantes et l'aéroport Nantes Atlantique.


**Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs en Parole**

Les doctorants intéressés par l'organisation d'une 1/2 journée ou
journée dédiée aux étudiants dans le cadre de ces JEP (**RJCP -
Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs en Parole**) sont invités à manifester
leur intérêt en nous écrivant à l'adresse jep2022@univ-nantes.fr.


**Contacts**

Le comité d'organisation est présidé par Olivier Crouzet et Elisabeth
Delais-Roussarie.

Adresse électronique de contact : jep2022@univ-nantes.fr

Liste de diffusion dédiée :
http://sympa.univ-nantes.fr/sympa/subscribe/infos-jep2022

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LREC 2022 - 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
Palais du Pharo - Marseille (France)
June 20-25, 2022

Main Conference: June 21-22-23,  2022
Workshops and Tutorials: June 20-24-25, 2022

Conference web site: https://lrec2022.lrec-conf.org/

Twitter: @LREC2022

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 13th edition of LREC, organised with the support of national and international organisations. We hope to be able to organise a face-to-face conference, otherwise an online or hybrid alternative will be set up.

CONFERENCE AIMS
LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Language Technologies (LT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, on-going and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect to both scientific/technological issues as well as policy and organisational ones.
LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss issues and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.


TRACKS FOR SUBMISSION
LREC 2022 invites the submission of papers on original and unpublished research covering all aspects of LRs & Evaluation of LTs, within natural language processing and computational linguistics. The following (in alphabetical order) are the relevant tracks for the conference:

- Applications involving LRs and Evaluation (including applications in specific domains)
- Corpora and Annotation (including Tools, Systems, Treebanks)
- Dialogue, Conversational Systems, Chatbots, Human-Robot Interaction
- Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
- Discourse and Pragmatics
- Evaluation and Validation Methodologies
- Information Extraction and Information Retrieval (including NER, QA, Text Mining,  Document Classification, Text Categorisation)
- Knowledge Discovery/Representation (including Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data, Terminology, Ontologies)
- Language Resources and Evaluation for Psycho-linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Theories
- Language Resource Infrastructures, Standards for LRs, Metadata, Policy issues, Ethics, Legal Issues
- Less-Resourced/Endangered Languages
- Lexicons (also WordNet, FrameNet, Multimodal and Sign Language lexicons, etc.)
- Multilinguality and Machine Translation (including Speech-to-Speech translation)
- Multimodality and Cross-modality  (including Sign Languages, Vision and other modalities) and Multimedia
- Natural Language Generation (including Summarization)
- Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Recognition/Generation
- Parsing, Tagging, Grammar, Syntax, Morphology
- Reproduction of Research Results in Science and Technology of Language
- Semantics (including Distributional Semantics, Word Sense Disambiguation, Coreference, etc.)
- Social Media Processing
- Speech Resources and Processing (including  Phonetic Databases, Phonology, Prosody)
- Statistical Methods and Machine Learning for Language Technologies (including Language Models)

LREC2022 HOT TOPICS

• Multilingualism and Language Technology for All
• Language Resources for Emergency Needs
• Machine Learning and Multimodality

DESCRIBE AND SHARE YOUR LRs!
In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map - now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences - LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community.
When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. After LREC, such Language Resources will be made available to the community within the share-LRs repository set-up by ELRA, in compliance with the licenses indicated by right-holders. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral,  poster and demo presentations in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.

An Industrial Track to report on state of the art within industry and commercial achievements, for which there will be a separate Call, will also be organized

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

• Main Conference Submission of oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 10 January 2022

Submission Site: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2022/main

LREC2020 asks for full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more pages for references if needed), which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet which will be available on the conference website.

• Workshops and tutorials proposals submission:

The submission deadline for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals is extended to November 5, 2021 (23:59 GMT+1).

Both links to the Workshop and Tutorial submission pages remain:

    https://lrec2022.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2022/submit-workshop/
    https://lrec2022.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2022/submit-your-tutorial-proposal/


PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.
There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication to the content of the paper will be considered.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari - CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Frédéric Béchet ?- LIS-CNRS, Aix Marseille University - France
Philippe Blache - LPL-CNRS & Aix-Marseille University - France
Khalid Choukri  - ELRA, Paris - France
Christopher Cieri - Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA - USA
Thierry Declerck - DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Hitoshi Isahara - Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi - Japan
Bente Maegaard  - Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani  - LISN, CNRS, University Paris-Saclay, Orsay - France
Jan Odijk  - UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis - Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece

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

Contact: lrec@lrec-conf.org

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1er Appel TALN 2022 / RECITAL 2022 à Avignon du 27 juin au 1er juillet 2022


Le LIA et le LIS organisent du 27 juin au 1er juillet 2022 sur le campus
Hannah Arendt d'Avignon Université la 29ème édition de la conférence sur le
Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN) et la 24ème Rencontre des
Étudiants Chercheurs en Informatique pour le Traitement Automatique des
Langues (RÉCITAL).

Après une période sanitaire qui a fortement limité les échanges, cette édition
aura pour objectif majeur de réunir la communauté du TALN en présentiel.

Tout en conservant un niveau d'exigence scientifique conséquent, cette édition
continuera la politique de ces dernières années qui consiste, en plus de la
sélection de publications scientifiques francophones originales, à offrir la
possibilité de soumettre des versions traduites d'articles scientifiques
publiés très récemment dans des conférences majeures anglophones ou en cours
de soumissions dans une conférence anglophones.

Plus de détails seront bientôt donnés dans le prochain appel.

En attendant, prenez date !

Les dates importantes :

- Soumission des articles longs et courts : 18 février 2022

- Notification aux auteurs : 8 avril 2022

- Date de la conférence  : 27 juin au 1er juillet 2022 à Avignon

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Le Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF) est la plus grande manifestation biennale consacrée à l’étude scientifique de la langue française. Les propositions de communication se font sous forme d’articles (10 pages minimum, 15 pages maximum) incluant une bibliographie. La gestion des propositions, leur répartition entre comités thématiques et au sein des comités thématiques s'effectue via la plateforme https://www.sciencesconf.org/ L'évaluation est assurée par des experts au moyen d'une grille unifiée et après anonymisation des soumissions. Les communications retenues, sous réserve de leur présentation effective en conférence, sont publiées en version intégrale dans les actes dès l’ouverture du colloque par edp sciences http://www.edpsciences.org à l’adresse www.linguistiquefrancaise.org

Toutes les informations se trouvent dans l'appel à communication que nous vous invitons à consulter.

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The ICMR Steering Committee invites interested parties to submit proposals to
host and organize the 13th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval,
ICMR2023 (sponsored by the ACM SIGMM). ACM ICMR is the premier
scientific conference for multimedia retrieval.  Its mission is
to provide a forum to discuss,  promote and advance the
state-of-the-arts in multimedia retrieval by bringing together
researchers and practitioners in its related field. It is thus essential
to ensure that the conference includes sessions for presenting high-quality
research papers and for sharing practitioner experience.  The list of
previous ICMRs is at http://www.acmicmr.org/.
We expect ICMR2023 to be held in Europe.

Parties interested in hosting ICMR2023 are invited to submit  their
proposals (20 pages or less) by Friday, 26 February 2021 by email with
the subject line: ICMR2023 to the steering committee chair.
The details of CFP is at http://acmicmr.org/icmr2023.cfo.final.pdf.

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