The Paris Graduate School of Linguistics (PGSL) is a newly-formed Paris-area graduate program covering all areas of language science.

It offers a comprehensive Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research, in close connection with PhD programs as well as with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics consortium. 

Research plays a central part in the program, and students also take elective courses to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Prior knowledge of French is not required.

For more details, please see https://paris-gsl.org/index.html

New funding opportunity: https://u-paris.fr/en/call-for-applications-international-students-miem-scholarship-program/

 Application deadline : February 1st 2021 (program starting September 1st 2021)

PGSL is funded by Smarts-UP (Student-centered iMproved, Active Research-based Training Strategy at Université de Paris) through the ANR SFRI grant « Grandes universités de recherche » (PIA3) 2020-2029.

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Dans le cadre du projet européen ELE (European Language Equality), qui vise à créer une
feuille de route pour atteindre une égalité linguistique numérique totale en Europe d'ici
2030,  une enquête détaillée concernant le support technologique pour plus de 70 langues
européennes est en cours de réalisation.

Notre contribution porte spécifiquement sur la langue française, et les autres langues
d'Europe, officielles ou non, seront traitées par d'autres groupes, avec un recensement
distinct des ressources.

Si vous fournissez des outils, services ou collections de données linguistiques liés à la
langue française, nous vous serions donc extrêmement reconnaissants de consacrer quelques
minutes à nous aider à identifier un maximum de ressources linguistiques pour le
français. Notez qu'un certain nombre d'enquêtes similaires sont actuellement en cours
pour les autres langues européennes.

Pour ce faire, le plus simple sera de nous signaler par retour de courrier les ressources
produites dans vos équipes que vous souhaitez voir figurer dans cet inventaire, en nous
fournissant par exemple un lien vers une page Web documentant la ou les ressources. Merci
de prendre soin de vérifier au préalable que la ressource n'est pas déjà connue
(https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French).

Nous sommes intéressés par toutes les ressources et technologies linguistiques qui
existent actuellement et sont opérationnelles, quelle que soit la politique d'accès,
telles que:
- les corpus : collections de segments de texte ou de documents bruts ou annotés,
monolingues ou bi-/multilingues, mono- ou multimodaux, transcriptions audio, scripts,
enregistrements audio et vidéo, etc. ainsi que les corpus d'apprenants et les corpus de
langue des signes.
- des descriptions linguistiques, comprenant des modèles de langage et des grammaires
computationnelles
- ressources lexicales/conceptuelles, comprenant des lexiques informatiques, des bases de
données terminologiques, des répertoires, des ontologies, des listes de termes, des
thésaurus, etc.
- des outils et services : services offerts via le web, d'autres réseaux ou fonctionnant
dans le cloud, mais aussi outils téléchargeables, code source, etc. Il s'agit notamment
d'outils de base pour le français (analyseurs morphologiques, tagueurs POS, lemmatiseurs,
analyseurs syntaxiques, etc.), d'outils d'aide à la rédaction (par exemple, correcteurs
d'orthographe, de grammaire et de style), d'outils/services pour la
recherche/extraction/fouille d'informations, l'analyse de texte et de parole, la
traduction automatique, la compréhension et la génération de langue naturelle, les
technologies vocales, les systèmes conversationnels, etc.

Notez que dans le cadre de cette collecte, un certain nombre de ressources répertoriées
dans des catalogues publiquement accessibles ont déja été répertoriées et peuvent être
retrouvées dans le catalogue ELG:
https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French

*Il n'est donc pas nécessaire de les documenter à nouveau.*

Vous trouverez de plus amples informations sur le projet à l'adresse suivante :
https://european-language-equality.eu/.

Si vous avez des questions concernant cette enquête, merci de nous contacter directement.

Merci beaucoup

Gilles Adda, Ioana Vasilescu et François Yvon
LISN, CNRS

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-------
 The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021 enhanced at NeurIPS 2021'
-------
 

 Dear colleagues,
 
We are pleased to officially announce the second round of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, on spoken language modelling, which will take the form of a competition at NeurIPS. While the benchmark remains the same, this enhanced edition of the challenge introduces some twists, including a new, optional, TRACK 2 on visually grounded spoken language modelling.
 
We invite:
 
- New approaches to spoken language models, particularly, but not limited to, larger ('higher-budget') language models
- Systems exploring the utility of weak supervision with images or videos (Track 2)
- Further, substantive development of existing systems doing spoken language modelling, including major modifications to or improvements upon systems submitted in the first, Interspeech round of the challenge
 
For more detailed information, please see the ZeroSpeech 2021 website:
 
https://zerospeech.com/2021/
 
We are also in the planning stages of a NeurIPS workshop on the general theme of unsupervised and semi-supervised speech, which will be an excellent venue to submit detailed reports on your systems. While the workshop submission deadline has yet to be announced, we expect that it will be in mid-October.
 
For groups wishing a little extra time to improve their systems after the workshop deadline, the *final* competition submission deadline to be considered for inclusion in the presentation of the results at NeurIPS has been set for November 19th.
 
Please get in touch with us if you have questions or comments about this continuation of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, and we look forward to seeing the results!
 
Best,
The Zero Resource Speech Challenge Organizers
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Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval - Community Evaluation Effort for MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) on Covid-19

******* ROUND II *******
Call for Participation in the Second Evaluation Round: Runs due by 15 September-15 October 2021

• Website: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/
• Registration: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/registration/
• Twitter: @covid19mlia
• Email: info@covid19-mlia.eu

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

Overall Description

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval organizes a community evaluation effort aimed at accelerating the creation of resources and tools for improved MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) in the current emergency situation with a reference to a general public use case:
?Sofia has heard that a drug has been experimented in different countries and she would like to have a consolidated and trustworthy view of the main findings, whether the drug is effective or not, and whether there are any adverse effects?.
Distillation for the general public also implies a level of specialist-non-specialist communication, when the aggregated sources contain both disseminative and specialised sources. Therefore, the general public would need to understand medical expertise by using their correspondent in the 'everyday ' language or by using an appropriately calibrated language for the communication to be effective.
Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval adopts an incremental and iterative evaluation methodology to enable the release of intermediate (but functional) resources and to progressively (iteration-after-iteration) move towards finally consolidated tools and resources. We plan for three rounds, tentatively one and half-month long each.

Each round consists of the following phases:

• data release
• submission of participants? runs
• ground-truth creation (when needed)
• scoring of participants? runs
• writing of the rolling technical report
• round wrap virtual meeting

An integral part of the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval approach is the sharing of information and ideas among the participants. This happens via the rolling technical report where participants describe their solutions as the evaluation rounds progress and the virtual meetings at the end of each round where participants briefly present the main highlights of what worked and what did not work and interactively discuss together in order to share ideas and improve for the next round.

Moreover, to facilitate the exchange of resources and components and to jointly work together for improving MLIA technologies for Covid-19, participants are provided with a dedicated git repository where to push and share the outcomes of your participation in the different rounds, i.e. runs, code, (language) resources, and a technical report. To facilitate sharing and re-use, all the contents of the repositories are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Tasks

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval offered the following tasks for its first round and will continue for this second round:

• Information Extraction
• Multilingual Semantic Search
• Machine Translation

We offer tasks in the following languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Swedish.

Registration for the tasks is open at: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/registration/

Important Dates -  Second Round

- Registration Opens: 14 June 2021
- Second Round Starts: 21 June 2021 (data release)
- Submission of Runs: 15 September - 15 October 2021 (depending on task)
- Submission of Technical Report: 19 November 2021
- Round II Wrap-up Virtual Meeting: 30 November-2 December 2021 (exact date TBD)
- Second Round Ends: 2 December 2021

More detailed dates are provided on the Web pages dedicated to each specific task, since the internal scheduling of each task may differ slightly to better match the task design.

Organizers

Overall

Khalid Choukri, ELDA, France
Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy

Data Acquisition and Engineering

Miltos Deligiannis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Marwa Hadj Salah, ELDA, France
Guillaume Jacquet, JRC, Italy
Vassilis Papavassiliou, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Stelios Piperidis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Prokopis Prokopidis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece

Information Extraction

Cyril Grouin, LISN, France
Thierry Declerck, DFKI, Germany
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LISN, France

Multilingual Semantic Search

Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy
Maria Eskevich, CLARIN ERIC

Machine Translation

Francisco Casacuberta, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Miguel Domingo, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Mercedes García-Martínez, Pangeanic, Spain
Manuel Herranz, Pangeanic, Spain

Supporters

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval is an evaluation effort promoted by several communities which are closely working together.

• European Commission
• European Language Resources Coordination (ELRC)
• European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
• European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology (CLARIN)
• CLEF Initiative

We hope that other communities will join us in this shared effort. You are very welcome!

Any question? Please email us at  info@covid19-mlia.eu.

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Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval)

MediaEval 2021 Registration Now Open

https://multimediaeval.github.io

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

The Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval) offers challenges in the form of shared tasks. The goal of MediaEval is to develop and evaluate new algorithms and technologies for multimedia retrieval, analysis and exploration. MediaEval tasks are innovative, involving multiple modalities, (e.g., images, video, music, user interaction data, sensor data, lifelogging data) and focusing on the human and social aspects of multimedia. Our larger aim is to promote reproducible research that makes multimedia a positive force for society.

MediaEval 2021 Tasks:

Driving Road Safety Forward: Video Data Privacy

Emerging News: Detecting emerging stories from social media and news feeds

Emotional Mario: A Games Analytics Challenge

Emotions and Themes in Music

FakeNews: Corona Virus and Conspiracies Multimedia Analysis Task

Insight for Wellbeing: Cross-Data Analytics for (transboundary) Haze Prediction

Medico: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation

NewsImages: The relation between images and text in news articles

Predicting Media Memorability

Sports Video: Fine Grained Action Detection and Classification of Table Tennis Strokes from videos

Visual Sentiment Analysis: A Natural Disaster Use-case

WaterMM: Water Quality in Social Multimedia

For details of the tasks and information on how to register visit: https://multimediaeval.github.io/editions/2021/

Tasks will start to release data at the end of July and continue through August. Submissions will be due in early November. The MediaEval 2021 Workshop is a hybrid workshop that will take place in Bergen, Norway 6-8 December 2021 and also provide an opportunity for online participation. 

For more information see https://multimediaeval.github.io or contact Martha Larson m.larson at cs.ru.nl or Steven Hicks steven@simula.no

On behalf on the MediaEval organization team, Gabi Constantin Researcher at: Personal page: http://gconstantin.aimultimedialab.ro/ AI Multimedia Lab: https://www.aimultimedialab.ro/ CAMPUS Research Center: http://www.campus.pub.ro/ University Politehnica of Bucharest https://upb.ro/en/

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Chère/cher collègue,

? La mise en place et à la gestion d?un espace dédié aux projets de la communauté sur le site web de l?AFCP.
? La création de la page dédiée à votre projet dans cet espace.
? La mise à jour de cette page, à votre demande.
? La diffusion de ces informations sur les différents médias sociaux de l?AFCP.
? La publication d?une présentation de ces projets dans les actes des conférences organisées par l?AFCP.

Les formalités et instructions de soumissions seront précisées ci-dessous.
Pour plus de détails, vous pouvez nous contacter par courriel (vitrine@afcp- parole.org).

Pour les laboratoires français, si vous souhaitez financer ce service sur votre subvention d?état, n?oubliez pas que la date limite des bons de commande pour ce service est à la fin de ce mois d?octobre.

Nous vous remercions très chaleureusement de l?intérêt que vous avez pu accorder à ce message et  et comptons sur votre participation.

Pour l?AFCP, sa présidente
Martine Adda-Decker

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

Afin de faire apparaître votre projet dans la vitrine 'Projets à la Une', il suffit de remplir le formulaire en ligne:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj2i0hP8tUU3vF2mGDD2KAkGwPH8sp1h-yiqmMZUK7NBk2-Q/viewform?usp=pp_url

Vous pouvez également envoyer les informations demandées par le formulaire par courriel à vitrine@afcp-parole.org

Afin de nous permettre de vous envoyer le devis, veuillez pré-remplir les champs vous concernant dans le formulaire du devis ci-joint:

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

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Cambridge's Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence MPhil

Are you interested in speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, human-computer interaction, or machine learning? Please consider applying to the University of Cambridge?s Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence (MLMI) MPhil programme. 

The MLMI MPhil is an elite 11 month programme with a small cohort of about 30 students each year. Due to its small size there is the opportunity to carry out PhD-like research projects on the course (see here for previous students? dissertations), as well having a number of bespoke taught modules with lots of opportunities to interact with the faculty and other members of the course (see here for a list of modules and here for a list of the teaching staff).

Previous members of the MPhil have gone on to study for PhDs in top research groups (e.g. at Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, and MIT), and have gone into top industry positions (e.g. Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, Open AI, and AstraZeneca).

This year our programme is restructuring around four overlapping tracks: speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. You apply to one of these tracks and this choice shapes your module options and the research project that you will take on. We are especially interested in candidates who are interested in speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, and human-computer interaction as we have significant capacity to expand in these areas this year.

Details about the application process can be found on our website. The application deadline is 2nd December 2021.

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ELDA: the OpenSLR European mirror

In November 2021, ELDA opened the European mirror of the Open Speech and Language Resources (OpenSLR) repository which hosts

speech and language resources, such as training corpora for speech recognition, and software related to speech recognition.

As of today, this repository comprises 113 resources representing almost 2 terabytes of data and covering a large number of languages,

including low-resourced languages.

All resources are easily downloadable from OpenSLR. Licenses however may differ from one resource to another and should be checked

carefully prior to use. The legal team at ELDA is available to assist users through the Helpdesk.

Resources can also be uploaded onto OpenSLR. Details are provided in the Contribute section.

OpenSLR is an initiative from the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing.

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APOLLO Fearless Steps: A Community Resource for Massive Naturalistic Communications

TIMELINE:Challenge Start Date (Train/Dev Data Release): February 1^st, 2022

Evaluation Data Release: March 7^th, 2022

Evaluation Portal Open (Data Release): March 10^th, 2022

INTERSPEECH-2022 Paper submission deadline: March 28^th, 2022

Open Challenge Duration: from February 1^st, 2022, to September 15^th, 2022

Challenge Tasks in Phase-4 (FS#4):

1. Speech Activity Detection (SAD)

2. Speaker Recognition:

2a. Track 1: Speaker Identification (SID)

2b. Track 2: Speaker Verification (SV)

3. Speaker Diarization (SD):

3a. Track 1: Diarization using reference SAD

3b. Track 2: Diarization using system SAD

4. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR):

4a. Track 1: ASR using reference Diarization

4b. Track 2: Continuous stream ASR

5. Topic Identification:

5a. Track 1: Topic Detection

5b. Track 2: Topic Segmentation

For Challenge Registration, please contact: FearlessSteps@utdallas.edu

Website Link: https://fearless-steps.github.io/ChallengePhase4/

Background

We are pleased to announce the APOLLO Fearless Steps Special Sessionto be held at INTERSPEECH-2022. The focus of this Special Session is to provide a forum for researchers working on the massive naturalistic audio collection stemming from the NASA Apollo Missions. UTDallas-CRSS under NSF support has led the Fearless Steps Initiative, a continued effort spanning eight years has resulted in the digitization, and recovery of over 50,000 hours of original analog audio data, as well as the development of algorithms to extract meaningful information from this naturalistic data resource, including an initial release of pipeline diarization meta-data for all 30 channels of APOLLO-11 and APOLLO-13 Missions. More than 500 sites worldwide have accessed the initial data. A current NSF Community Resource project is continuing this effort to recover the remaining Apollo missions (A7-A17; estimated to be 150,000hrs of data) in addition to motivating collaborative speech and language technology research through the Fearless Steps Challenge series.

We invite all researchers to submit papers to this special session which use Fearless Steps speech data as a data set for their research. In addition, this special session is also connected with the next phase of the Fearless Steps Challenge (FS-4) to be held from Feb. 1 to Sept. 15, 2022. Any team worldwide can participate and submit their output scoring summaries with a leaderboard being updated regularly (see Fearless Steps FS-4 Challenge logistics below). If your organization, university, team wishes to submit a specific solution on FS-4 for Interspeech-2022, we welcome you to do this as well and submit your paper to this Special Session. A major goal of this Special Session is to allow for researchers to discuss and provide feedback on how they have used this public data resource, and how ongoing efforts can make this data more useful for the speech technology/psychology-team research/history-STEM education communities.

Organizers

John H.L. Hansen (john.hansen@utdallas.edu)

Christopher Ceiri (ccieri@ldc.upenn.edu)

Jim Horan (jim.horan@nist.gov)

Aditya Joglekar (aditya.joglekar@utdallas.edu)

Midia Yousefi (midia.yousefi@utdallas.edu)

Meena Chandra Shekar (meena.chandrashekar@utdallas.edu)

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