Call for Papers
IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on

Deep Learning for High Dimensional Sensing

Important Dates

• Manuscript submissions due: October 15, 2021
• First review completed: November 30, 2021
• Revised manuscript due: January 15, 2022
• Second review completed: February 28, 2022
• Final manuscript due: April 15, 2022
• Publication: June 2022

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Call for Papers

Applied Sciences (IF: 2.474)

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/

Special Issue on Applications of Speech and Language Technologies in Healthcare

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/speech_language_technologies_healthcare

Speech and language technologies (SLTs) have experienced a major boom in recent years and commercial speech-enabled systems are becoming ubiquitous. Unfortunately, people with speech and language impairments often face barriers to using these technologies leading to an increasing gap between SLTs available to the general public and those accessible to people with speech impairments. Other applications of SLTs include assistive communication devices for people with speech impairments, speech-based diagnosis of certain voice and respiratory pathologies (e.g., dysphonia, vocal fold nodules, COVID-19, etc.) and, even, certain neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer?s or Parkinson?s disease. In addition, new communication interfaces with great potential are emerging, such as silent speech interfaces.

In this Special Issue, we attempt to collect relevant contributions in the development of SLTs focused on improving the integration of people with speech impairments in society, as well as for the detection and monitoring of pathologies or diseases. We also intend to attract studies on the development of applications for voice professionals in the clinical field.

We cordially invite you to participate in this special issue by submitting your recent work on the field. Relevant research topics include, but are not limited to:

• Speech and language technologies for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC);

• Silent speech interfaces;

• Voice conversion (VC) and text-to-speech (TTS) assistive communication systems;

• Automatic speech recognition for people with speech impairments;

• Diagnosis and monitoring of voice disorders and other respiratory diseases;

• Speech-based diagnosis and assessment of neurological disorders;

• Personalization of speech tools for people with speech impairments;

• Voice banking initiatives;

• Tools and software for speech therapists and clinicians.

Submission instructions

Manuscripts should be submitted online atwww.mdpi.com byregistering andlogging in to this website. Once you are registered,click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website.

Important dates:

• Submission opens: January 1, 2021

• Submission deadline: July 31, 2021

Guest editors:

• Inma Hernáez Rioja (inma.hernaez@ehu.eus), University of the Basque Country, Spain
• Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez (joseangl@ugr.es), University of Granada, Spain
• Heidi Christensen (heidi.christensen@sheffield.ac.uk), University of Sheffield, U.K.

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La revue TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues) vous invite à soumettre une contribution, en français ou en anglais, au numéro spécial 62(3) sur le thème de *la diversité linguistique en TAL*.
https://tal-62-3.sciencesconf.org/

APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS

Bien que la linguistique informatique porte en elle la promesse d'outils aidant au traitement et à la compréhension d'une multitude de langues, la majorité des travaux en TAL porte encore sur un petit nombre de langues, et en particulier sur l'anglais. L'objectif de ce numéro spécial est de promouvoir la diversité linguistique en TAL en encourageant la présentation de travaux portant sur des langues ou variantes de langues moins souvent traitées, ainsi que sur des méthodes qui peuvent être aisément appliquées à celles-ci.

Les défis rencontrés vont de la faible disponibilité de ressources pour le développement et l'estimation de modèles, aux difficultés de gérer des morphologies ou syntaxes plus complexes, en passant par le challenge que présente la publication de ces travaux.

Pour ce numéro thématique, la revue TAL (https://www.atala.org/revuetal) encourage les contributions (en français ou en anglais) décrivant par exemple :

des méthodes nouvelles avec une application démontrée à des langues, dialectes ou variantes moins souvent traitées ;
des applications nouvelles de techniques et modèles, même déjà publiées, sur de nouvelles langues ou variantes, en en identifiant clairement les défis ;
des modèles de phénomènes linguistiques qui ne sont pas ou peu présents en anglais ou dans les langues les plus couramment traitées, ainsi que des méthodes ou outils les mettant en ?uvre ;
la production ou le portage de ressources pour des langues moins souvent traitées.

Nous encourageons aussi la soumission de contributions sur le traitement de textes multilingues, par exemple la traduction automatique ou l'apprentissage de représentations multilingues ou translinguistiques, lorsque les langues à l'étude sont peu traitées.

Les auteurs souhaitant soumettre à ce numéro spécial sont fortement encouragés à identifier clairement les langues sur lesquelles portent leurs travaux, ainsi que les défis spécifiques aux langues étudiées.
Site et soumission : https://tal-62-3.sciencesconf.org/

Date limite de soumission : 30 juin 2021
 
Rédacteurs en chef invités :
Aarne Ranta (U. Gothenburg)
Cyril Goutte (CNRC, Canada)

Relecteurs invités (en cours de finalisation) :
Francis Tyers (Indiana U.)
Laurent Besacier (Naver Labs)
Laurette Pretorius (U. South Africa)
Leila Kosseim (U. Concordia, Montréal)
Marie-Odile Junker (Carleton U.)
Marine Carpuat (U. Maryland, College Park)
Mathieu Mangeot (U. Grenoble)
Mona Diab (George Washinton U.)
Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Bombay)
Trond Trosterud (U. Tromsø)
Wanjiku Nganga (U. Nairobi)
Yannick Parmentier (U. Lorraine)
Yves Scherrer (U. Helsinki)
https://www.atala.org/content/comité-de-rédaction-0

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

• LT platforms: architectures and approaches (including commercial and non-commercial; national and international; domain-specific and general purpose; all countries, regions and continents)
• LT platform interoperability: standards, APIs, workflows, as well as the exchange of services, models, data and metadata
• Data and metadata exchange formats and harvesting (including taxonomies, ontologies and other forms of semantic descriptions of repository records)
• Operational and legal policies as well as governance structures for LT platforms (GDPR, data management, licensing, user authentication and authorisation, billing, business models, ethical considerations)
• Means by which one can address the problem and challenge of accessing language data and LT software that is not entirely free to use.
• (Cloud-based) containerisation and virtualisation technologies for LT platforms
• Training, re-training, (up/down)scaling and adaptation of models; connecting data sets, tools and machine learning frameworks
• LT platforms and challenges regarding the availability of CPU/GPU resources, practical issues in load balancing, bandwidth (re)allocation and regulation, power consumption 
• From (general or domain-specific) AI platforms and (general or domain-specific) LT platforms and back again
• Community-related aspects of LT platforms

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The Special Issue ?Prosody and Interfaces? welcomes contributions on the interaction between prosody and other grammar components (e.g., morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics), focusing on the Portuguese language. Besides aiming at gathering the papers presented at Symposia 7 and 2 of the I International Congress Voices and Writings in the Different Spaces of the Portuguese Language, organized by the Postgraduate Program in Vernacular Letters (PPGLEV) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in November 2020 (http://congressoppglev.letras.ufrj.br/congress/), this special issue is broadly open to other (unpublished) related research papers.

Potential themes/topics of this special issue include but are not limited to the following: 

- prosodic similarities/differences across Portuguese varieties;

- prosodic properties of Portuguese in contact with other languages;

- prosodic properties of Portuguese as second language;

- prosody and the expression of emotions;

- visual prosody;

- the prosody of signed languages;

- the role of prosody for the linguistic processing (of spoken or written modalities);

- perception of prosody;

- ?

We encourage the submission of  papers using experimental methods, targeting a broad reader, and envisaging the application to other research areas, such as first/second language learning, computational linguistics, speech therapy, among others.

Paper preparation guidelines:

Papers must conform to the format defined in D.E.L.T.A. guidelines. Please ***use the journal?s template file***, attached to this message. Before submitting your paper, make sure it strictly follows all the journal requirements, which can be checked at the journal?s website (https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/delta/about/submissions).

The main text, written in English, should have up to 8000words and be preceded by an abstract of around 100 words in English and Portuguese, and 3-5 keywords, also in both languages. Please ensure that your paper is proofread by a native English speaker before submission.

Paper submission procedure:

Papers must be submitted in .doc/.docx format, by sending an e-mail to the guest editors: prosody.interfaces@gmail.com

Since papers will undergo a blind peer review process, please make sure that your file is anonymous and that it does not contain any revealing information on its authorship (e.g., the section devoted to the Acknowledgements, if any, should be left incomplete). 

Important dates:

Submission deadline: ***November 15, 2021***

Notification acceptance: until February 28, 2022

Submission of a revised version: March 31, 2022

Contact:

For any question related with the submission procedure to this special issue, please contact us at prosody.interfaces@gmail.com

Looking forward to your submissions,

The Guest Editors

Carolina Serra (UFRJ, Brazil), Flaviane Svartman (USP, Brazil) and Marisa Cruz (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

---

Marisa Cruz

Investigadora | Researcher

Membro da Equipa Editorial do Journal of Portuguese Linguistics | Associate Editor of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

Laboratório de Fonética e Fonologia & Lisbon BabyLab (CLUL/FLUL)

Phonetics and Phonology Lab & Lisbon BabyLab (CLUL/FLUL)
http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/English/marisa_cruz.htm

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa | School of Arts and Humanities

Alameda da Universidade 1600-214 Lisboa PORTUGAL

Telefone: 217 920 000 | www.letras.ulisboa.pt | http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/babylab/

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Special Issue title:

Advances in Phonetic Sciences: Role of Speech Corpora and Automatic Processing

Guest Editors:

Prof. Dr. Ioana Vasilescu

LISN/CNRS, UMR 9015, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France

Interests: large scale corpora; phonetic variation; language change

Dr. Yaru Wu

1. CRISCO/EA4255, Université de Caen Normandie, 14000 Caen, France

2. LISN/CNRS, UMR 9015, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France

3. Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, UMR 7018, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 75005 Paris, France.

Interests: large corpora phonetics; variation in continuous speech; second language acquisition

Dr. Mathilde Hutin

LISN/CNRS, UMR 9015, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France

Interests: phonetic variation in large scale corpora; fine phonetic details; phonology of romance languages

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a Special Issue on ?Advances in Phonetic Sciences: The role of Speech Corpora and Automatic Processing?.

This Special Issue aims to bring together recent research on advances in speech corpora and to better comprehend the current status and challenges in the construction and analysis of spoken corpora.

During the past few decades, we have witnessed an increasing collaboration between linguistics and speech technology communities (Bradlow et al., 2011; Ernestus and Warner, 2011; Coleman et al., 2011). For instance, on the linguistic side, this collaboration has resulted mainly in an increasing integration of methods, tools and corpora from speech technologies into the analytical practices of linguistic domains such as phonetics and laboratory phonology. In particular, the automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large collections of spoken data are impacting phonetic sciences. These analyses have allowed us to test classical theoretical issues from a different perspective, and they have greatly facilitated the work of linguists (Liberman, 2019). On the speech technology side, in-depth explorations of speech reduction phenomena helped to improve pronunciation dictionaries for speech recognition systems (Adda-Decker and Lamel, 2018; Vasilescu et al., 2018).

In this Special Issue, we would like to address different demands and interactions between linguistics (with a particular focus on phonetics and laboratory phonology research) and computer science. We also aim to provide a state of the art on corpus construction and publication, technological processing of corpora, ecological use of corpora gathered for a specific purpose by other scholars and data sharing in general, and benefits for real-world applications of advances in speech corpus construction and analysis.  Special emphasis will be placed on the relevance of multidisciplinarity in spoken data creation, analysis and sharing, and on collaborations among different research disciplines. We welcome submissions on advances in speech corpus covering technological and/or linguistic aspects.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400?600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors (ioana.vasilescu@lisn.upsaclay.fr, yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr, mathilde.hutin@lisn.upsaclay.fr) or to the Languages Editorial Office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

* Abstract submission deadline: 15 November 2021

* Notification of abstract acceptance: 15 December 2021

* Full manuscript deadline: 15 April 2022

List of references:

Adda-Decker, M., & Lamel, L. (2018). 4. Discovering speech reductions across speaking styles and languages. In Rethinking Reduction. De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 101?128

Bradlow, A. R., Guion-Anderson, S., & Polka, L. (2011). Cross-language Speech Perception and Variations in Linguistics Experience. C. T. Best (Ed.). Elsevier.

Coleman, J., Liberman, M., Kochanski, G., Burnard, L., & Yuan, J. (2011). Mining a year of speech. VLSP 2011: New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research, 16?19.

Ernestus, M., & Warner, N. (2011). An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants. Journal of Phonetics, 39(SI), 253?260.

Liberman, M. Y. (2019). Corpus phonetics. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 91?107.

Vasilescu, I., Wu, Y., Jatteau, A., Adda-Decker, M., & Lamel, L. (2020). Alternances de voisement et processus de lénition et de fortition: une étude automatisée de grands corpus en cinq langues romanes. Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL), 3, pp. 11?36

Prof. Dr. Ioana Vasilescu

Dr. Yaru Wu

Dr. Mathilde Hutin

Guest Editors

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The speaker's mask: a transdisciplinary interrogator of the complexity of speech

Call for papers

At the time of this call, the current health crisis still requires the world population to wear face masks designed to protect each individual from droplets and aerosols received or projected during breathing, speaking or singing. Several publications attest to the effectiveness of approved masks in this protection, which varies according to the material of the equipment and its duration of use. However, the study of these devices is also a matter for the human sciences. In particular, the language sciences are not left out in the study of the effects of the mask on the wearer's ability to be heard (Giovanelli et al. 2021) and intelligible (Palmiero et al. 2016), regardless of the communication situation or speech style (Cohn et al. 2021). Speech acoustics (Magee et al. 2020), phonetics, discourse analysis (Onipede 2021), modeling, recognition (Kodali et al. 2021), and psycholinguistics can, for example, be convened by such research regarding a current universal everyday concern. Although several publications have recently appeared in this field, many ways remain to be explored for this transdisciplinary subject.

In this volume, we propose to pursue the reflection ay least through the following thematic reflections:

• Speech perception: How does hiding the lower part of the face alter the receiver’s perception of the message produced by the emitter, and how does the latter adapt to this communicational change?

• Spoken articulation: How does the articulatory discomfort experienced by the masked speaker alter the management of speech production? Does it depend on the segmental and prosodic composition of the speech, on the speaking style or on the communication situation, or even on the representation that the speaker makes of the discomfort caused by the mask to his/her interlocutor?

• Voice: What are the effects of wearing a mask on the produced, perceived and felt timbre of the spoken, declaimed or sung voice, in an ecological situation (artistic for example, or in a training context)?

• Modeling and recognition of speech: What modeling and recognition of a 'masked speech signal' are possible? • Transmission of speech: What are the issues in terms of acquisition and education related to wearing a face mask? (Early childhood, schooling, native and foreign languages, teaching, etc.)

• Discourse analysis: What are the discourses produced in terms of behavior and reaction, emotions and affects, feelings and proprioception, nonverbal communication and aesthetics as a result of wearing the mask? Does wearing the mask (and subsequently dropping it) have any impact (positive or negative) on the speaker's self-esteem and confidence in front of a group? • Clinical phonetics and linguistics: What links can exist between pathologies of the areas covered by the mask and its use? Can the use of the mask cause significant alterations? What are the adaptations to be made when wearing the mask with respect to voice, speech or communication pathologies? Is wearing a mask linked to an increase in vocal fatigue in speakers who have to practice a profession that requires oral expression in front of a large audience?

• Engineering: How can knowledge of the effects of the mask on spoken communication be useful to designers of new devices that are better suited to the communication situation and/or the particularities of the target speakers? In this respect, this volume aims to bring together current research on the issues and effects of wearing a mask as they can be studied from the point of view of the various components of the language sciences (linguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, clinical phonetics and linguistics, didactics, sociolinguistics) and their implementation in certain communication contexts (speech therapy, psychology, artistic disciplines, etc.). These reflections, in their theoretical aspect, will contribute to the systemic analyses of oral communication, by providing, for example, data to enlighten the mechanisms of compensation, reorganization of voice, speech or discourse to this multi-effect, external disrupter (Vaxelaire et al. 2007) of language and oral communication systems. The examples of themes proposed above aim, by their diversity, to have the reader perceive the width of the epistemological span targeted by this volume of contributions. Other topics may of course be considered, provided that the research questions involved do question the impact of wearing a mask on the functioning of language and thus contribute, in a transdisciplinary approach, to develop knowledge about the latter. From an application point of view, it is hoped that the contributions collected can contribute to optimizing strategies to overcome the disturbances resulting from wearing the mask. Coordinators Claire Pillot-Loiseau, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France Bernard Harmegnies, Université de Mons, Mons, Belgique Languages of publication: French, English

Author guidelines : https://revistes.uab.cat/languesparole/languesparole/languesparole/about/submissions

Timeline: May 30, 2022: deadline for submission of article proposals to be sent to: r.langues.parole@uab.cat, claire.pillot@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr, Bernard.HARMEGNIES@umons.ac.be

End of 2022: print and online publication of the issue Appel à contributions – Call for papers – Langue(s) & Parole, n°7, 2022 : le masque du locuteur 5

References

Cohn, M., Pycha, A., & Zellou, G. (2021). Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, clear, and emotional speech. Cognition, 210, 1-5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104570

Giovanelli, E., Valzolgher, C., Gessa, E., Todeschini, M., & Pavani, F. (2021). Unmasking the Difficulty of Listening to Talkers With Masks: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. i-Perception, 12(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669521998393

Kodali, R. K., & Dhanekula, R. (2021). Face Mask Detection Using Deep Learning. In 2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

Magee, M., Lewis, C., Noffs, G., Reece, H., Chan, J. C., Zaga, C. J., ... & Vogel, A. P. (2020). Effects of face masks on acoustic analysis and speech perception: Implications for peri-pandemic protocols. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(6), 3562-3568.

Onipede, F. M. (2021). Nigerians' Reactions towards COVID-19 Pandemic Health Precautions: A Pragma-Semiotic Analysis, International Review of Social Sciences Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 1- 24.

Palmiero, A. J., Symons, D., Morgan III, J. W., & Shaffer, R. E. (2016). Speech intelligibility assessment of protective facemasks and air-purifying respirators. Journal of occupational and environmental hygiene, 13(12), 960-968.

Vaxelaire, B., Sock, R., Kleiber, G., Marsac, F. (2007). Perturbations et Réajustements. Langue et langage, Publications de l'Université Marc Bloch - Strasbourg 2.

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