Call for Papers

TAL Journal (Open Access), Special issue on 'Cross/multimodal NLP'

Submission deadline: 31 March 2022

Abstract submission deadline is removed. The only deadline is now the full paper submission deadline.

If possible, the authors are invited to let us know their intent to submit by email to tal-63-2@sciencesconf.org one week before the full paper submission deadline.

Website: https://tal-63-2.sciencesconf.org

Natural language is not limited to the written modality. It includes and interacts with many others. On the one hand, a message can be conveyed through other language modalities, including audio (speech), gestures and facial expressions (sign language or completed speech). It may also be accompanied by social attitudes and non-verbal dimensions, including signs of affect, spontaneity, pathology, co-adaptation with dialogue participants, etc. Natural language processing (NLP) is thus a joint processing of multiple information channels. On the other hand, natural language is often used to describe concepts and denote entities that are essentially multimodal (description of an image, an event, etc.). Many problems then require bridges between different modalities.

The objective of this special issue of the journal TAL is to promote NLP in multimodal contexts (several modalities contribute to the resolution of a problem) or inter-modal contexts (passage from one modality to another). Thus, the contributions expected for this special issue are, among others (but not exclusively), in the following fields of application:

• multimodal dialogue, multimodal question-answering ;
• sign language, completed spoken language ;
• speech processing, automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis in multimodal contexts;
• synthesis of animated emotional agents;
• handwriting recognition and analysis of handwritten documents;
• understanding, translation and summarisation of multimodal documents;
• indexing, search and mining of multimedia and/or multimodal documents;
• biological signal processing, computational psychology or sociology, for NLP;
• inter-/multimodal human-computer interface for NLP;
• other multimodal or inter-modal applications (automatic image captioning, image-to-text generation, generation/analysis of songs and lyrics, etc.).
  

• understanding the interactions between modalities;
• harmonisation or compatibility of representations;
• the development of joint models or transfer from one modality to another;
• the constitution (or even annotation) of multimodal resources;
• etc.
  
  

IMPORTANT DATES

• Full paper submission deadline: 31 March 2022
• Notification to authors, first review: 15 June 2022
• Notification to authors, second review: 15 September 2022
• Publication: November 2022

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. If all authors are French speakers, they are requested to submit their contributions in French.

FORMAT

Papers must be between 20 and 25 pages, references and appendices included (no length exemptions are possible). Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to click the menu item 'Paper submission' (PDF format).

To do so, they will need to have an account, or create it, on the sciencesconf platform (go to http://www.sciencesconf.org and click on 'create account' next to the 'Connect' button at the top of the page). To submit, come back to the page https://tal-63-2.sciencesconf.org/ , connect to the account and upload the submission.

From now on, TAL will perform double-blind review: it is thus necessary to anonymize the manuscript and the name of the pdf file.

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal (https://www.atala.org/content/instruction-authors-style-files-0)

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL, ?Natural Language Processing?) is an international journal published by ATALA (French Association for Natural Language Processing) since 1960 with the support of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic mode of publication, with printing on demand. This has no impact however on the reviewing and selection process.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Guest editors:

• Gwénolé Lecorvé (Orange)
• John D. Kelleher (TU Dublin)

Members (under development):

• Loïc Barrault (U. Le Mans)
• Marion Blondel (CNRS)
• Chloé Clavel (Telecom Paris)
• Camille Guinaudeau (U. Paris Saclay)
• Hervé Le Borgne (CEA)
• Damien Lolive (U. Rennes 1)
• Slim Ouni (U. Lorraine)