2nd Call for Papers

SIGUL 2023 Workshop

Co-located with Interspeech 2023

Dublin, Ireland, 18-20 August 2023

The 2nd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2023) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge research in text and speech processing for under-resourced languages by academic and industry researchers. SIGUL 2023 carries on the tradition of the SIGUL and the CCURL-SLTU (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages – Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008 and, as LREC Workshops, since 2014. As usual, this workshop will span the research interest areas of less-resourced, under-resourced, endangered, minority, and minoritized languages.

Special Features

This year, the workshop will be marked with three special events:

(1) Special Session in Celtic Language Technology (August 18)

SIGUL 2023 will provide a special session or forum for researchers interested in developing language technologies for Celtic languages.

(2) Joint Session with SlaTE 2023 (August 19)

SIGUL 2023 will have a joint session with The 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SlaTE 2023). The goal is to accelerate the development of spoken language technology for under-resourced languages through education.

(3) Social outing and dinner near Dublin (optional on August 20)

Invited Speakers

• Subhashish Panigrahi, O Foundation and Law for All Initiative: Reclaiming Our Voices - Imagining Community-Led Ai/Ml Practices

• Delyth Prys, Language Technologies Unit, Canolfan Bedwyr: TBA

Workshop Topics 

Following the long-standing series of previous meetings, the SIGUL venue will provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in natural language processing and spoken language processing for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Processing any under-resourced languages (covering less-resourced, under-resourced, endangered, minority, and minoritized languages)

• Cognitive and linguistic studies of under-resourced languages

• Fast resources acquisition: text and speech corpora, parallel texts, dictionaries, grammars, and language models

• Zero-resource speech technologies and self-supervised learning

• Cross-lingual and multilingual acoustic and lexical modeling

• Speech recognition and synthesis for under-resourced languages and dialects

• Machine translation and spoken dialogue systems

• Applications of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages

• Special topic: 

• Celtic language technology

• Spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages via education

We also welcome various typologies of papers:

• research papers;

• position papers for reflective considerations of methodological, best practice, institutional issues (e.g., ethics, data ownership, speakers’ community involvement, de-colonizing approaches);

• research posters for work-in-progress projects in the early stage of development or description of new resources;

• demo papers, and early-career/student papers, to be submitted as extended abstracts and presented as posters.

Instructions for Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit their contributions according to the following guidelines.

• Research and position papers: a maximum of 5 pages with the 5th page reserved exclusively for references.

• Demo papers, and early-career/student papers: a maximum of three pages with the 3rd page reserved for references. 

Both types of submissions must conform to the Interspeech format defined in the paper preparation guidelines as instructed in the author’s kit on the Interspeech webpage. Papers do not need to be anonymous. Authors must declare that their contributions are original and that they have not submitted their papers elsewhere for publication.

Important Dates

- Paper submission deadline: 28 May 2023

- Notification of acceptance: 2 July 2023 

- Camera-ready paper: 21 July 2023 

- Workshop date: 18-20 August 2023

Outline of the Program

SIGUL 2023 will continue the tradition of the previous SIGUL event that features a number of distinguished keynote speakers, technical oral and poster sessions, and panel discussions to discuss a better future for under-resourced languages and under-resourced communities. 

Full list of organizers SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)

Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

SIGUL 2023 Organizers

Kolawole Adebayo (ADAPT, Ireland)

Ailbhe Ní Chasaide (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

Brian Davis (ADAPT, Ireland)

John Judge (ADAPT, Ireland)

Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)

SIGUL 2023 Program Committee

Gilles Adda (LIMSI/IMMI-CNRS, France)

Manex Agirrezabal (University of Copenhagen – Center for Sprogteknologi | Center for Language Technology, Denmark)

Shyam S. Agrawal (KIIT, India)

Begona Altuna (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea | University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Steven Bird (Charles Darwin University, Australia)

Matt Coler (University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân, The Netherlands)

Pradip K. Das (IIT, India)

Iria De Dios Flores ( Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes, Spain)

A. Seza Doğruöz (Universiteit Gent, België | Ghent University, Belgium)

Stefano Ghazzali (Prifysgol Bangor | Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd) 

Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, USA)

Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC [Artificial Intelligence Research Center], AIST Tokyo Waterfront, Japan)

Laurent Kevers (Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli, France)

Teresa Lynn (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, United Arab Emirates)

Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France)

Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Espanya | Spain)

Win Pa Pa (UCS Yangon, Myanmar)

Delyth Prys (Prifysgol Bangor | Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd) 

Carlos Ramisch (Université Marseille, France)

Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italia | Italy)

Trond Trosterud (Norges Arktiske Universitet | The Arctic University of Norway)

Acknowledgments

SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The SIGUL 2023 workshop has been organized with the help of the local organizers of Interspeech 2023 and Slate 2023. This edition has been sponsored by Google and endorsed by Linguapax International. 

Contact

To contact the organizers, please mail sigul2023@ml.jaist.ac.jp (Subject: [SIGUL2023]).