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ISCApad #315 |
| Friday, September 13, 2024 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, President of ISCA
Dear ISCA members, Dear ISCA members,
It’s been a week since Interspeech finished. I look back at a wonderful, fruitful, and science- and fun-filled Interspeech in Kos, Greece. This Interspeech was the 25th Interspeech. We celebrated this with videos of the leaders in our field and lots of photos from previous Interspeech conferences. I hope you enjoyed those!
I first want to thank Itshak Lapidot and Sharon Gannot, the two great General Chairs, and Jean-François Bonastre, Reinhold Häb-Umbach, and Luciana Ferrer, the three amazing TPC chairs, for organizing this great event with their team and PCO Ortra. They worked very hard to not only make this conference the success it was, but also while moving the conference to another country. Interspeech was also made possible by the many sponsors and exhibitors, thank you for supporting and being part of our great community! And of course a big thank you to the many reviewers of the 2000+ papers that were submitted to Interspeech. If you are not yet a reviewer, check the criteria and sign up here: https://www.isca-speech.org/Reviewing !
The more than 1800 participants got to enjoy
and several great social events including live music and a lot of dancing.
At Interspeech we celebrated the new ISCA Medalist for Scientific Achievement, seven new ISCA fellows, three best student paper awards, two best journal paper awards, one best poster award at the Young Female Researchers in Speech Science and Technology Workshop, one best Interspeech paper, and two best paper awards of the 4th Symposium on Security & Privacy in Speech Communication. Congratulations to all!
This year’s Interspeech hosted several special sessions which specifically aimed to bring together people from speech science and speech technology on a common topic. This allowed all attendees to learn from each other. Finally, we continue to focus on furthering the integration of people from minorities and geographically distant areas into our association. ISCA stands for inclusivity and respectful treatment of everyone by everyone.
On Monday September 2nd, we held our yearly General Assembly, where we presented our budget and all the things the board has been working on the past year, these include a new website and new rules for Distinguished Lecturer. We also have been working on two new exciting plans: a new ISCA award, to complement our current Fellows program and ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, and a life-time membership for our senior members. We’re also working on improving our support for ISCA workshops. Watch this space for updates in the months to come! We’ll continue to work on further professionalising the software supporting ISCA and our administrative staff, community building, strengthening of the ties with external associations and related research areas, and strengthening the speech science part in ISCA and at Interspeech.
Finally, I would like to thank our members of the ISCA Advisory Council who provides the ISCA board with their opinions and advice on many different topics during the meeting in Kos and throughout the year. And a big thank you to Chris Wellekens, who for so many years now, has dedicated some of his time to put together this ISCAPad every month.
Logo competition In honor of Interspeech's 25th anniversary, we are excited to launch a competition to design a new ISCA logo! Participants should design a logo that embodies ISCA, the home for speech science and technology researchers and innovators. Please take inspiration from ISCA’s mission: to promote activities and exchanges in speech communication science and technology. The logo should not only align with the expectations of ISCA’s existing members but also serve to attract a wider audience, ultimately representing speech and language science and technology. Find all the information you need here: https://isca-speech.org/Logo-Design-Competition Deadline: October 25, 2025
Volunteers Are you interested in supporting our great association with your time or expertise? Are you interested in building your CV? Are you interested in learning more about how ISCA and the ISCA board work and would you like to help out? That is great! Now that ISCA has grown so large, we could use your support! Please sign up by filling in the form on the ISCA home page: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckba3R1XSxnHYoB8yKGNcM84siurQSOD3qY8oGgPN6naejDw/viewform
ISCA Archive Did you know that our ISCA Archive hosts almost 40.000 papers from more than 360 workshops and conferences dating back all the way to 1987? The ISCA Archive moved to a new location: https://www.isca-archive.org and has several new features including the possibility of adding an erratum. Please check out the new website! A big thank you to Martin Cooke and Sebastien Le Maguer who have put in so much of their time and effort into making this great archive available to everyone!
We want to hear from you! Therefore, during this year’s Interspeech, we asked Interspeech participants to fill out a survey, in return for which they received cool blue ISCA sunglasses. Thank you everyone who filled out the survey! But we also want to hear from those ISCA members who were not there at Interspeech. What is it that you would like ISCA to do, to improve, not to do, to provide? What would you like to get out of your ISCA membership? Do you have any cool ideas or suggestions? Anything you would like to share with us, please contact us through communication@isca-speech.org.
ISCA Board elections Next year April, we will have new ISCA board elections. If you are interested in learning more about joining the ISCA board, please let us know! We are happy to talk to you.
Important dates
Odette Scharenborg ISCA president
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| 2-2 | ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer: Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan) Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy) Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)
SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH. Annual Meetings of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) were held successively: SIGUL2022 in Marseille (FR) on 24-25 June 2022 as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022, SIGUL 2023 in with ISCA as INTERSPEECH satellite workshop (https://sigul-2023.ilc.cnr.it/), SIGUL 2024 with ELRA as LREC-COLING workshop (https://sigul-2024.ilc.cnr.it/). The SIGUL venue provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP 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:
Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
SIGUL Board Sakriani Sakti Claudia Soria Maite Melero
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| 2-3 | ISCA Language SIGS ISCA supports speech communication research activities in various languages. The individual languages have equal interest, but they may involve have different technical or scientific problems. For example, some languages are tonal, while others are not; Some languages have only one writing system, while others have several. In the ISCA community, we have 6 language Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for Chinese, French, Italian, Iberian, Indian, and Russian. Each SIG is organised by researchers who speak the language of interest as L1 and others who have a technical or scientific interest in the language. Each SIG sponsors domestic and international research activities, and representative members of the SIGs attend a Lang SIG meeting every year during the INTERSPEECH conference. In this meeting, recent activities of each SIG are reported, and new ideas are exchanged. We also review what ISCA can do for the SIGs and what the SIGs can do for ISCA. Each SIG has its own web page, and you can visit the pages here. Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU The University of Tokyo Japan
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| 2-4 | ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG) 'Spoken Language Translation'
ISCA SIG “Spoken Language Translation” Aims. The SIG SLT covers all aspects of spoken language translation — simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas SIG SLT will (a) provide members of ISCA with a special interest in spoken language translation and its related areas with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in spoken language translation; (b) organize challenges and evaluation campaigns; (c) sponsor and organize the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), meetings, satellites, and tutorial workshops in spoken language translation, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and (d) make available open-source code and data resources, best practices and tools, and evaluation metrics relevant to spoken language translation.
Motivation. Recent interest in speech translation and simultaneous translation by machine has been growing explosively, due to continued performance advances and a growing international need for simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas. The under-covered elements in the current research are, for instance, incremental simultaneous speech-to-speech translation, paralinguistic translation, speaking style translation across languages. The proposed SIG will be organized by the members who are interested in spoken language translation/interpretation from various related areas such as ASR, TTS, and MT. SIG SLT emerged from over two decades of organizing the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) and its predecessor C-Star, scaling operations in response to significant growth in the field. The organizers of IWSLT and partners believe it is now time to join with ISCA by creating an ISCA SIG. IWSLT has a 15-year track record of profitability; it runs the premier benchmarking campaign on spoken language translation annually accompanied by an international scientific conference to present and discuss results.
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| 2-5 | ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA. ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) Annual Gathering aims to provide an opportunity for postdoc & early career researchers to meet and communicate at INTERSPEECH. In the framework of ISCA-PECRAC, we would like:
Contacts: Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)
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| 2-6 | ISCA social networks We encourage all members tokeep contact with ISCA via our social nets. Also you will bde kept informed about all events on our website. This is particularly important in this time where due to the coronavirus, many modifications may be brought to the conference.
ISCA Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/iscaspeech/ ISCA Twitter : https://twitter.com/ISCAFOX ISCA SAC Student Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/98794207409/ website : www.isca-speech.org
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| 2-7 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-8 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:
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| 2-9 | SProSIG News Dear SProSIG Members,
I’m pleased to share two conference announcements: - Tone and Intonation 2025 - Prosody of Uralic Languages 2025
Details follow.
Prosody of Uralic languages
Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso
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| 2-10 | [Speech Prosody SIG] asking the SprSIG community to support free and fair open access
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| 2-11 | Elected SProSig officers for 2024-2026 Dear SProSIG members,
The election of officers is now complete. Thank you for voting. Based on the results, SProSIG PAC has elected 5 officers for the term 2024-2026.
The new officers are; Plinio Barbosa Aoju Chen Martine Grice Jürgen Trouvain Nigel Ward (in alphabetical order)
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