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ISCApad #318 |
| Wednesday, December 11, 2024 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, President of ISCA
Dear ISCA members,
2024 is almost at an end. Within ISCA, this year, we started several new initiatives that we hope to finalise and show to you in the coming months. These include the logo competition (we saw some good designs!) to celebrate 25 years of Interspeech, a new format for our newsletter to go with our new website, a new medal scheme, and a life-time membership. For now, we wish you a relaxing end of the year 2024 and a great start of the year 2025! I hope you have many wonderful memories of 2024, and look back with happiness on the great things you have accomplished.
Membership fees With the increasing number of members over the years, ISCA needed to professionalise. We have made great steps with
to name a few things. To ensure the sustainability of our services and a long-term, financially healthy future of ISCA, and after getting positive feedback from both the IAC and during the General Assembly in Kos, the ISCA board has decided to increase the membership fees, for the first time in around 20 years. This increase also takes into account the wider financial context, e.g., inflation.
The new membership fees are:
The changes will be implemented on our website in December 2024 and will be effective from January 1, 2025.
Want to stay updated regarding Interspeech 2025 Rotterdam news? In the next few months, everything you need to know about Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, travelling to the Netherlands and more will be shared through social media and the Interspeech 2025 website and newsletter. If you want to stay up to date, follow the Interspeech 2025 organisation team via:
Award nomination season is coming up The deadlines for the nominations for ISCA Fellows, Distinguished Lecturers and the ISCA Service Medal are coming up! I would like to invite you to nominate one (or more) of your esteemed colleagues for one of the ISCA honours. More information on the nomination procedure can be found at https://isca-speech.org/Honours. Deadlines:
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 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 SIG SLATE 'Speech and Language Technologies in Education' The aims of ISCA SIG 'Speech and Language Technologies in Education'
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| 2-6 | 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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| 2-7 | 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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| 2-8 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-9 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:
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| 2-10 | 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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| 2-11 | [Speech Prosody SIG] asking the SprSIG community to support free and fair open access
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| 2-12 | 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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| 2-13 | SProSIG Events Dear Speech Prosody members, I’m pleased to announce two upcoming events:
Details for both are in the ' Other Events' section
Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 nigel@utep.edu https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/
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