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ISCApad #321 |
| Sunday, March 09, 2025 by Chris Wellekens |
| 2-1 | Message from ISCA by Odette Scharenborg, President
Dear ISCA members, ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2025 It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the ISCA Board, I announce that the ISCA Medalist for Scientific Achievement 2025 is:
Prof. Dr. Roger K. Moore - ' For contributions to spoken language based interaction and uncovering its underlying mechanisms.' The ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement has been established in 1989, and recognizes and honors an individual each year who has made extraordinary contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. The ISCA Medal will be presented to Prof. dr. Roger K. Moore by the ISCA President at the Interspeech opening ceremony in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where Roger will deliver a keynote speech. Upcoming elections of the ISCA board The ISCA Board has 15 members. Members are elected to the ISCA Board for four years, and no member may serve for more than two consecutive terms. This year, nine members will be elected for the 2025-2029 term. The deadline for nominations is March 15. Please be aware that ISCA board members must have a strong commitment to the management of ISCA, including attendance at meetings, voting on many motions, and taking on roles such as conference organization and technical activities. The details and the nomination form are available on the webpage: https://www.isca-speech.org/Elections. Stay tuned for more great news in the April Newsletter! Odette Scharenborg President of the International Speech Communication Association
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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 | 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 | 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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| 2-11 | 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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| 2-12 | Call for Reviewers Interspeech 2025 Dear colleague, The submission deadline for Interspeech 2025 has passed (February 12) with a new record of submitted papers —nearly 2,700! To maintain our high reviewing standards, ensuring three independent reviews per paper, we need another ~300 reviewers. We are asking you for your help in recruiting these additional reviewers! If you or colleagues in your network are not yet reviewers and are eligible, please sign up! The eligibility criteria can be found at: If you meet the criteria, we encourage you to apply as soon as possible by following the instructions on the page. Please feel free to forward this email to your network—we truly appreciate your support in strengthening the Interspeech community. Many thanks in advance, and we hope to see you at Interspeech 2025!
Best regards, Odette Scharenborg General Chair Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
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| 2-13 | Call for Bids for Interspeech 2029 Bids for Interspeech 2029 ISCA now invites bids for hosting Interspeech 2029. Interspeech conferences include papers on all the scientific and technological aspects of Speech. More than 1,500 participants from all over the world attend the conference annually to present their work in oral and poster sessions. Several satellite workshops and a Scientific and Industrial Exhibition highly enrich the conference content.Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur on the same continent in two consecutive years. After this year's Interspeech conference in Rotterdam, the next conferences will be held in Sydney, Australia in 2026, Sao Paolo, Brazil in 2027, and San Antonio, TX, USA in 2028.In order to prepare the bid, please contact the ISCA conference coordinators at conferences@isca-speech.org well in advance of the deadline in order to prepare a high-quality bid. Each bid needs to include: • the bidding and budget template
• a detailed description of the bid
• other material which might be necessary for evaluating the bid The deadline for submitting a bid is November 1, 2025.
Guidelines on how to prepare an Interspeech conference can be found here.
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| 2-14 | Passing of Ian MaddiesonPassing of Ian MaddiesonWe are saddened to learn from Caroline Smith that her husband Ian Maddieson(link is external) died on Sunday, February 2. Ian was Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading phoneticians, whose ground-breaking books Patterns of Sounds and The Sounds of the World's Languages (with Peter Ladefoged) shaped contemporary linguistic phonetics.
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| 2-15 | Notre collègue Danielle Duez nous a quitté. C’est avec beaucoup de tristesse que nous vous informons de la disparition notre collègue Danielle Duez, survenue le mercredi 26 février.
Danielle avait fait toute sa carrière de chercheure au sein du Laboratoire Parole et Langage et était restée très proche des recherches de son équipe durant ses années d’éméritat à partir de 2009. Après 20 années passées en tant que professeure dans l’enseignement secondaire, Danielle était entrée au CNRS en 1987 en tant que Chargée de Recherche. C’est durant ces années dans l’enseignement secondaire qu’elle avait réalisé sa thèse (1978) puis son doctorat d’état (1987). Elle avait ensuite été promue Directrice de Recherche en 2001 et avait demandé son éméritat lors de son départ à la retraite en 2009.
Les 15 premières années de ses recherches ont été consacrées à l’analyse acoustique et phonétique des styles de parole, à une période où peu de travaux se focalisaient sur cette thématique. Elle a ainsi organisé Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech en 1998, première conférence consacrée à l’étude de la parole spontanée. Danielle était particulièrement intéressée par l’organisation temporelle des différents styles de parole. Ses travaux sur la durée des pauses et la relation locuteur/auditeur font d’elle l’une des premières à s’être intéressée aux interactions langagières. Alors que de nombreux projets allaient désormais s’orienter sur cette thématique, Danielle s’est ensuite consacrée à l’étude de la phonétique clinique, initiant, là encore, des travaux visant à caractériser la parole pathologique à la lumière des méthodologies de la phonétique expérimentale. Ses travaux ont ainsi apporté de nombreux éclairages sur la production de la parole dans la maladie de Parkinson, notamment sur la production spécifique des consonnes occlusives et sur la durée des pauses.
Danielle avait cette intuition d’aller chercher des terrains d’études peu occupés et particulièrement novateurs, puis de passer à autre chose lorsque la communauté s’en emparait. Ses réorientations thématiques n’obéissaient pas à une stratégie. Elle restait fidèle à ses objets descriptifs (organisation temporelle segmentale et suprasegmentale) et les exportait vers de nouvelles questions, loin des courants dominants...
Par un curieux hasard (qui deviendra un clin d’œil affectueux), il se trouve que nous avons évoqué ses travaux lors de notre dernier séminaire, quelques minutes avant d’apprendre sa disparition...
Toutes nos pensées vont à ses proches.
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