Dear ISCA members,

New ISCA board members

Every two years, half of the ISCA board positions are up for election. This year we had nine open positions on the ISCA board. It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you the nine elected ISCA board members who will dedicate their time and energy to our great association for the next four years. Their term will start in August, during the General Assembly at Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The following seven ISCA members have been elected onto the ISCA board for their first term:

Luciana Ferrer, Computer Science Institute, UBA-CONICET, Argentina

Hung-yi Lee, National Taiwan University

Sakriani Sakti, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Sabato Marco Siniscalchi, University of Palermo, Italy

Berrak Sisman, Johns Hopkins University, US

Jennifer Williams, University of Southampton, UK

Helena Moniz, University of Lisbon, Portugal

The following two ISCA board members have been re-elected to the ISCA board:

Joakim Gustafson, KTH, Sweden

Ioana Vasilescu, LISN CNRS & University Paris-Saclay, France

I wish all new ISCA members good luck on the ISCA board!

Technical Program Committee Meeting in Delft, the Netherlands

On 7 and 8 May, the technical program committee meeting (TPC meeting) was held in Delft, the Netherlands. The Interspeech 2025 TPC and lead area chairs (ACs) from the various areas met for two days to discuss paper decisions and sessions amongst others. I sincerely want to thank

• all (lead) area chairs for their work in getting the reviews for all papers and carrying out the difficult task of paper decisions,

• all reviewers, your job is crucial,

• and particularly the Interspeech 2025 TPC for coordinating and carrying out the massive task of organising all aspects of the technical program of Interspeech 2025.

The decisions for acceptance or rejection have since been sent out. Interspeech 2025 has an acceptance rate of 49.87%, with the highest number of papers (1163) ever to be presented at Interspeech. For those of you whose paper are rejected: I hope you will consider improving your paper based on the reviews and perhaps try again next year or elsewhere. For those whose papers were accepted: congratulations!

Interspeech-related news

Registration is open

Registration for Interspeech 2025 is open: https://www.interspeech2025.org/registration

If you are an ISCA member, please have your ISCA e-mail address and ISCA membership ID ready because you will need both to verify your ISCA membership. The ISCA membership ID can be found on your personal page at http://www.isca-speech.org -> login. Please note that due to the change of ISCA database to WildApricot, your old ISCA membership number is no longer valid.

If you have an accepted paper, please have the paper IDs ready.

Paper coverage

Each accepted paper must be covered by at least one of its co-authors with a full, student, or retired registration (can be at a “light” rate). Participants registering as student or retired will be able to cover two papers for presentation and publication, and participants with a full registration can cover a maximum of four papers.

Preliminary programme

Preliminary programme will be available at the end of June.

ISCA Travel Grants for Interspeech 2025!

We are excited to welcome the student and young researcher community working in speech science and technology across the globe to attend the upcoming Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Last year we implemented a new travel grant scheme. We moved from a fixed travel grant amount scheme to a variable travel grant scheme. This is motivated by the thought to help students from underrepresented areas with higher grant amounts. There are 3 different grant amounts based on the country of affiliation of the grantee: 

• 500 euros for grantees whose affiliation is from the same continent as where Interspeech is organized. 

• 1000 euros for grantees whose affiliation is from other continents. 

• 2500 euros for grantees whose affiliation is from under-represented countries in South America and Africa.

Students and young researchers who have an accepted paper(s) at Interspeech 2025 can apply for an ISCA Travel Grant through https://services.isca-speech.org/iscagrants/admin.php.

More information can be found through https://isca-speech.org/Grants and at the Interspeech 2025 website: https://www.interspeech2025.org/travel-grants. Please note that the deadline is June 6.

See you all in Rotterdam, the Netherlands!

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA President

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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:

• general research on under-resourced languages.

• transfer-learning techniques for under-resourced languages (zero-shot, few-shot training);

• unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to build applications for under-resourced languages;

• use of multilingual pre-trained language models to under-resourced languages;

• speech technologies for under-resourced languages.   

• Also position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues are welcome.

 Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
will take place in February 2025. 

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero

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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.
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/sigs

Do you want to start a new language SIG? If so, please visit the page above and check what you have to prepare for your SIG. Although it is not yet announced, we’re going to launch a new language SIG in the near future, perhaps for your native language. If so, please support it!.

Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU

The University of Tokyo

Japan

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The aims of ISCA SIG 'Speech and Language Technologies in Education'
 (SLaTE) are to promote interest in the use of speech and natural
 language processing for education, and to provide a platform to
 exchange ideas, present and discuss research, etc.
 SLaTE Webinar Series: ISCA SIG SLaTE is organizing a series of
 Webinars.
 Everybody can attend, but you do have to register in advance (for
 free).
 Videos are made of the first - presentation part of the Zoom meetings
 (i.e. not of the second - Q&A part), and these videos are available
 online.
 For info. about (free) registration, future and (videos of) past
 Webinars see https://sites.google.com/view/sigslate

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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:

• to establish link and collaboration between postdocs in different institutions and early career researchers from all over the world,

• to keep postdoc & early career researchers posted with current postdoc & tenure-track job offers,

• to provide mentoring,

• to give feedback to their major issues (in research),

• to create an environment where postdoc & early career researchers can socialize with their peers.

Contacts:

Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr)

Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)

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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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 ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
communication as an exciting and diverse field of research and discovery. Moreover, ISCA
is committed to gender equality.

We are therefore delighted to announce that the database with names, affiliations,
positions, and research topics of women in speech science and speech technology,
originally started by Maxine Eskenazi, is now a wonderful, searchable website, created by
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson.

The website can be found at https://womennspeech.herokuapp.com/

The website can be used for, amongst others:
- Workshop and conference organisers to search for keynote and invited speakers,
panelists, and co-organisers
- Nominations for distinguished lecturers
- Norminations for awards, medals, fellowships, and prizes
- Prospective new faculty by faculty search committees

If you identify yourself as female and want to be added to this list, please follow the
instructions on the WomenNspeech website.

We hope this website will be useful to many!

Julia Hirschberg
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Odette Scharenborg

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The TAI Standing Committee is delighted to announce that the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany, has won the bid to host the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025). Dr. James Kirby and his team will host the conference in Munich (Herrsching), Germany, during May 16-18, 2025.

With the theme of 'Variation and Change in Tone and Intonation Systems across Space and Time,' TAI 2025 aims to foster a more diverse and comprehensive understanding of tone and intonation by exploring variation in geographical as well as physical space, along with the dynamic evolution of tone and intonation across various timescales.

Please visit the conference website www.tai2025.org for preliminary information. Additionally, attendees of Speech Prosody 2024 will have the opportunity to hear a brief introduction to TAI 2025 at the closing ceremony of SP2024.

We eagerly look forward to meeting you at TAI 2025 in Herrsching!!

Kind regards,

Wentao Gu
On behalf of the TAI Standing Committee

Prosody of Uralic languages

Symposium at the Congressus XIV Internationalis
Fenno-Ugristarum, 18–23 August 2025 in Tartu, Estonia.

Following the three workshops on Uralic prosody in Tartu
2015, Budapest 2017 and Helsinki 2019 we would like to
invite you to yet another meeting on the prosody of Uralic
languages. The meeting will be organised as a symposium of
the Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum (CIFU14).
See the description of the symposium on the CIFU14
website: https://cifu14.ut.ee/symposium-b11/

The abstract submission to CIFU14 is open until 30
September 2024. Abstracts must be submitted as an
anonymised attachment (preferably word and pdf file) to
cifu14@ut.ee. Please also indicate in your email that your
abstract is being submitted to the symposium of the
Prosody of Uralic languages. Abstracts must be written in
English and may not exceed 2 pages, including references;
font size 12, line spacing 1.5, margins 2.5 cm everywhere,
A4 paper (see more details on abstract formatting and
submission here: https://cifu14.ut.ee/2nd-circular/).

Please forward this mail to anyone who might be interested.

Hope to see you in Tartu!

Pärtel Lippus (University of Tartu)
Eva Liina Asu (University of Tartu)
Katalin Mády (HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair,

Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

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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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Dear Speech Prosody members,

 I’m pleased to announce two upcoming events:

• Speech Prosody and Social Meaning, in the SProSIG Virtual Lecture Series, by Robert Xu, December 18

   

• Workshop on Prosody in Languages of the Middle East, at PaPE, Jun 25, 2025, Mallorca, Spain

   

 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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