(2016-05-09) 5th Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU'16), Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU'16)5th Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU'16) will be held on 9-12 May 2016 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
### Important dates ### - Full paper submission: 25 January 2016 - Notification of acceptance: 07 March, 2016 - Submission of final papers: 21 March, 2016 - Early registration: 21 March, 2016 - Workshop dates: 9-12 May, 2016
The Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages is the fifth in a series of even-year SLTU Workshops. Four previous Workshops were organized: SLTU'14 in St. Petersburg (Russia), SLTU'12 in Cape Town (South Africa), SLTU'10 in Penang (Malaysia), and SLTU'08 in Hanoi (Vietnam). SLTU?16 is held in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), a centre of classical Javanese culture. There are more than 700 ethnic languages spoken in Indonesian archipelago, but 146 are endangered. Therefore, SLTU?16 has special focus on under-resourced languages and endangered languages, but other related topics are also encouraged.
SLTU?16 will continue the tradition of previous SLTUs that features a number of distinguished keynote speaker, and this year, for the first time, SLTU will also offer Kaldi Tutorial on Under-Resourced Language.
### Workshop Topics ### Areas related to processing any under-resourced and endangered languages: - Fast resources acquisition (text and speech corpora, parallel text, dictionary, grammars, language model) - Spoken language processing for language without dictionary or written forms - Cross-lingual and multi-lingual spoken language processing including analysis and synthesis - Speech recognition and synthesis of low-resourced languages and dialects - Machine translation and spoken dialogue systems - Applications of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages
### Paper submission ### Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers up to 4 pages for technical content (including figures, tables, etc) and possible references, plus one additional (optional) page containing only references.
### Important dates ### - Full paper submission: 25 January 2016 - Notification of acceptance: 07 March, 2016 - Submission of final papers: 21 March, 2016 - Early registration: 21 March, 2016 - Workshop dates: 9-12 May, 2016
Framing speech: Celebrating 40 years of inquiry with Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel
We are pleased to announce a satellite meeting to the Speech Prosody 2016 conference in Boston, the purpose of which is to celebrate Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel?s 40 years of work in our field. The satellite meeting will be held the afternoon of June 3, 2016, after the close of Speech Prosody. We are now opening submissions for either paper or poster presentations at this event. Papers addressing questions related to any of the many areas Stefanie has enjoyed discussing and investigating over the years are equally welcome. Papers need not directly address Stefanie?s own work. A partial list of subject areas, in no particular order, might include: speech errors, planning, disfluencies, intonation analysis and transcription, rhythm, gesture, voice quality, features and cues.
Anyone wishing to present at this meeting should submit a one page abstract (with a second page optional for figures, examples, and references) by March 1. More details on submission instructions can be found here:http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/satellite-meeting-framing-speech/
(2016-05-31) Speech Prosody 2016, Boston University, MA, USA
Speech Prosody 2016, the eighth international conference on speech prosody, will be hosted at Boston University, May 31 to June 3, 2016. We invite papers addressing any aspect of the science and technology of prosody. This year, we especially invite submissions concentrating on variation and differences both at the level of the community and that of the individual. Speech Prosody, the biennial meeting of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG) <http://speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/sprosig.php> of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) <http://www.isca-speech.org/>, is the only recurring international conference focused on prosody as an organizing principle for the social, psychological, linguistic, and technological aspects of spoken language. Past conferences in Aix-en-Provence, Nara, Dresden, Campinas, Chicago, Shanghai and Dublin have each attracted 300-400 delegates, including experts in the fields of Linguistics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Speech and Hearing Science, Psychology, and related disciplines.
Keynote Speakers for Speech Prosody 2016, Boston:
Aoju Chen, Universiteit Utrecht Laura Dilley, Michigan State University Rupal Patel, Northeastern University Patrick Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong
We are pleased to announce the special sessions of Speech Prosody 2016:
? Rising intonation in English and beyond (Organizers: Meghan Armstrong, Page Piccinini, Amanda Ritchart) ? Sentence-final particles and intonation: Similarities, interactions, and historical relationships (Organizers: James Sneed German, K. K. Luke) ? Sources of Prosodic Variation across Recording Settings: Measures before measuring speech signals from inside and outside the lab (Organizers: Oliver Niebuhr, Petra Wagner) ? Speaker comfort and communication in noisy environments (Special Poster Session) (Organizers: Oliver Niebuhr, Simone Graetzer)
*Important Deadlines*
- Submission of Papers: November 15, 2015 - Notification of Acceptance (by email): January 15, 2016 - Early Registration Deadline: February 15, 2016 - Author's Registration Deadline: March 1, 2016 - Conference: May 31 - June 3, 2016
1. Phonology and phonetics of prosody 2. Signal processing 3. Rhythm and timing 4. Prosody in computational linguistics 5. Acquisition of first language prosody 6. Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics 7. Prosody in language and music 8. Prosody in Tone Languages 9. Prosody in language contact and second language acquisition 10. Prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects 11. Audiovisual prosody modeling and analysis 12. Communicative situation and speaking style 13. Prosodic aspects of speech and language pathology 14. Psycholinguistic, cognitive, neural correlates of prosody 15. Meta-linguistic and para-linguistic communication 16. Voice quality, phonation, and vocal dynamics 17. Prosody of sign language 18. Prosody in automatic speech synthesis, recognition and understanding
The goal of this special issue is to highlight the current state of research efforts on speaker and language recognition andcharacterization. New ideas about features, models, tasks, datasetsorbenchmarks are growing, making this a particularly exciting time.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, those of Odyssey 2016 (follow the link above for more details).
Guest Editors: Eduardo LleidaUniversity of Zaragoza, Spain Luis J. RodrÃguez-FuentesUniversity of the Basque Country, Spain
Important dates (tentative): Submission open:April 11, 2016 Submission deadline:July 22, 2016 Notifications of final decision:February 23, 2017 Scheduled publication:March, 2017
Though the call for papers to this special issue is open, authors with best reviews at Odyssey 2016 will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers (at least 30% of the material must be new). Note that CSL papers have no page limit. All papers will go through the same rigorous review process as regular CSL papers, with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.
*DEADLINES EXTENDED !!! (no further extensions will be done)*
Regular paper submissions February 5, 2016 Show & Tell / Industry & Forensics February 22, 2016 Notifications March 22, 2016 Camera ready papers April 8, 2016
*NEW !!!* *A _Special Issue_of _Computer Speech and Language_is under* *consideration (see details below). If approved, there will be* *an open call, and authors with best reviews at Odyssey 2016* *will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers.*
The general themes of the workshop include speaker and language recognition and characterization. The specific topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
o Speaker and language recognition, verification, identification o Speaker and language characterization o Features for speaker and language recognition o Speaker and language clustering o Multispeaker segmentation, detection, and diarization o Language, dialect, and accent recognition o Robustness in channels and environment o System calibration and fusion o Speaker recognition with speech recognition o Multimodal speaker recognition o Speaker recognition in multimedia content o Machine learning for speaker and language recognition o Confidence estimation for speaker and language recognition o Corpora and tools for system development and evaluation o Low-resource (lightly supervised) speaker and language recognition o Speaker synthesis and transformation o Human and human-assisted recognition of speaker and language o Spoofing and tampering attacks: analysis and countermeasures o Forensic and investigative speaker recognition o Systems and applications
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *WORKSHOP FORMAT AND PAPER SUBMISSION*
As in previous editions <http://www.speakerodyssey.com>, Odyssey 2016 will consist of plenary oral and poster sessions, with special sessions on topics of interest, Show & Tell (demo) sessions and panel discussions with industry partners.
Regular papers (including those for special sessions) and Show & Tell papers must be uploaded in PDF format to the Odyssey 2016 Submission System:
Regular papers (including those for special sessions) must be at most 8 pages long and are expected to include scientific or methodological novelty, which must be stated clearly in the Introduction, along with a review of the relevant prior work. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the scientific committee. Accepted papers will appear in electronic proceedings, and will be accessible through the ISCA Archive < http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/online-archive>.
For the Show & Tell (demo) sessions, authors must submit short papers (at most, 4 pages long) describing a system or prototype, a target application, a product, a demonstrator or any combination of them. These contributions do not have to present scientific or methodological novelty; therefore, they will not undergo full peer review and will not be included in the proceedings (though will be available for download on the website). One or more poster sessions will be allocated for Show & Tell submissions, with auxiliary equipment (tables, plugs, etc.) available if requested. The organizing committee may select the most interesting submissions for oral presentation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *INDUSTRY AND FORENSICS TRACK*
To foster a closer collaboration across industry and academia, an industry track was introduced in Odyssey 2014. The initiative is continued in Odyssey 2016 under the name 'Industry and Forensics track', in order to include forensic and investigative speaker recognition, an application which involves diverse areas of expertise. Companies, R&D labs, government agencies and other interested parties (e.g. forensic experts and labs) are called to participate in the following sessions:
*- Forensic and investigative speaker recognition* *- Commercial applications of speaker and language recognition*
These sessions are expected to be highly interactive, with a series of pitch talks (3-5 minutes long each), followed by a panel discussion open to the audience, addressing practical issues or unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention.
To participate, just send an email to info@odyssey2016.org < mailto:info@odyssey2016.org> with 'Industry and Forensics track' as Subject, providing details of your company profile (in particular, your involvement with or your need for speaker and language recognition technology), your interests (forensics, commercial or other) and contact info. Besides voice biometrics providers and companies that develop and exploit speaker/language recognition solutions, we encourage companies who are IN NEED for speaker or language recognition technology to participatre in these sessions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *SPECIAL SESSION 1: Speaker Recognition in Multimedia Content (SS-SRMC)*
Speaker information is instrumental in better exploiting spoken multimedia content, as evidenced by recent work on large-scale speaker indexing and linking, or on speaker naming in broadcast archives.
The special session 'Speaker recognition in multimedia content', organized in collaboration with the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia (SIG-SLIM, http://slim-sig.irisa.fr/), pursues two main goals: (1) to share recent advances in the field and to identify synergies between the various multimedia applications where speaker recognition, indexing and segmentation is considered; and (2) to raise awareness on speaker-related research in multimedia so as to strengthen the link between the multimedia and the speaker recognition communities.
The session targets researchers working on any topic related to speaker characterization for multimedia content processing, including (but not limited to) speaker segmentation, speaker indexing, speaker clustering, speaker naming or discovery, or speaking face detection. Multimodal (e.g. speech + face recognition) approaches are particularly welcome. We expect submissions presenting original research results, ongoing research and development projects, tools and resources that are being made available, or benchmarking initiatives.
Submissions to this Special Session must be done under the topic:
In 2015 NIST launched a Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge as an alternative evaluation methodology to attract newcomers to the field by reducing the effort required to preprocess the data through the use of i-vectors.
This special session focuses on the recent advances in language recognition in the context of the NIST Challenge as well as on the Challenge results. As such, we invite participants of the Challenge as well as researchers who work on the language recognition task using i-vectors to submit papers about their systems or techniques. Novel uses of i-vectors for language recognition as well as data resources and benchmark results are of special interest.
Submissions to this Special Session are expected to present original ideas or results, and must be done under the topic:
'Machine learning for speaker and language recognition'
*- A best paper award* *- A best student paper award*
All regular papers (including special session papers) are candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student paper award, the first author must be a student (meaning that she/he does not yet hold a PhD degree) at the time of paper submission.
Luis J. RodrÃguez-Fuentes, chair University of the Basque Country, Spain Eduardo Lleida, co-chair University of Zaragoza, Spain Jean-François Bonastre University of Avignon, France Niko Brümmer Agnitio, South Africa Lukáš Burget Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic Joseph Campbell MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA Jan 'Honza' ÄŒernocký Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic Tomi Kinnunen University of Eastern Finland, Finland Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore Alvin Martin NIST, USA Douglas Reynolds MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE -- Special Issue (AWAITING APPROVAL)*
'Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization'
The goal of this special issue is to highlight the current state of research efforts on speaker and language recognition and characterization. New ideas about features, models, tasks, datasets or benchmarks are growing, making this a particularly exciting time. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, those of Odyssey 2016 (as listed above). Guest Editors:
Eduardo Lleida University of Zaragoza, Spain Luis J. RodrÃguez-Fuentes University of the Basque Country, Spain
Important dates (tentative):
Submission deadline July 22, 2016 Notifications December 23, 2016 Scheduled publication March, 2017
Though the call for papers to this special issue is open, authors with best reviews at Odyssey 2016 will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers (at least 30% of the material must be new). Note that CSL papers have no page limit. All papers will go through the same rigorous review process as regular CSL papers, with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *VENUE AND TRAVEL*
Odyssey 2016 will be hosted by two Spanish groups: GTTS (http://gtts.ehu.es), from the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of the Basque Country, and ViVoLab (http://vivolab.unizar.es/), from the School of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Zaragoza.
The workshop will be held in Bilbao < http://www.bilbaoturismo.net/BilbaoTurismo/en/tourists>, a medium-size city in the north of Spain, with about 350,000 inhabitants. The venue, Bizkaia Aretoa < http://www.ehu.eus/en/web/bizkaia-aretoa/home>, is located in the heart of the city. The building, designed by the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, hosts all kind of social, cultural, academic and scientific events, most of them organized by the University of the Basque Country.
Bilbao is the commercial and administrative head of a large area of about one million people living by the Ibaizabal-Nervion estuary. After centuries of trading and iron industry, in the last decades Bilbao has become a service town, supported by a huge investment in infrastructure and urban renewal, that started with the construction of an underground network (Metro Bilbao) in 1995 and the opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in 1997.
The Bilbao airport < http://www.aena.es/csee/Satellite/Aeropuerto-Bilbao/en/Home.html> can be easily reached from many European airports, including international hubs such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Istanbul, London, Madrid or Paris, which provide worldwide connectivity. The city is connected to the European road network by the AP-8 toll motorway, to the north of Spain by the A-8 (free) motorway and to the rest of Spain by the AP-68 toll motorway.
Located in a hilly countryside, Bilbao offers many outdoor activities. Hiking is very popular as well as rock climbing in the nearby mountains. Mount Artxanda, easily accessible from the town centre by a funicular railway, features a recreational area at the summit, with restaurants, a sports complex and a balcony with panoramic views. In the south, the natural wonders of Mount Pagasarri receive hundreds of hikers every weekend.
A few minutes away by public transport, the Bizkaia Bridge, declared World Heritage in 2006, connects Portugalete and Las Arenas at the left and right banks of the estuary. In the coast, old fishing villages like Plentzia, Mundaka or Lekeitio have become touristic spots due to the nearby beaches, where watersports, especially surfing, are practiced. Just an hour away by car, the beautiful city of San Sebastian, as well as the vineyards and wineries of La Rioja, are worth a visit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *For more details:*
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Odyssey 2016 is supported by:*
- ISCA SIG-SpLC - University of the Basque Country - University of Zaragoza - Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology - AGNITIO VOICE ID - CIRRUS LOGIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 2nd Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology is going to take place in San Francisco on September 6 and 7.
June 12, 2016: paper submission deadline
June 26, 2016: notification of paper acceptance
July 10, 2016: camera-ready paper submission deadline
September 6/7, 2016 workshop
The LTLT workshop intends to join researchers across countries on the topic of language teaching/learning. Papers submitted here do not have to employ any technology yet. We are looking for contributions from users that may not be aware of all the possibilities that the technologies have to offer to solve educational research problems. What these papers bring to the table are problem statements and data collections that the speech and text processing community may in turn not be aware of. Thus we are looking for symbioses between the two disciplines in research about learning/teaching language. It is important for both areas to get to know each other's research questions and potential application for technologies.
This goal will be achieved through collocation with workshops that are associated with Interspeech (focusing on technology for automatic processing and synthesis of speech and text) that allows you to meet people with similar interests, share your work and forge new interactions across disciplines. In doing so, we are looking for a broad range of contributions from didactics, psychology and pedagogy from researchers interested in bridging the current gap to automation. Demonstrations as well as samples of data collections and annotations are welcome.
This workshop is endorsed by ISCA and organized by the Special Interest Group for Children (SIG-CHILD) group that has regular WOCCI workshops.
Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:
Data collection, methods, annotation, recognition, analysis, diagnostic, progression of skills, for example in:
Handwriting
Spoken interaction
Story telling
Text production
Spelling errors
Evaluation of L1/L2 teaching methods
Teaching L2 Kids in an L1 class environment (many classes have a large number of multilingual children in L1 classrooms whose parents to not speak the L1 language)
Issues in majority language learning environments for L1 and L2 learners
Models of learning
Applications for teaching, self-learning, classroom learning
Giving Feedback
Technology in the classroom
Games for language learning
Other analyses and ideas that have to do with language teaching
The 2nd Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology is going to take place in San Francisco on September 6 and 7.
June 12, 2016: paper submission deadline
June 26, 2016: notification of paper acceptance
July 10, 2016: camera-ready paper submission deadline
September 6/7, 2015 workshop
The 5th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI 2016) will be held in San Francisco on 6-7th of September, 2016. The Workshop is a satellite event of the 17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2016), which will take place in the same city September 8-12, 2016. WOCCI 2016 will be held at the offices of Educational Testing Services (ETS).
This workshop aims to join researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in all aspects of child-machine interaction including computer, robotics and multi-modal interfaces. Children are special both at the acoustic/linguistic level as well as the interaction level. The Workshop provides a unique opportunity for bringing together different research communities from cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, linguistics as well as applied areas such as medical and educational technologies. Various state-of-the-art components can be presented here as key components for the next generation of child-centered computer interaction. Technological advances are increasingly necessary in a world where education and health pose growing challenges to the core wellbeing of our societies. Noticeable examples are remedial treatments for children with or without disabilities and capabilities for providing individualized attention. The Workshop will serve as a venue for presenting recent advancements in core technologies as well as experimental systems and prototypes.
Papers are solicited on any technical areas relevant to the workshop. The technical scope of the workshop includes, but it is not limited to:
Speech Interfaces: acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech, discourse analysis of spoken language in child machine interaction, age-dependent characteristics of spoken language, automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems
Multi-modality and Robotics: multi-modal child machine interaction, multi-modal input and output interfaces, including robotic interfaces, intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing, pen or gesture/visual interfaces
User Modelling: user modelling and adaptation, usability studies accounting for age preferences in child machine interaction
The 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2016) will be located in the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technology, Los Angeles, CA, USA. SIGDIAL will be held September 13-15.
The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing with a series of sixteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome formal, corpus-based, system-building or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following themes and topics:
- Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems - Corpora, Tools and Methodology - Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling - Computational Sociolinguistics - Collaborative Process Analysis - Dimensions of Interaction - Open Domain Dialogue - Style, Voice and Personality in Spoken Dialogue and Written Text - Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology - Novel Methods for Generation Within Dialogue
Call for Special Session Proposals
The SIGDIAL organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals. A SIGDIAL special session has the length of a regular session at the conference and may be organized as a poster session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session. Note that Special Session papers can include papers that appear in the SIGDIAL proceedings and/or papers which do not appear in the proceedings. The only firm requirement is that papers which appear in the SIGDIAL proceedings must follow the same review process as normal SIGDIAL papers. Reviews for these papers are managed by the PC as usual. The special session organizers may suggest reviewers for the special session, but that is the extent of their involvement in reviewing special session papers which appear in the SIGDIAL proceedings. Special session organizers can decide how to handle SIGDIAL rejected papers--for example, they may invite papers which will not appear in the proceedings to still be presented. Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions.
Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: (i) Summary of the topic of the special session; (ii) List of organizers and sponsors; (iii) List of people who may submit and participate; (iv) Requested format (poster/panel/oral session).
These proposals should be sent to conference[at]sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general and program co-chairs.
Special Session Proposal Deadline: Tuesday, 1 March 2016 (23:59, GMT-11) Special Session Notification: Sunday, 27 March 2016
* General SIGDIAL call for papers will be posted in Feb 2016.
SIGDIAL 2016 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
General Chairs Raquel Fernandez, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University, Germany
Program Chairs Giuseppe Carenini, The University of British Columbia, Canada Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan
Local Chairs Ron Artstein, University of Southern California, USA Alesia Gainer, University of Southern California, USA
Mentoring Chair Pierre Lison, University of Oslo, Norway
Sponsorships Chair Ethan Selfridge, Interactions Corporation, USA
SIGdial President Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Labs, USA
SIGdial Vice President Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA
SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland _______________________________________________ SIGdial mailing list SIGdial@list.sigdial.org
