Website: https://sites.google.com/site/secns16/

Organizers: Edward F. Chang (University of California, San Francisco), Gopala Anumanchipalli (University of California, San Francisco)

Date: 8 September 2016

Location: San Francisco, CA

Several of the goals of speech scientists and neuroscientists working in speech are of mutual relevance and are increasingly converging into each other. The aim of this workshop is to promote exchange of ideas, methods, data and to foster collaborations between researchers working in these fields. This synergy between the neuroscience of speech and computer speech technologies is indispensable for creating the next generation rehabilitative technologies for a range of speech and language disorders and to bring computer based speech technologies closer to human performance in speech recognition, synthesis and understanding.

L1TLT 2016: The 2^nd Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/l1teachingandtechnology/

Organizers: Kay Berkling (Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Karlsruhe, Germany), Keelan Evanini (Educational Testing Service, USA), David Suendermann-Oeft (Educational Testing Service, USA)

Dates: 6-7 September 2016

Location: San Francisco, CA

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.

MLSLP 2016: The 3^rd Workshop on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing

Website: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~klivescu/MLSLP2016/

Organizers: Karen Livescu (TTI-Chicago, USA), Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (University of Illinois, USA), Navdeep Jaitly (Google, USA), Joseph Keshet (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), Tara Sainath (Google, USA)

Date: 13 September 2016

Location: TBD

MLSLP is a workshop of SIGML, the ISCA SIG on machine learning in speech and language processing. Prior workshops were held in 2011 and 2012. Speech and language processing is continually mining new ideas from ML and ML, in turn, is devoting more interest to speech and language applications. This workshop aims to be a venue for identifying and incubating the next waves of research directions for interaction and collaboration. In general, the workshop will (1) discuss the emerging research ideas with potential for impact in speech/language and (2) bring together relevant researchers from ML and speech/language who may not regularly interact at conferences.

WOCCI 2016: The 5^th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction

Website: http://www.wocci.org/2016/home.html

Organizers: Kay Berkling (Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Karlsruhe, Germany), Keelan Evanini (Educational Testing Service, USA), David Suendermann-Oeft (Educational Testing Service, USA)

Dates: 6-7 September 2016

Location: San Francisco, CA

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.

SLPAT 2016: The 7^th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

Website: http://www.slpat.org/slpat2016/

Organizers: Heidi Christensen (University of Sheffield, UK), François Portet (Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble), Thomas Quatieri (MIT Lincoln Labs, USA), Frank Rudzicz (University of Toronto, Canada), Keith Vertanen (Michigan Tech)

Date: 13 September 2016

Location: TBD

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do. Many examples of assistive technologies involve providing universal access, such as modifications to televisions or telephones to make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An important sub-discipline within the AT research community is Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with some aspect of human communication, including spoken or written modalities. Speech and natural language processing (NLP) can be used in AT/AAC in a large variety of ways including, for example, improving the intelligibility of unintelligible speech, and providing communicative assistance for frail people or individuals with severe motor impairments. However, there has not been very much interaction in the intersection between researchers of AT/AAC and speech/NLP. This workshop will bring individuals from both of these research communities together with AAC users to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress. The workshop has historically had a strong focus on applications and user inclusion

SIGDIAL 2016: The 17^th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference17/

Organizers: Raquel Fernandez (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Wolfgang Minker (Ulm University, Germany), Jason Williams (Microsoft, USA)

Dates: 13-15 September 2016

Location: Los Angeles, CA

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 successful sixteen previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest area 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. SIGDIAL 2016 will be co-located with INTERSPEECH 2016 as a satellite event, and also with YRRSDS 2016, the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.

Interspeech 2016 Special Session

Sub-Saharan African languages : from speech fundamentals to applications

Organizers

Martine Adda-Decker (madda@limsi.fr) ? CNRS ? LPP and LIMSI, France.

Laurent Besacier (laurent.besacier@imag.fr) - Univ. Grenoble-Alpes, France - LIG laboratory.

Marelie Davel (marelie.davel@nwu.ac.za) ? North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.

Larry Hyman (hyman@berkeley.edu) - Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.

Martin Jansche (mjansche@google.com) ? Google, London, UK.

Francois Pellegrino (francois.pellegrino@univ-lyon2.fr) ? CNRS ? DDL Lyon, France.

Olivier Rosec (olivier.rosec@voxygen.fr) ? Voxygen SAS,- Pleumeur-Bodou, France.

Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu) - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.

Martha Tachbelie Yifiru (martha.yifiru@aau.edu.et) ? School of Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Call for papers

This special session aims at gathering researchers in speech technology and researchers in linguistics (working in language documentation and fundamentals of speech science). Such a partnership is particularly important for Sub-Saharan African languages which tend to remain under-resourced, under-documented and often also un-written.

Prospective authors are invited to submit original papers in the following areas:

• ASR and TTS for Sub-Saharan African languages and dialects

• Cross-lingual and multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling

• Applications of spoken language technologies for the African continent

• Phonetic and linguistic studies in Sub-Saharan African languages

• Zero resource speech technologies: unsupervised discovery of linguistic units

• Language documentation for endangered languages of Africa

• Machine-assisted annotation of speech and laboratory phonology

• Resource / Corpora production in African languages

Submission deadline

Same as regular Interspeech 2016 papers: 23d March, 2016

Special session web site

For more details on this special session: http://alffa.imag.fr/interspeech-2016-special-session-proposal/