The preparations for Interspeech 2017 are in full swing!

As you may have noticed, we had a serious virus attack to Interspeech 2017 website and it too us a while to restore it. The website is now up and running again, although with still some issues concerning links that are not yet completely operational, at this time.

We have received a good number of proposals for Satellite Workshops as well as for Special Sessions and Challenges and we are working on the schedules and logistic details. We can announce that co-registration will be possible. Participants will be able to select participation in Satellite Workshops and pay the registration fee in connection with the registration for Interspeech 2017. The organizers of satellite events will be in touch with our PCO to get information on the registered participants and the universities involved in the satellite events will request from our PCO transfers of the events’ registration amounts. Except for the credit card fee (about 2 %), we do not expect any other costs for the organizers of the satellite events.

Sponsorships and exhibition requests are dropping in, which is a very good sign. We have started a Facebook page and taken over a Twitter account for Interspeech 2017. There is still some work to be done to activate properly those social media but we are working on it.

The three main Interspeech 2017 partners, Stockholm University, KTH and Karolinska Institute are coordinating efforts to make the conference a success and are deeply involved in the planning. To the good news, we can add that Stockholm University will not be charging Interspeech 2017 for the lecture halls or use of other spaces at the university and KTH/TMH will be hosting the Technical Committee meeting in May. Meanwhile, we are having regular planning meetings involving Stockholm University’s representatives of various infrastructures, like wifi, media services, restaurants and cafeterias, security, etc. and working hard to make sure that Interspeech 2017 will flow as smoothly and effectively as possible.

See you in Stockholm in August!

Francisco Lacerda
General Chair for Interspeech 2017

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the Seventh ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Workshop on Speech and
Language Technology in Education (SLaTE).
See http://www.slate2017.org/

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                                                           INTERSPEECH 2018

               Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies

                                                2-6 September 2018

                                                    Hyderabad, India

                                           http://www.interspeech2018,org

Gen. Chair: B. Yegnanarayama

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Interspeech 2019 will be held in Graz, Austria.

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Forthcoming ISCA Supported Events

to be updated soon

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First Call for Papers

=============================================================================================

1st Workshop on 'Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity' (CL4LC).

Collocated with COLING 2016 in Osaka (Japan) on Sunday, 11 December 2016.

https://sites.google.com/site/cl4lc2016/home

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====================

Workshop Description

====================

CL4LC aims at investigating 'processing' aspects of linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modelling of linguistic complexity.

The term linguistic complexity is highly polysemous and several definitions have been advanced according to different standpoint theories. One major standpoint considers the 'theoretical' distinction between absolute complexity (i.e. the formal properties of linguistic systems) and relative complexity (i.e. covering issues such as cognitive cost, difficulty, level of demand for a user/learner).

CL4LC aims at investigating a complementary standpoint which has long attracted great interest in the Computational Linguistics community. This is focused on 'processing' aspects related to linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject.

The objective of the workshop is to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modeling of linguistic complexity, with a particular emphasis on  research questions such as:

whether, and to what extent, a machine and human subject perspective can be combined or share commonalities; whether, and to what extent, linguistic complexity metrics specific for the human subject perspective can be extended for handling complexity for machine and vice versa; whether, and to what extent, linguistic phenomena hampering human processing correlate with difficulties in the automatic processing of language.

Despite the two perspectives have been separately treated, the interest for the “processing” aspects of linguistic complexity is shared by several initiatives and workshops within the NLP community where the emphasis has been put more on the achievement of specific tasks than on an overt reflection of linguistic complexity underlying the treated phenomena. From the machine point of view, this is the case, for instance, of initiatives focusing on linguistic complexity raised by e.g. the automatic processing of typologically different languages or language varieties deviant with respect to the standard language or by the challenges of parsing languages with morphology richer than English, or non-canonical varieties of language (e.g. spoken language, the language of social media, historical data etc.).

From the human subject perspective the attention is directed to what is complex (i.e. difficult) for a speaker, hearer, reader, learner with the aim of both modeling the cognitive processing underlying language usage and developing human-oriented applications. This is the case e.g. of computational linguistics methods devoted to unravel the difficulties in online language processing or to build applications to improve text accessibility in different scenarios, e.g. education, social inclusion.

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List of Topics

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We encourage the submission of long and short research papers including, but not limited to the following topics:

Detection and Measurement of Linguistic Complexity:

- methods to measure and modeling human comprehension difficulty, in terms of e.g. Dependency Locality and Surprisal frameworks;

- methods to measure complexity in linguistic systems with respect to different linguistic dimensions (e.g. morphology, syntax);

- methods to measure the distance between texts and learners' competences, according to their literacy skills, native language or language impairments;

- methods and models to measure text quality, in terms e.g. of grammaticality, style, accessibility, readability;

- methods to measure the distance between training corpora and texts in machine learning perspective;

- approaches to compute the processing perplexity of machine learning systems.

Processing of Linguistic Complexity:

- models of human language acquisition in specific linguistic environments, e.g. atypical language acquisition scenarios, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), learning of domain specific sub-languages;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving human understanding, e.g. text simplification and normalization to improve human comprehension;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving machine processing, e.g. text simplification for machine translation, word reordering to improve semantic and syntactic parsing;

- experimental approaches to CL4LC: experimental platforms and designs, experimental methods, resources;

- automatic processing of non-canonical languages and cross-lingual model transfer approaches; NLP tools and resources for CL4LC; Vision papers discussing the link between human and machine oriented perspectives on linguistic complexity.

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Submissions

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We invite submissions of both long and short papers, including opinion statements. All of the papers will be included in conference proceedings, this time in electronic form only.

Long papers may consist of up to eight pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Short papers may consist of up to four pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Authors of accepted papers will be given additional space in the camera-ready version to reflect space needed for changes stemming from reviewers comments.

Papers shall be submitted in English, anonymised with regard to the authors and/or their institution (no author-identifying information on the title page nor anywhere in the paper), including referencing style as usual. Authors should also ensure that identifying meta-information is removed from files submitted for review.

Papers must conform to official COLING 2016 style guidelines, which are available in coling2016.zip. coling2016.zip has LaTeX files, Microsoft Word template file, and sample PDF file.

Submission and reviewing will be managed online by the START system. The only accepted format for submitted papers is in Adobe's PDF. Submissions must be uploaded on the START system (to be anounced soon) by the submission deadlines.

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Important Dates

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June 2016: First call for workshop papers September 25, 2016: Workshop paper due October 16, 2016: Notification of acceptance October 30, 2016: Camera-ready due November 30, 2016: Official proceedings publication date December 11, 2016: Workshop date

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Program committee

=================

Delphine Bernhard (LilPa, France)

Nicoletta Calzolari (European Language Resources Association (ELRA), France) Angelo Cangelosi, (Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, UK) Benoît Crabbé (Université Paris 7, INRIA, France) Matthew Crocker (Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany) Scott Crossley (Georgia State University, USA) Rodolfo Delmonte (Department of Computer Science, Università Ca’ Foscari, Italy) Piet Desmet (KULeuven, Belgium) Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Cédrick Fairon (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Marcello Ferro (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Nuria Gala (Aix-Marseille Université, France) Ted Gibson (MIT, USA) Itziar Gonzalez-Dios (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Alex Housen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh, UK) Kristopher Kyle (Georgia State University, USA) Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa, Italy) Annie Louis (University of Essex, UK) Xiaofei Lu (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Ryan Mcdonald (Google) Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany) Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of Washington, USA, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, CA) Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden) Gabriele Pallotti (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Magali Paquot (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Katerina Pastra (Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Greece) Vito Pirrelli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Barbara Plank (University of Groningen, Netherlands) Massimo Poesio (University of Essex, UK) Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Advaith Siddharthan (University of Aberdeen, UK) Paul Smolensky (John Hopkins University, USA) Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KULeuven, Belgium) Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii (University of Tokyo, Japan) Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Labs) Sara Tonelli (FBK, Trento, Italy) Sowmya Vajjala (Iowa State University, USA) Aline Villavicencio (Institute of Informatics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Elena Volodina (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) Daniel Wiechmann (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Victoria Yaneva (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

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Organisers

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Dominique Brunato,  Felice Dell'Orletta,  Giulia Venturi

    ItaliaNLP Lab @ Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale 'A. Zampolli', Pisa (Italy)

Thomas François

    CENTAL, IL&C, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

Philippe Blache

    Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS & Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence (France)

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Contact

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For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to: cl4lc.ws@gmail.com

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Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-v)

https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home

Workshop co-lated with coling (the 26th International Conference on

Computational Linguistics, Osaka, Japan), December 12, 2016

Invited speaker :  Chris Biemann (Technische Universität, Darmstadt)

We are pleased to announce the 5th Workshop on ‘Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon’ (Cogalex-V), taking place just before coling (Osaka, Japan), december 12, 2016.

1        Context and background

The way we look at the lexicon (creation and use) has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. While in the past being considered as an appendix to grammar, the lexicon has now moved to centre stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without it. Also, rather than considering it as a static entity (database view), dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, akin to the human brain, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time.

Linguists work on products, while psychologists and computer scientists deal with processes. They decompose the task into a set of subtasks, i.e. modules between  which information flows. There are inputs, outputs and processes in between. A typical task in language processing is to go from meanings to sound or vice versa, the two extremes of language production and language understanding. Since this mapping is hardly ever direct, various intermediate steps or layers (syntax, morphology) are necessary.

Most of the work done by psycholinguists has dealt with the information flow from meaning (or concepts) to sound or the other way around. What has not been addressed though is the creation of a map of the mental lexicon, that is a  represention of the way how words are organized or connected.

In this respect WordNet and Roget's Thesaurus are probably closest to what one can expect these days. This being said, to find a word in a resource one has to reduce the search space (entire lexicon) and this is done via the knowledge one has at the onset of search. While the information stored in the lexicon is a product, its access is clearly a (cognitive, i.e. knowledge-based) process.

1.1      Goal

The goal of Cogalex is to provide a forum for researchers in NLP, psychologists, computational lexicographers and users of lexical resources to share their knowledge and needs concerning the construction, organization and use of a lexicon by people (lexical access) and machines (NLP, IR, data-mining).

Like in the past (2004, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014), we will invite researchers to address various unsolved problems, by putting this time stronger emphasis though on distributional semantics (DS). Indeed, we would like to see work showing the relevance of DS as a cognitive model of the lexicon. The interest in distributional approaches has grown considerably over the last few year, both in computational linguistics and cognitive sciences. A further boost has been provided by the recent hype around deep learning and neural embeddings. While all these approaches seem to have great potential, their added value to address cognitive and semantic aspects of the lexicon still needs to be shown.

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and electronic dictionaries, as well as on any aspect relevant to the achieve a better understanding of the mental lexicon and semantic memory.We solicit contributions including but not limited to the topics listed here below, topics, which can be considered from any of the following points of view:

• (computational, corpus) linguistics,
• neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip of the tongue problem, associations),
• network related sciences (sociology, economy, biology),
• mathematics (vector-based approaches, graph theory, small-world problem), etc.
  
  

We also plan to organize a “friendly competition” for corpus-based models of lexical networks and navigation, i.e. lexical access (see below).

1.2      Possible Topics

1.2.1   Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

• What does a language producer start out with and how does this input relate to the target form? (meaning, collocation, topically related, etc.)
• What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and looking for a word?
• What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the desired output (target word)?
• Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
• Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
• Distributional semantics (count models, neural embeddings, etc. )
• Neurocomputational theories of content representation.
• Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of view (clustering, topical structure)
• Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
• Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information concerning words, organization of words)
• Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and indexes (crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.)
• Impact and use of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) for building dictionaries, for organizing and indexing the  data (clustering of words), and for allowing to track navigational strategies, etc.
• (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym, hypernym, meronym, association, collocation, ...)
• Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to words, their uses, combinations and associations
• Search based on sound, meaning or associations
• Search (simple query vs. multiple words)
• Search-space determination based on user's knowledge, meta-knowledge and cognitive state (information available at the onset, knowledge concerning the relationship between the input and the target word, ...)
• Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
• Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used by people)
• Interface problems, data-visualization
• Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations (reading between the lines, subliminal communication).

1.2.2   The meaning of words

1.2.3    Structure of the lexicon

1.2.4     Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

1.2.5     Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies), interface issues,

2        Description of the shared tasks associated with the workshop.

We plan to organize a “friendly competition” of corpus-based models of lexical access and semantic/associative relations between words.  This competition will be based on an existing, publicly available data set.  We provide an official separation of the data set into training, development and test data as well as a detailed specification of the task and evaluation metrics (implemented as easy-to-use scripts), so that the results obtained by different participants can be compared directly.

The precise design of the task has not been finalized yet, but it will be based on one or more of the following data sets:

• free association norms from the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT)
• free association norms from the University of South Florida (USF)
• prime-target pairs from the Semantic Priming Project (SPP)
• semantically related word pairs from EVALution 1.0 (https://github.com/esantus/EVALution)

3        INVITED SPEAKER

Chris Biemann, leader of the LT research group in Darmstadt, and well known for his work on graph-based-approaches for NLP, has kindly accepted to give the invited presentation.

4        Deadlines.

• September 25:   Submission deadline
• October 16:       Author notification
• October 30:       Camera ready due by Authors
• November 6:     Proceedings due by Workshop Organisers to Workshop & Publication Chairs.
• December 12 :   Workshop

5        Submission

The submissions should be written in English and be anonymized for review. They must comply with the style-sheets provided by Coling: http://coling2016.anlp.jp/#instructions

• Long papers may consist of 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references;
• Short paper may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references
• The respective final versions may be up to 9 pages for long papers and 5 pages for short ones. In both cases the number of pages for references is limited to 3 pages

Papers should be in PDF format and have to be submitted electronically via the START submission system (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/ CogALex-V/). You probably have to register first, and then choose: submission, i.e. (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/CogALex-V/user/scmd.cgi?scmd=submitPaperCustom&pageid=0).

6       Organizers.

• Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France)
• Alessandro Lenci (Computational Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pisa,, Italy)
• Stefan Evert (FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)

7       Contact persons

For general questions, please get in touch with Michael Zock (michael.zock@lif.univ-mrs.fr), for questions concerning the shared task, send an e-mail to Stefan Evert (stefan.evert@fau.de)

8       Program committee

Bieman Chris (Technische Universität, Darmstadt, Germany)

Babych, Bogdan (University of Leeds, UK)

Brysbaert, Marc (Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium)

Cristea Dan ('Al. I. Cuza' University, Iasi, Romania)

deDeyne Simon (University of Adelaide, Australia)

de Melo Gerard (IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)

Evert, Stefan (University of Erlangen, Germany)

Ferret Olivier (CEA LIST, France)

Fontenelle Thierry (CDT, Luxemburg)

Gala Nuria (University of Aix-Marseille, France)

Geeraerts Dirk (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Granger Sylviane (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

Grefenstette Gregory (Inria, Paris, France)

Hirst Graeme (University of Toronto, Canada)

Hovy Ed (CMU, Pittsburgh, USA)

Hsieh, Shu-Kai (National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan)

Joyce Terry (Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)

Lafourcade, Matthieu (LIRMM, université de Montepellier, France

Lapalme Guy (RALI, University of Montreal, Canada

Lebani Gianluca (University of Pisa, Italy)

Lenci Alessandro (University of Pisa, Italy)

L'Homme Marie Claude (University of Montreal, Canada)

Mititelu Verginica (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)

Navigli, Roberto  (Sapienza, Rome, Italy)

Paradis Carita (Centre for Languages and Literature Lund University, Sweden)

Pihlevar, Taher  (university of Cambridge, UK)

Pirrelli, Vito (ILC, Pisa, Italy)

Polguère Alain (ATILF-CNRS, Nancy, France)

Purver, Matthew (King's College, London, UK)

Ramisch Carlos (AMU, Marseille, France)

Rayson Paul (UCREL, university of Lancaster, UK

Rosso, Paol (NLEL, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)

Sahlgren, Magnus (Gavagai Inc. & SICS, Sweden)

Schulte im Walde Sabine (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Schwab Didier (LIG, Grenoble, France)

Sharoff Serge (University of Leeds, UK)

Stella Massimo (Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, university of Southhampton, UK)

Tokunaga Takenobu (TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)

Tufis Dan (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)

Zarcone, Alessandra (Saarland University, Germany)

Zock Michael (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France)

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Deadline for submission extended to November 18th

Winter School: Speech Perception and Production

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Free university Bozen-Bolzano (UNIBZ)

                                                                    Call for abstracts

Doing Sociophonetic Research

8th - 10th February 2017 Bozen-Bolzano | South Tyrol | Italy

Plenary speaker: Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow)

We invite contributions on any of the following topics:

• sociophonetics

• social networks and sound variation

• bilingual speech

• phonetics-phonology interface

• speech production and perception

• articulatory analysis (UTI, EGG)

• phonetic corpora

• modelling data (models and statistical techniques)

•  

Doing Sociophonetic Research is a three-day workshop on the sociophonetics of speech production and perception, with a strong focus on methodological approaches.

Abstract guidelines:

• word limit: 200 -

• deadline: 31st December 2016 -

• submit here: tinyurl.com/dsr2017

•  

Submissions as poster presentation will be peer-reviewed. Notification of acceptance: 11th January 2017

Organising committee (alps@unibz.it):

Alessandro Vietti

Lorenzo Spreafico

Vincenzo Galatà

Constantijn Kaland

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(Dis)Fluency2017: Fluency and disfluency across languages and language varieties

15-17 February 2017
Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

Fluency and disfluency have attracted a great deal of attention in different areas of linguistics such as language acquisition or psycholinguistics. They have been investigated through a wide range of methodological and theoretical frameworks, including corpus linguistics, experimental pragmatics, perception studies and natural language processing, with applications in the domains of language learning, teaching and testing, human/machine communication and business communication.

Spoken and signed languages are produced and comprehended online, with typically very little time to plan ahead. As a result, they are often characterized by features such as (filled and unfilled) pauses, discourse markers, repeats and self-repairs, which can be said to reflect on-going mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The role of these items is ambivalent, as they can both be a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two faces of the same phenomenon.

Within the frame of a research project entitled ?Fluency and disfluency markers. A multimodal contrastive perspective? (see http://www.uclouvain.be/en-415256.html), the universities of Louvain and Namur have been involved in a large-scale usage-based study of (dis)fluency markers in spoken French, L1 and L2 English, and French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. To close this five-year research project, an international conference will be organized in Louvain-la-Neuve on the subject of fluency and disfluency across languages and language varieties.

The conference aims at bringing together scholars and researchers from different disciplines in order to discuss and confront different conceptions and perspectives on fluency and disfluency, in both spoken and sign languages. We particularly welcome abstracts for oral or poster presentations on the following topics:

        ?  theoretical insights gained from the study of fluency and disfluency;

        ?  methodological issues raised by the investigation of (dis)fluency markers;

        ?  acquisitional perspectives on (dis)fluency and pedagogical implications;

        ?  contrastive analyses of (dis)fluency markers;

        ?  variationist approaches to fluency and disfluency;

        ?  (dis)fluency in the Sign Language of native, near-native and late signers;

        ?  applications of fluency research (NLP, testing, etc.)

Keynote Speakers:

Martin Corley, University of Edinburgh
Sandra Götz, Justus Liebig University, Giessen
Helena Moniz, Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering: Research and Development, Lisbon
David Quinto-Pozos, The University of Texas at Austin

Abstracts (1000 words, excluding references) should be submitted via Easy chair at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=disfluency2017

Important dates:

        ? Deadline submission of abstracts: 15 September 2016

        ? Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2016

        ? Early-bird registration: 30 November 2016

        ? Deadline registration: 15 January 2017

Scientific committee

Nicolas Ballier (Université Paris Diderot)
Roxane Bertrand (Université Aix-Marseille)
Philippe Blache (Université Aix-Marseille)
Catherine Bolly (Universität zu Köln)
Hans Rutger Bosker (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
Maria Candéa (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris)
Sylvie De Cock (Université catholique de Louvain)
Nivja de Jong (Utrecht University)
Robert Eklund (Linköping University)
Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark)
Thomas François (Université catholique de Louvain)
Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya (University of Michigan, USA)
Jonathan Ginzburg (Université Paris Diderot)
Pascale Goutéraux (Université Paris Diderot)
Heather Hilton (Université de Lyon 2)
Judit Kormos (University of Lancaster)
Anne Lacheret (Université Paris Ouest)
Bertille Pallaud (Université Aix-Marseille)
Laurent Prévot (Université Aix-Marseille)
Helmer Strik (Radboud Universiteit)
Parvaneh Tavakoli (University of Reading, UK)
Gunnel Tottie (University of Zurich)
Mieke Van Herreweghe (Universiteit Gent)
Ioana Vasilescu (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris)
Myriam Vermeerbergen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Organizing committee

Liesbeth Degand (UCL)
Cédrick Fairon (UCL)
Gaëtanelle Gilquin (UCL)
Sylviane Granger (UCL)
Laurence Meurant (UNamur)
Anne Catherine Simon (UCL)
George Christodoulides (UCL)
Ludivine Crible (UCL)
Amandine Dumont (UCL)
Iulia Grosman (UCL)
Ingrid Notarrigo (UNamur)
Lucie Rousier-Vercruyssen (UCL & Université de Neuchâtel)

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10th International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing

New submission deadline: November 23, 2016

http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/

February 21 - 23, 2017

Porto, Portugal.

Due to many requests, the position paper submission deadline of this conference has been extended.

The purpose of the International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing is to bring together researchers and practitioners from multiple areas of knowledge, including biology, medicine, engineering and other physical sciences, interested in studying and using models and techniques inspired from or applied to biological systems. A diversity of signal types can be found in this area, including image, audio and other biological sources of information. The analysis and use of these signals is a multidisciplinary area including signal processing, pattern recognition and computational intelligence techniques, amongst others.

What is a position paper?

A position paper presents an arguable opinion about an issue. The goal of a position paper is to convince the audience that your opinion is valid and worth listening to, without the need to present completed research work and/or validated results.

In Cooperation with: EUROMICRO, ISfTeH, AAAI, ISCB and BMES

With the presence of internationally distinguished keynote speakers:

-Bart M. ter Haar Romeny, Eindhoven University of Technology 
-Joyce Westerink, Philips Research and Eindhoven University of Technology 
-Kristina Höök, Royal Institute of Technology 
-Bethany Bracken, Charles River Analytics Inc.

A short list of presented papers will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published by Springer.

All papers presented at the conference venue will also be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library.

Should you have any question please don't hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

Vera Coelho

BIOSIGNALS Secretariat

Address: Av. D. Manuel I, 27A, 2. esq.
2910-595 Setubal, Portugal
Tel: +351 265 100 033 
Fax: +351 265 520 186
Web: http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/
e-mail: biosignals.secretariat@insticc.org

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HSCMA Hands Free Communication and Microphone Arrays

March 1–3, 2017 • San Francisco, CA, USA

Call for Papers

The Fifth Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays will

be held on March 1-3, 2017 at the Google Offices in downtown San Francisco, California.

The workshop is devoted to presenting recent advances in distant-talking speech communication

and human/machine interaction with an emphasis on multi-microphone systems. It will bring

together researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in distant speech

and speaker recognition, speech enhancement, high-quality sound capture, and multiple-input/

multiple-output (MIMO) acoustic signal processing. Demonstrations of experimental systems,

applications, and prototypes are especially welcome.

HSCMA 2017 is being held with technical sponsorship by the IEEE Signal Processing Society

and will immediately precede ICASSP 2017.

Workshop Topics

Papers in all areas of distant-talking human/human and human/machine interaction are

encouraged, including:

• Multi-channel and single-channel approaches for speech acquisition, noise suppression,

source localization and separation, dereverberation, echo cancellation, and acoustic event

detection

• Speech and speaker recognition technology for hands-free scenarios, including robust

acoustic modeling, novel features, feature enhancement, dereverberation, and model

adaptation

• Microphone array technology and architectures, especially for distant-talking speech

recognition and acoustic scene analysis

• Multi-channel rendering, including spatial audio for immersive environments, improvements

to intelligibility in noisy environments, and privacy of speech communications

• Speech corpora for training and evaluation of distant-talking speech systems

• Applications based on microphone arrays and hands-free speech systems.

Special Sessions

The program will also feature special sessions on new or emerging topics of interest. Proposals

for special sessions must include the session title, rationale, outline, and a list of four invited

papers.

Paper & demo submission

The workshop technical program will consist of oral presentations, poster sessions, and

demonstrations. Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers up to four pages,

with a fifth page permitted for references only. Submissions for proposed demonstrations may be

up to two pages in length. Manuscripts should be prepared using the same format as for ICASSP

submissions using the ICASSP author kit for LaTeX or Word. Accepted papers will be published

in IEEEXplore.

Committee

General Co-chairs Jerome Bellegarda, Apple Malcolm Slaney, Google Ivan Tashev, Microsoft Technical Program Chairs Shoko Araki, NTT Jacob Benesty, INRS-EMT, University of Quebec Bastiaan Kleijn, Victoria University of Wellington Mike Seltzer, Microsoft

Finance Chair Mark Thomas, Dolby

Publicity/Publications Chair Ozlem Kalinli,

Sony Demo/Special Sessions Chair Shiva Sundaram,

Amazon Local Arrangements Chair Horacio Franco, SRI

Important Dates
Special Session Proposals Due ..........................September 1, 2016 Notification for Special Sessions ........................September 15, 2016 Paper Submission Deadline .........................December 13, 2016 Final Upload of Submitted Papers .........................December 18, 2016 Notification of Paper Decisions .............................January 20, 2017 Camera Ready Papers Due .............................January 23, 2017

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2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2017)
New Orleans, USA
March 5-9, 2017

http://www.ieee-icassp2017.org/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Just as music and rhythm are the heartbeats of life, signal and information processing are the heartbeats of IT development. Having both of them capture the attendees' hearts and souls is the goal of the 42th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2017) which will be held at the Hilton Conference Center, in the jazz-music capital of the world (New Orleans, USA) on March 5-9, 2017. ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference provides, both for researchers and developers, an engaging forum to exchange ideas and proposed new developments in this field. The theme of ICASSP 2017 is 'The Internet of Signals' which is the real technology and world behind the Internet of Things. The conference will feature world-class international speakers, tutorials, exhibits, lectures and poster sessions from around the world. Topics include but are not limited to:
+ Audio and acoustic signal processing
+ Sensor array & multichannel signal processing
+ Bio-imaging and biomedical signal processing
+ Signal processing education
+ Design & implementation of signal processing systems
+ Signal processing for communication & networking
+ Image, video & multidimensional signal processing
+ Signal processing theory & methods
+ Industry technology tracks
+ Signal processing for Big Data
+ Information forensics and security
+ Internet of Things and RFID
+ Machine learning for signal processing
+ Speech processing
+ Multimedia signal processing
+ Spoken language processing
+ Remote Sensing and signal processing
+ Signal Processing for Brain Machine Interface
+ Signal Processing for Smart Systems
+ Signal Processing for Cyber Security

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. A selection of best papers will be made by the ICASSP 2017 committee upon recommendations from Technical Committees.

SPECIAL SESSIONS
Special-session proposals should be submitted by July 11, 2016. Proposals for special sessions must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information for the session chair, a list of authors, and a tentative title and abstract. Additional information can be found at the ICASSP 2017 website (http://www.ieee-icassp2017.org).

TUTORIALS
Will be held on March 5, 2017. Brief proposals should be submitted by September 15, 2016. Proposal for tutorials must include a title, an outline of the tutorial and its motivation, a two-page CV of the presenter(s), and a short description of the material to be covered.

SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS
Authors of IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL) papers will be given the opportunity to present their work at ICASSP 2017, subject to space availability and approval by the ICASSP Technical Program Chairs. SPL papers published between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016 are eligible for presentation at ICASSP 2017. Because they are already peer-reviewed and published, SPL papers presented at ICASSP 2017 will neither be reviewed nor included in the ICASSP proceedings. Requests for presentation of SPL papers should be made through the ICASSP 2017 website on or before December 12, 2016. Approved requests for presentation must have one author/presenter register for the conference.

DEMOS
Offers a perfect stage to showcase innovative ideas in all technical areas of interest at ICASSP. All demo sessions are highly interactive and visible. Please refer to the ICASSP 2017 website for additional information regarding demo submission.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
  Special-Session proposals:                    July 11, 2016
  Tutorials proposals:                          September 15, 2016
  Notification of Special Session acceptance:   August 15, 2016
  Notification of Tutorial acceptance:          October 15, 2016
  Submission of regular papers:                 September 12, 2016
  Signal Processing Letters:                    November 21, 2016
  Notification of paper acceptance:             December 12, 2016
  Author registration:                          January 9, 2017

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11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
 
LATA 2017
 
Umeå, Sweden
 
March 6-10, 2017
 
Organized by:
           
Department of Computing Science
Umeå University
 
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2017/
*************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field organized by Rovira i Virgili University since 2002, LATA 2017 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas.
 
VENUE:
 
LATA 2017 will take place in Umeå, a university town in North Sweden which was European Capital of Culture in 2014. The venue will be the Faculty of Science and Technology.
 
SCOPE:
 
Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
algebraic language theory
algorithms for semi-structured data mining
algorithms on automata and words
automata and logic
automata for system analysis and programme verification
automata networks
automatic structures
codes
combinatorics on words
computational complexity
concurrency and Petri nets
data and image compression
descriptional complexity
foundations of finite state technology
foundations of XML
grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, unification, categorial, etc.)
grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
graphs and graph transformation
language varieties and semigroups
language-based cryptography
mathematical and logical foundations of programming methodologies
parallel and regulated rewriting
parsing
patterns
power series
string processing algorithms
symbolic dynamics
term rewriting
transducers
trees, tree languages and tree automata
weighted automata
 
STRUCTURE:
 
LATA 2017 will consist of:
 
invited talks
invited tutorials
peer-reviewed contributions
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be completed):
 
Eric Allender (Rutgers University, Piscataway, US)
Christel Baier (Technical University of Dresden, DE)
Armin Biere (Johannes Kepler University Linz, AT)
Avrim Blum (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US)
Liming Cai (University of Georgia, Athens, US)
Alessandro Cimatti (Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, IT)
Rocco De Nicola (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, IT)
Rodney Downey (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)
Frank Drewes (Umeå University, SE)
Zoltán Fülöp (University of Szeged, HU)
Gregory Z. Gutin (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Lane A. Hemaspaandra (University of Rochester, US)
Dorit S. Hochbaum (University of California, Berkeley, US)
Marek Karpinski (University of Bonn, DE)
Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Ottawa, CA)
Lars M. Kristensen (Bergen University College, NO)
Kim G. Larsen (Aalborg University, DK)
Axel Legay (INRIA, Rennes, FR)
Leonid Libkin (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Carsten Lutz (University of Bremen, DE)
João Marques Silva (University of Lisbon, PT)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, ES, chair)
Mitsunori Ogihara (University of Miami, Coral Gables, US)
Arlindo Oliveira (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, PT)
David Parker (University of Birmingham, UK)
Madhusudan Parthasarathy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, US)
Doron A. Peled (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, IL)
Jean-Éric Pin (Paris Diderot University, FR)
Wojciech Rytter (University of Warsaw, PL)
Kunihiko Sadakane (University of Tokyo, JP)
Jens Stoye (Bielefeld University, DE)
Wing-Kin Sung (National University of Singapore, SG)
Dimitrios M. Thilikos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, GR)
Ioannis G. Tollis (University of Crete, Heraklion, GR)
Bianca Truthe (University of Giessen, DE)
Frits Vaandrager (Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Yonas Demeke (Umeå)
Frank Drewes (Umeå, co-chair)
Petter Ericson (Umeå)
Anna Jonsson (Umeå)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Manuel Jesús Parra Royón (Granada)
Bianca Truthe (Giessen)
Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)
Niklas Zechner (Umeå)
 
SUBMISSIONS:
 
Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices, references, proofs, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).
 
Submissions have to be uploaded to:
 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2017
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.
 
A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.
 
REGISTRATION:
 
The registration form can be found at:
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2017/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Paper submission: October 21, 2016
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: November 25, 2016
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: December 5, 2016
Early registration: December 5, 2016
Late registration: February 20, 2017
Submission to the journal special issue: June 10, 2017
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
florentinalilica.voicu (at) urv.cat
 
POSTAL ADDRESS:
 
LATA 2017
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain
 
Phone: +34 977 559 543+34 977 559 543
Fax: +34 977 558 386
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
 
Umeå universitet
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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 ************************************
Call for Papers
************************************
Workshop (In)Coherence of Discourse 4

March 30th and 31th, 2017
LORIA - Nancy

http://discours.loria.fr
************************************

The fourth (In)Coherence of discourse workshop will be held in the
University of Lorraine on March 30th and 31th, 2017.
The objective of the workshop is to discuss the latest advances in the
modelling of discourses, in particular the kind held with pathological
patients (e.g. schizophrenics). The adopted modelling paradigm is that
of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics
and logic while also making ties to the philosophy of language.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
discourse comprehension and representation
experimental studies of non standard dialogues
formal accounts of dialogues
logic and reasoning
semantics / pragmatics interfaces
goals, intentions and commitments in dialogues
Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics        mental illness and cognitive (in)coherence
radical interpretation
logicality and cognitive (in)coherence

Like the previous (In)Coherence of discourse workshops, the fourth
edition is organised by the SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language: Analysis
and Modelling) project. The SLAM project aims to systematize the study
of pathological conversations as part of an interdisciplinary approach
combining Psychology, Linguistics, Computer Science and Philosophy. It
focuses particularly on conversations involving people with psychiatric
disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder).

Important dates:
        * January 9th, 2017: Submission deadline
        * February 6th, 2017: Notification
        * March 30th-31th, 2017: Workshop

Submission:
Authors are invited to submit a two-page PDF abstract (including
references), anonymously prepared for review, in English or French,
using easychair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=incoherence4

Keynote speakers:
Alain Lecomte, professeur émérite Université Paris 8
Ellen Breitholtz and Christine Howes, University of Gothenburg

Scientific committee:
Maxime Amblard - Université de Lorraine
Nicholas Asher - CNRS Toulouse
Valérie Aucouturier - Université Paris Descartes
Patrick Blackburn - University of Roskilde
Mathilde Dargnat - Université de Lorraine
Felicity Deamer - Durham University
Hans van Ditmarsch - CNRS Nancy
Bart Geurts - University of Nijmegen
Philippe de Groote - INRIA Nancy
Klaus von Heusinguer - Universität zu Köln
Michel Musiol - Université de Lorraine
Denis Paperno - CNRS Nancy
Sylvain Pogodalla - INRIA Nancy
Manuel Rebuschi - Université de Lorraine
Christian Retoré - Université de Montpellier
Laure Vieu - CNRS Toulouse
Sam Wilkinson - Durham University


Organisation committee:
Maxime Amblard (Loria, INRIA, CNRS, Université de Lorraine)
Stefan Jokulsson (LHSP-Archives Poincaré, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)
Michel Musiol (ATILF, UFR SHS Nancy, CNRS, Université de Lorraine)
Marie-Hélène Pierre (ATILF, UFR SHS Nancy, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)
Manuel Rebuschi (LHSP-Archives Poincaré, CNRS, Université de
 Lorraine)

Supported by: CNRS, Université de Lorraine, INRIA, MSH Lorraine,
LORIA, LHSP? Archives Henri-Poincaré and ATILF

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Workshop on Speech perception and production across the lifespan (SPPL 2017)

26/27 April 2017, UCL, London, UK

Workshop website: www.sppl2017.org

Contact email: sppl2017@pals.ucl.ac.uk

Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2017

Workshop description

Although the focus of much research into speech development has been to establish when ?adult-like? performance is reached (with young adult speakers taken as a ?norm?), it is increasingly clear that speech perception and production abilities are undergoing constant change across the lifespan as a result of physical changes, exposure to language variation, and cognitive changes at various periods of our lives.  Few studies have examined changes in speech production or perception measures across the lifespan using common materials and experimental designs. Lifespan studies can further our understanding of the extent and direction of these changes for key measures of speech communication and of how these changes interact with cognitive, social or sensory factors. Such knowledge is essential to refine and extend models of speech perception and production.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for interactions between researchers from areas of speech and language sciences research that may be focused on different developmental stages, e.g. early development and ageing. It will also discuss methodological issues, such as how to overcome the difficulty of developing tests that are equally appropriate for children, younger and older adults, and will consider ?missing gaps? in the developmental trajectory, e.g. data for older teenagers and middle-aged adults.

Invited speakers

Paul FOULKES (University of York)

Sandra GORDON-SALANT (University of Maryland)

Mitchell SOMMERS (Washington University)

Hayo TERBAND (University of Utrecht)

Call for papers

We invite submissions for oral and poster presentations. Presentations can include or consist of demonstrations of tests and software. We expect submitted papers to report experimental and modelling studies relating to more than one age group or longitudinal work. See further detail of topics at http://sppl2017.org/call-for-papers

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ACM ICMR 2017, June 5-8, Bucharest, Romania
International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
http://www.icmr2017.ro/
https://www.facebook.com/icmr2017/
https://twitter.com/icmr17


*** CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS ***

ACM ICMR-2016 is the premier conference for multimedia information
retrieval. We are calling for papers presenting significant and
innovative research in multimedia retrieval and related fields. Papers
should extend the state of the art by addressing new problems or
proposing insightful solutions. The scope of the conference includes
core topics in multimedia retrieval and recommendation, as well as the
broader set of topics that must be addressed to ensure that multimedia
retrieval technologies are of practical use in real-world use cases.
Special emphasis is placed on topics related to large-scale indexing,
user interaction, exploiting diverse and multimodal data, and
domain-specific challenges.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
? Multimedia content-based search and retrieval
? Multimedia-content-based (or hybrid) recommender systems
? Large-scale and web-scale multimedia retrieval
? Multimedia content extraction, analysis, and indexing
? Multimedia analytics and knowledge discovery
? Multimedia machine learning, deep learning, and neural nets
? Relevance feedback, active learning, and transfer learning
? Zero-shot learning and fine-grained retrieval for multimedia
? Event-based indexing and multimedia understanding
? Semantic descriptors and novel high- or mid-level features
? Crowdsourcing, community contributions, and social multimedia
? Multimedia retrieval leveraging quality, production cues, style, framing, affect
? Narrative generation and narrative analysis
? User intent and human perception in multimedia retrieval
? Query processing and relevance feedback
? Multimedia browsing, summarization, and visualization
? Multimedia beyond video, including 3D data and sensor data
? Mobile multimedia browsing and search
? Multimedia analysis/search acceleration, e.g., GPU, FPGA
? Benchmarks and evaluation methodologies for multimedia analysis/search
? Applications of multimedia retrieval, e.g., medicine, sports, commerce, lifelogs,
travel, security, environment.


*IMPORTANT DATES*

-Full/short papers-
Paper Submission: January 27, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: March 29, 2017

-Open software papers-
Paper Submission: January 27, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: March 29, 2017

-Demo papers-
Paper Submission: January 27, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: March 29, 2017

-Brave new ideas papers-
Paper Submission: February 10, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: March 29, 2017

-Doctoral symposium papers-
Paper Submission: February 17, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: March 29, 2017

-Special session proposals-
Proposals due: November 30, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: December 12, 2016

-Tutorial proposals-
Proposals due: February 12, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: February 26, 2017

-Workshop proposals-
Proposals due: November 30, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: December 12, 2016


Details of each track are available on the conference website:
http://www.icmr2017.ro/call-for-contributions.php

Looking forward to hosting you in Bucharest!

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*First Call for Papers and Workshops: Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2017*

University of Cologne, 12-14 June 2017

The Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) conference is an interdisciplinary forum
bringing together researchers interested in all areas of phonetics and phonology, both
theoretical and applied, with a special focus on Laboratory Phonology. The series covers
a wide variety of topics including tone and intonation, phonological theory, language
acquisition, linguistic typology, and methodologies from fields as diverse as
psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and speech technology.

The Cologne PaPE conference, scheduled for June 12-14 2017, complements this broad
mission with a more specific scientific aim, namely to contribute towards a fundamental
integration of the fields of phonetics and phonology, highlighting the intrinsic
relationship between the two. Submissions in any area of phonetics and phonology are
welcome with special consideration given to papers addressing the conference's
integrative goal.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Jonathan Barnes (Boston University)

Bettina Braun (Universität Konstanz)

Mirjam Ernestus (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)

Maria Josep Solé (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Satellite workshops will be held on June 11 (whole day) and June 14 (afternoon) 2017.

Conference web site: http://pape2017.uni-koeln.de/


Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: December 9, 2016
Notification of acceptance: January 21, 2017
Submission of revised abstracts: February 25, 2017
PaPE 2017 Conference: June 12-14, 2017


Submission Information
Abstracts should be written in English and not exceed one page of text (A4). In addition,
references, examples and/or figures can optionally be included on a second page.
Abstracts can be submitted from November 1 until December 9, 2016, using the EasyChair
link that will be provided on the conference website. Abstracts may be submitted either
for a 'talk/poster', or as a 'poster only'. Authors may submit one abstract as first
author and up to three abstracts as a co-author.


Call for Satellite Workshop proposals

University of Cologne, June 11 (whole day) and June 14 (afternoon) 2017

The PaPE 2017 Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops to be held in
conjunction with the conference. There is no restriction regarding topics, as long as
there is a clear relevance to phonetics and phonology. Rooms for the workshops will be
provided.
The workshop proposal should be sent to pape-2017@uni-koeln.de by October 1 and should
not exceed two A4 pages and include information on the topic, the organizers (including
affiliation and e-mail address) and the paper selection process.


PaPE Organization
Martine Grice, Stefan Baumann, Francesco Cangemi, Anna Bruggeman (University of Cologne)


Contact
For enquiries please contact us at pape-2017@uni-koeln.de.

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The Phonetics Laboratory of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Málaga are happy to announce the upcoming celebration of the International Conference Subsidia: Tools and Resources for Speech Sciences, which will take place on June 21-23, 2017, in the city of Málaga (Costa del Sol, Spain).
During this quarter of 2016 we will be sending further information concerning the Conference, as well as its website address.
If you have any questions, please contact Juana Gil: juana.gil@cchs.csic.es, or José Villa:jovillavilla@hotmail.com. 

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Paris,  29 juin - 30 juin 2017

Organisées pour la première fois à Paris en 2005 puis rééditées successivement à Grenoble (2007), Aix-en-Provence (2009), Strasbourg (2011), Liège  (2013) et Montpellier (2015), les Journées de Phonétique Clinique (JPC) reviennent à Paris en 2017.

Elles réunissent des chercheurs et des ingénieurs mais aussi des médecins (ORL, phoniatres, chirurgiens,…) ainsi que des orthophonistes s’intéressant tous aux questions liées aux pathologies de la voix, de la parole et du langage.

Les 7^èmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique,  se dérouleront à Paris du 29 juin au 30 juin 2017, organisées par le Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie (LPP-UMR7018), l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris3, l’Université Paris Descartes, l’Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou HEGP (service ORL et Unité d’exploration fonctionnelle des troubles de la voix, de la parole et de la déglutition), le Département Universitaire d’Orthophonie (Université Pierre et Marie Curie UPMC).

Les thèmes de ces 7^èmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique incluront, de façon non exhaustive, les problématiques suivantes :

- troubles phonétiques / phonologiques

- troubles de la production / de la perception

- troubles de la voix / de la parole

- communication verbale / non verbale

- troubles moteurs de la parole  

- Instrumentation, ressources et modélisations en phonétique clinique

Bientôt plus d’'infos...

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The 2017 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology.  It will be held this year at CMU in Pittsburgh.

The CFP with more details can be found here: http://engineering.jhu.edu/clsp/wp-content/uploads/sites/75/2016/10/WS17-CFP.pdf

More information (and maybe inspiration) about previous workshops can be found here: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops

 Andrew Rosenberg & Izhak Shafran

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http://www.sped2017.ro

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                 TSD 2017 - PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
**************************************************************************

           The twentieth anniversary International Conference on
                   TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2017)
                      Praha (Prague), Czech Republic
                            August 27-31, 2017
                       http://www.tsdconference.org


TSD HIGHLIGHTS

* Invited speakers: Tomas Mikolov and other eminent personages with various
  expertise covering speech modeling, acoustic-phonetic decoding, dialogue
  systems, and semantics have been asked to give their respective pieces of
  speech.
* TSD is traditionally published by Springer-Verlag and regularly listed in
  all major citation databases: Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings
  Citation Index, DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, COMPENDEX, etc.
* TSD offers high-standard transparent review process - double blind, final
  reviewers discussion.
* TSD will take place in the historical centre of Prague, the Capital of
  the Czech Republic in co-operation with the Institute of Formal and
  Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles
  University.
* TSD provides an all-service package (conference access and material, all
  meals, one social event, etc.) for an easily affordable fee starting at
  290 EUR for students and 360 EUR for full participants.

TSD SERIES

TSD series have evolved as a prime forum for interaction between
researchers in both spoken and written language processing from all over
the world. Proceedings of the TSD conference form a book published by
Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI)
series. The TSD proceedings are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters
Conference Proceedings Citation Index. LNAI series are listed in all major
citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, or COMPENDEX.

TOPICS

Topics of the 20th anniversary conference will include (but are not limited
to):

    Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional speech,
    handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words, alternative way of
    feature extraction, new models for acoustic and language modelling).

    Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual, text, and
    spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation, specialized
    lexicons, dictionaries).

    Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high fidelity
    speech synthesis, computer singing).

    Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech (multilingual
    processing, sentiment analysis, credibility analysis, automatic text
    labeling, summarization, authorship attribution).

    Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information extraction,
    information retrieval, data mining, semantic web, knowledge
    representation, inference, ontologies, sense disambiguation, plagiarism
    detection).

    Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing (machine
    translation, natural language understanding, question-answering
    strategies, assistive technologies).

    Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
    question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in dialogues).

    Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial
    animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotion and
    personality modelling).


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

All program committee members are listed on the conference web pages:
http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2017/index.php?page=committees

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event is English, however, papers on issues
related to text and speech processing in languages other than English are
strongly encouraged.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 31, 2017 ............ Deadline for submission of contributions
May 10, 2017 .............. Notification of acceptance or rejection
May 31, 2017 .............. Deadline for submission of camera-ready papers

August 27-31, 2017 ........ TSD2017 conference date

The proceedings will be provided on flash drives in form of navigable
content. Printed books will be available for extra fee.

CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on the participant's
status (full or student). It includes one copy of the conference
proceedings (on a USB flash drive), refreshments/coffee breaks, lunches and
dinners, opening dinner, welcome party, mid-conference social event
admissions, and organizing costs. In order to lower the fee as much as
possible, the accommodation and the conference trip are not included in it
this time.

Full participant:
    early registration by May 31, 2017 -  CZK   10 000 (approx. 360 EUR)
    late registration by August 1, 2017 - CZK   11 000 (approx. 400 EUR)
    on-site registration -                CZK   12 000 (approx. 444 EUR)

Student (reduced):
    early registration by May 31, 2017 -  CZK    8 000 (approx. 290 EUR)
    late registration by August 1, 2017 - CZK    8 700 (approx. 322 EUR)
    on-site registration -                CZK   10 000 (approx. 360 EUR)

Please, keep in mind that the fees are preliminary and they may slightly
change in the future.  We are also doing our best to find a way to reduce
the fees for students.

LOCATION

Praha (Prague)--also called The City of a Hundred Spires or The Heart of
Europe--is situated in the very centre of Bohemia on the banks of the river
Vltava. There live more than 1.2 million people in the metropolitan area.
Thus, Praha is considered the centre of science, higher education, culture,
economy and authorities.

The city is divided into ten districts. Each of them offers its own
charming atmosphere predicated upon its rich history.  A good example can
be the Jewish Quarter (Josefov) known especially for the legend of Golem
and famous writer Franz Kafka. Then, walking the Parizska street (said to
be the most luxurious street in the city), there is the Old Town Square.
One of the most important squares of the city renowned for the rare Prague
Astronomical Clock (Orloj), number of galleries, Bethlehem Chapel and
a monument of religious reformer Jan Hus.

The next place of interest can be found in the area of the New Town. The
Wenceslas square with the monument of St. Wenceslas, the patron saint of
the Czech state, is the longest square of the republic. Its capacity is
fully used by various shops, restaurants, clubs and street artists. Also
the renaissance revival-styled building of National Museum, which is now
under reconstruction, is situated on the upper end of the square.

Modern art and architecture together with technical mastery demonstration
are represented by the Zizkov Television Tower, the Dancing House (Fred and
Ginger Building) or the Stefanik's Observatory on the Petrin hill located
in the neighbourhood of the quarter Hradcany. Also Krizik's light fountain
or Industrial Palace in the area of the Holesovice Showground are worth
seeing.

However, the dominant feature of the skyline is still created by the Prague
Castle and the Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral spires. The Golden Lane heading
down to the Lesser Town shows the tiny and colorful medieval houses.  There
are many bridges connecting the banks of the Vltava River.

However, only one of them is well known in the whole world--the Charles
bridge. Czech King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV promoted its
construction in the 14th century. The bridge is 520 metres long and stands
for a connection between the Lesser Town and the Old Town. It was built in
the Gothic style as well as the St. Vitus Cathedral.

Charles IV was also the founder of the University, which now proudly bears
his name--The Charles University. It is one the world's oldest universities
and with 17 faculties, 3 institutes, 6 centres of teaching, research and
development it is also the largest and best rated university in the Czech
Republic. The students can choose some of the 642 courses within 300 of
accredited degree programmes in the field of medicine, law, theology,
pharmacy, arts, science, mathematics and physics, education, social
sciences, physical education and sports, and humanities.

We are justifiably very proud of the fact that the campus of the Charles
University is going to host the TSD2017 conference.


ABOUT CONFERENCE

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University
of West Bohemia, Pilsen, the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University,
Brno, and the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of
Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University.

The TSD2017 organizing committee has again applied for TSD2017 to be
recognized as an INTERSPEECH 2017 satellite event.

Venue:
    Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University
    Mala Strana Campus - 'S' Building
    Malostranske nam. 2/25
    CZ-118 00 Praha 1

Accommodation:
    Orea Hotel Pyramida ****
    Belohorska 24
    CZ-169 00 Praha 6

CONTACT

The preferred way of contacting the conference organizing committee is
writing an e-mail to:
    Mrs Romana Strapkova, TSD2017 Conference Secretary
    E-mail: tsd2017@tsdconference.org
    Phone: (+420) 736 664 500

All paper correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

    TSD2017 - KIV
    Fakulta aplikovanych ved
    Zapadoceska univerzita v Plzni
    Univerzitni 8
    CZ-306 14 Plzen
    Czech Republic

    Fax: (+420) 377 632 402 -- Please, mark the faxed material with large
    capitals 'TSD' on top.

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EUSIPCO 2017 CALL FOR PAPERS
KOS ISLAND, GREECE
28th AUGUST- 2nd SEPTEMBER 2017

The 25th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2017) will be held in the Greek island of Kos from August 28 to September 2, 2017, at the Kos International Convention Center. The flagship conference of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) will offer a comprehensive technical program addressing all the latest developments in research and technology for signal processing and its applications. It will feature world-class speakers, oral and poster sessions, keynotes and plenaries, exhibitions, demonstrations, tutorials and satellite workshops, and is expected to attract many leading researchers and industry figures from all over the world.

Technical scope: We invite the submission of original, unpublished technical papers on topics including but not limited to:
- Audio and acoustic signal processing
- Speech and language processing
- Image and video processing
- Multimedia signal processing
- Signal processing theory and methods
- Sensor array and multichannel signal processing
- Signal processing for communications
- Radar and sonar signal processing
- Signal processing over graphs and networks
- Nonlinear signal processing
- Statistical signal processing
- Compressed sensing and sparse modeling
- Optimization methods
- Machine learning
- Bio-medical image and signal processing
- Signal processing for computer vision and robotics
- Information forensics and security
- Signal processing for power systems
- Signal processing for education
- Bioinformatics and genomics
- Signal processing for big data
- Signal processing for the internet of things
- Design and implementation of signal processing systems
- Other signal processing areas

Accepted papers will be included in IEEE Xplore®. EURASIP Society enforces a ?no-show? policy. Procedures to submit papers, proposals for special sessions, tutorials and satellite workshops are detailed at the EUSIPCO website (www.eusipco2017.org).

** IMPORTANT DATES **
Special Session proposals: 12 December 2016
Tutorial proposals: 17 February 2017
Satellite Workshop proposals: 20 January 2017
Full paper submissions: 17 February 2017
Notification of paper acceptance: 25 May 2017
Camera-ready papers: 17 June 2017

STUDENT PAPER AWARDS: ?EUSIPCO Best Student Paper Awards? will be presented at the conference banquet. Papers will be selected by a committee composed of area and technical chairs.

PLACE: Kos has direct airport connections to many European cities and is located in the middle of the Dodecanese group of islands at the southeast part of the Aegean archipelagos. Rich in historic heritage, it has been a crossroad of many civilizations and was the birthplace of Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, and his ancient school of medicine. It offers a cosmopolitan mix of a vibrant city lifestyle, idyllic beaches, historic tours, easy access to other Greek islands and many other Mediterranean attractions.

TUTORIAL AND SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS: Tutorials will be held on August 28, 2017. Brief tutorial proposals should include title, outline, contact information, biography and selected publications for the presenter(s), and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants. Special session proposals should include title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited papers.

SATELLIT? WORKSHOP PROPOSALS:
The 2017 edition of EUSIPCO is proud to organize a full day of thematic workshops after the end of the main conference, which will provide a forum to participate in specific scientific events and present research focused on current innovative topics in signal processing technology and its extension to other fields.

3 MINUTE THESIS (3MT):
EUSIPCO 2017 is offering a 3 Minutes Thesis contest, where PhD students have three minutes to present a compelling oration on their thesis and its significance. It is an exercise for students to consolidate their ideas so they can present them concisely to an audience specialized in different signal processing fields.

Please refer to the EUSIPCO 2017 website for additional information.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
GENERAL CHAIRS
Petros Maragos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Sergios Theodoridis, National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

TECHNICAL PROGRAM CHAIRS
Konstantinos Diamantaras, Alexander Tech. Educ. Inst. of Thessaloniki, Greece
Stefanos Kollias, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Constantine Kotropoulos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Gerasimos Potamianos, University of Thessaly, Greece

PLENARY CHAIRS
Nikos Sidiropoulos, University of Minnesota, USA
Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California, USA

TUTORIAL CHAIRS
Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu, Télécom ParisTech, France
Aggelos Pikrakis, University of Piraeus, Greece

WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Kostas Berberidis, University of Patras, Greece
Iasonas Kokkinos, CentraleSupelec, France

FINANCE CHAIR
Costas Tzafestas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

PUBLICATION CHAIRS
Petros Boufounos, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, USA
Elias Manolakos, National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR
Giorgos Stamou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

PUBLICITY CHAIR
Panagiotis Tsakalides
University of Crete, Greece

INTERNATIONAL LIAISONS
North America: Georgios Giannakis, University of Minnesota, USA
South America: Paulo Diniz, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Asia: Hideaki Sakai, Kyoto University, Japan
EuCNC: Luis M. Correia, IST-University of Lisbon, Portugal

SECRETARIAT  ( secretariat@eusipco2017.org )      

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 EUSIPCO 2017 Announcement:  CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS

------------------------------------------------------------

Organizing Special Sessions in the 25th European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2017, Kos island, Greece (www.eusipco2017.org) . 

Prospective Researchers are invited to submit proposals for Special Sessions related to an emerging area in signal processing and to its applications by December 12th 2016, via e-mail in PDF to the Special Session chairs  Alex Potamianos and Maurizio Omologo (special_sessions@eusipco2017.org).

EUSIPCO has an excellent track record over the years for organizing Special Sessions in new or emerging areas. This year we are seeking innovative, high-quality and potentially interdisciplinary proposals for Special Sessions that complement the regular program of the conference. Special Sessions should be focused and provide both an overview of the state-of-the-art, as well as highlight the most promising research directions, trends and challenges in the proposed field of signal processing.

Proposers should submit the following information with their submission: 

1. Special Session title 
2. Short description of proposed field (one paragraph)
3. Novelty and motivation (one to two paragraphs), including why this topic is of interest to the EUSIPCO community
4. Short biography of the organizers
5. List of four (4) contributed papers (titles, authors w. affiliations, and a short abstract), excluding state-of-the art review and papers contributed by organizers 

Proposals will be evaluated based on topic novelty and associated impact, organizing committee qualifications, as well as the proposed list of contributed papers.

Special Session submissions at EUSIPCO 2017 are reviewed via the same exact process as submissions to the regular program, and papers are expected to meet the same quality standards. For Special Sessions that are somewhat undersubscribed (due to paper rejections or limited number of submissions), an effort will be made to identify regular submission papers to complete the session, as deemed appropriate by the conference organizers. If a Special Session is seriously undersubscribed the Special Session may be canceled, in which case the accepted papers from the canceled Special Session will be placed into the regular program.

The EUSIPCO 2017 Organizing Committee

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SPECOM 2017: 19^th International Conference on Speech and Computer

12-16 September 2017, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK

www.herts.ac.uk/specom2017

http://specom.nw.ru/

http://www.guide2research.com/conference/specom-2017-19th-international-conference-on-speech-and-computer-specom-2017

http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=57860&copyownerid=56734

Important Dates

March 12, 2017 ....... Submission of full papers

May 15, 2017 ............. Notification of acceptance

May 26, 2017 ............. Final papers (camera ready)

May 26, 2017 ............. Early registration

Sept 12-16, 2017 ??? Conference dates

TOPICS

The SPECOM conference is devoted to issues of human-machine interaction, particularly:

Affective computing; Applications for human-machine interaction; Audio-visual speech processing; Automatic language identification; Corpus linguistics and linguistic processing; Forensic speech investigations and security systems; Multichannel signal processing; Multimedia processing; Multimodal analysis and synthesis; Signal processing and feature extraction; Speaker identification and diarization; Speaker verification systems; Speech analytics and audio mining; Speech and language resources; Speech dereverberation; Speech disorders and voice pathologies; Speech driving systems in robotics; Speech enhancement; Speech perception; Speech recognition and understanding; Speech translation automatic systems; Spoken dialogue systems; Spoken language processing; Text mining and sentiment analysis; Text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems; Virtual and augmented reality.

Special Session 1: Natural Language Processing for Social Media Analysis

The exploitation of natural language from social media data is an intriguing task in the fields of text mining and natural language processing (NLP), with plenty of applications in social sciences and social media analytics. In this special session, we call for research papers in the broader field of NLP techniques for social media analysis. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to): sentiment analysis in social media and beyond (e.g., stance identification, sarcasm detection, opinion mining), computational sociolinguistics (e.g., identification of demographic information such as gender, age), and NLP tools for social media mining (e.g., topic modeling for social media data, text categorization and clustering for social media).

Organizers:

Vasiliki Simaki and Carita Paradis (Lund University, Sweden)

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros (UC San Diego, USA)

Andreas Kerren (Linnaeus University, Sweden)

Michalis Vazirgiannis (École Polytechnique, France)

Special Session 2: Multilingual and Low-Resourced Languages Speech Processing in Human-Computer Interaction

Multilingual speech processing has been an active topic for many years. Over the last few years, the availability of big data in a vast variety of languages and the convergence of speech recognition and synthesis approaches to statistical parametric techniques (mainly deep learning neural networks) have put this field in the center of research interest, with a special attention for low- or even zero-resourced languages. In this special session, we call for research papers in the field of multilingual speech processing. The topics include (but are not limited to): multilingual speech recognition and understanding, dialectal speech recognition, cross-lingual adaptation, text-to-speech synthesis, spoken language identification, speech-to-speech translation, multi-modal speech processing, keyword spotting, emotion recognition and deep learning in speech processing.

Organizers:

Alexandros Lazaridis (Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland)

Ivan Himawan (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Blaise Potard (CereProc Ltd, Edinburgh, UK)

Kate Knill (Cambridge University Engineering Department)

Peter Bell (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Special Session 3: Real-Life Challenges in Voice and Multimodal Biometrics

Complex passwords or cumbersome dongles are now obsolete. Biometric technology offers a secure and user friendly solution to authenticate and have been employed in various real-life scenarios. This special session seeks to bring together researchers, professionals, and practitioners to present and discuss recent developments and challenges in Real-Life applications of biometrics. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Biometric systems and applications; Identity management and biometrics; Fraud prevention; Anti-spoofing methods; Privacy protection of biometric systems; Uni-modalities, e.g. voice, face, fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, palm print and ear biometrics; Behavioural biometrics; Soft-biometrics; Multi-biometrics; Novel biometrics; Ethical and societal implications of biometric systems and applications.

Organizers:

Saeid Safavi (School of Engineering and Technology, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Lily Meng (School of Engineering and Technology, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Maryam Najafian (CSAIL Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Mohamad Hassan Bahari (Centre for processing speech and images, KU Leuven, Belgium)

Abosoud Hanani (Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Birzeit University, Palestine)

Hossein Zeinali (Computer and Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Iran)

Satellite Event

The 2^nd International conference on interactive collaborative robotics (ICR 2017)

web: http://specom.nw.ru/icr2017.html

Topics: Assistive robots; Child-robot interaction; Collaborative robotics; Educational robotics; Human-robot interaction; Medical robotics; Robotic mobility systems; Robots at home; Robot control and communication; Social robotics; Safety robot behaviour.

On behalf of the Organising Committee,

Iosif Mporas

************************************************

19^th International Conference on Speech and Computer

SPECOM 2017, http://www.herts.ac.uk/specom2017

************************************************

Dr Iosif Mporas, Dipl-Eng, PhD

Senior Lecturer in Information Engineering

Information Engineering and Processing Architectures Group

go.herts.ac.uk/iepa

School of Engineering and Technology

University of Hertfordshire

College Lane Campus

Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK

http://go.herts.ac.uk/iosif_mporas

www.iosifmporas.gr

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Speech Rhythm in L1, L2 and Learner Varieties of English

Workshop at BICLCE2017 (7^th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English) in Vigo, 28-30 September 2017

https://sites.google.com/site/rflinguistics/workshops/rhythm2017

Convenor: Robert Fuchs (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Speech rhythm has long been recognised as an important supra-segmental category of speech, yet its measurement, relevance and the theoretical soundness of the concept continue to be hotly debated. The arguably most widely supported approach considers speech rhythm to consist of a continuum ranging from (1) a syllable-timed pole, with relatively small differences in prominence between syllables, to (2) a stress-timed pole, with relatively large differences in prominence between syllables. Most L1 varieties of English are widely regarded to be more stress-timed than most L2 and learner varieties, and this is supported by a considerable amount of empirical evidence (e.g. Deterding 1994, 2001, Fuchs 2016, Gut 2005, Gut and Milde 2002, Low 1998).

Yet, upon closer inspection, many of the concepts underlying this research appear to be contested. For one, L1 varieties of English are themselves heterogeneous in their rhythm. There is, for example, regional variation, with some dialects spoken in the British Isles being more syllable-timed than others (Ferragne 2008, Ferragne and Pellegrino 2004, White and Matty 2007a, 2007b, White et al. 2007). Similarly, in L2 varieties, sociolinguistic differences such as that between acrolect and basilect might go hand in hand with a difference in speech rhythm. As for learner Englishes, while there is good evidence of the transfer of rhythmic characteristics from L1 to L2 (e.g. Dellwo et al. 2009, Gut 2009, Jang 2008, Sarmah et al. 2009), more research is needed to show that this has consequences in terms of foreign accent and accent recognition. More generally, research on speech rhythm would benefit from studies showing that quantitative measures of speech rhythm (so-called rhythm metrics) are perceptually relevant and psychologically ?real? in the sense that what is measured is reflected in a certain kind of percept. Finally, the very nature and reliability of these rhythm metrics has been discussed extensively, but arguably inconclusively, in the past years, with some researchers attempting to identify those duration-based metrics that are most reliable (White and Mattys 2007a, White et al.2007, Wiget et al. 2010), others concluding that none of them are reliable (Arvaniti 2009, 2012, Arvaniti et al. 2008), and yet others suggesting metrics that focus on acoustic correlates of prominence other than duration, such as intensity (Fuchs 2016, He 2012, Low 1998), loudness (Fuchs 2014a), f0 (Cumming 2010, 2011, Fuchs 2014b) and sonority (Galves et al. 2012).

In order to address these issues, this workshop aims to bring together researchers working on one or more of the following aspects:

• Applications of rhythm metrics that measure speech rhythm based on acoustic correlates of prominence other than duration
• Comparative tests of the validity and reliability of existing rhythm metrics
• Perceptual relevance and psychological reality of speech rhythm
• Relevance of speech rhythm in Second Language Acquisition/learner Englishes, e.g. its contribution to foreign accent as well as pedagogical approaches
• Differences in speech rhythm between varieties previously thought to be in the same 'rhythm class'
• Sociolinguistic relevance of speech rhythm in indexing e.g. lectal differences or ethnic subvarieties within the same national variety of English

Apart from addressing one or more of the issues above, papers need be concerned with (a variety of) English or a language contact situation involving English (in keeping with the scope of the conference).

The workshop will consist of full papers and work in progress reports, which will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation (plus 10 minutes for discussion). The deadline for submission of abstracts (ca. 500 words, excluding title, references and keywords) is 15 December 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January 2017. Abstracts should be sent to rfuchs@hkbu.edu.hk .

References

Arvaniti, Amalia. 2009. Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica 66(1/2): 46?63.

Arvaniti, Amalia. 2012. The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm. Journal of Phonetics 40: 351?373.

Arvaniti, Amalia, Tristie Ross, and Naja Ferjan. 2008. On the reliability of rhythm metrics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124(4): 2495.Dellwo, Volker, Francisco Gutiérrez Diez, and Nuria Gavalda. 2009. The development of measurable speech rhythm in Spanish speakers of English. In Actas de XI Simposio Internacional de Comunicacion Social, Santiago de Cuba, 594?597.

Cumming, Ruth E. 2010. The language-specific integration of pitch and duration. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

Cumming, Ruth E. 2011. Perceptually informed quantification of speech rhythm in pairwise variability indices. Phonetica 68(4): 256?277.

Deterding, David. 1994. The rhythm of Singapore English. In Proceedings of the fifth Australian international conference on speech science and technology, ed. Roberto Togneri, 316?321. Perth: Uniprint.

Deterding, David. 2001. The measurement of rhythm: A comparison of Singapore and British English. Journal of Phonetics 29: 217?230.

Ferragne, Emmanuel. 2008. Etude Phonétique des Dialectes Modernes de l?Anglais des Iles Britanniques: Vers l?Identification Automatique du Dialecte. PhD thesis. Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Ferragne, Emmanuel, and François Pellegrino. 2004. A comparative account of the suprasegmental and rhythmic features of British English dialects. Actes de Modelisations pour l?Identification des Langues, Paris, 121?126.

Fuchs, Robert. 2014a. Integrating variability in loudness and duration in a multidimensional model of speech rhythm: Evidence from Indian English and British English. In Proceedings of speech prosody 7, Dublin, ed. Nick Campbell, Dafydd Gibbon, and Daniel Hirst, 290?294.

Fuchs, Robert. 2014b. Towards a perceptual model of speech rhythm: Integrating the influence of f0 on perceived duration. In Proceedings of interspeech 2014, ed. Haizhou Li, Helen Meng, Bin Ma, Eng Siong Chng, and Lei Xie, Singapore, 1949?1953.

Fuchs, Robert. 2016. Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English: Evidence from Educated Indian English and British English. Singapore: Springer.

Galves, Antonio, Jesus Garcia, Denise Duarte, and Charlotte Galves. 2002. Sonority as a basis for rhythmic class discrimination. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2002, Aix-en-Provence, 323?326.

Gut, Ulrike. 2005. Nigerian English prosody. English World-Wide 26(2): 153?177.

Gut, Ulrike. 2009. Non-native speech. A corpus-based analysis of phonological and phonetic properties of L2 English and German. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gut, Ulrike, and Jan-Torsten Milde. 2002. The prosody of Nigerian English. In Proceedings of the speech prosody 2002 conference, ed. Bel Bell and Isabelle Marlien, 367?370. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage.

He, Lei. 2012. Syllabic intensity variations as quantification of speech rhythm: Evidence from both L1 and L2. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on speech prosody, Shanghai, 22?26 May 2012, ed. Qiuwu Ma, Hongwei Ding, and Daniel Hirst, 466?469. Shanghai: Tongji University Press.

Jang, Tae-Yeoub. 2008. Speech rhythm metrics for automatic scoring of English speech by Korean EFL learners. Malsori Speech Sounds 66: 41?59.

Low, Ee Ling. 1998. Prosodic Prominence in Singapore English. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

Sarmah, Priyankoo, Divya Verma Gogoi, and Caroline Wiltshire. 2009. Thai English. Rhythm and vowels. English World-Wide 30(2): 196?217.

White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007a. Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. Journal of Phonetics 35(4): 501?522.

White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007b. Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology 282: 237?257.

White, Laurence, Sven L. Mattys, Lucy Series, and Suzi Gage. 2007. Rhythm metrics predict rhythmic discrimination. In  Proceedings of the 16th international congress of phonetic sciences, Saarbrücken, 1009?1012.

Wiget, Klaus, Laurence White, Barbara Schuppler, Izabelle Grenon, Oleysa Rauch, and Sven L. Mattys. 2010. How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127(3): 1559?1569.

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 We take great pleasure to invite you to submit research article in the 11th International
Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP-2017) which will be held on October 16-19, 2017 in
Tianjin, China. ISSP is a triennial conference with the aim of providing an
interdisciplinary forum for researchers working on all aspects of speech production from
fields as diverse as phonology, phonetics, prosody, mechanics, acoustics, physiology,
motor control, neuroscience, computer science and human interaction. ISSP has been held
over the word since 1988.

The ISSP-2017 will be hosted by Tianjin University and Institute of Linguistics of
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Tianjin was the ancient port city to Beijing, and is
the 3rd largest city of China with a population of over 15 million. It has a rich history
and remains characteristics of old British and Italian architecture. The famous Italian
concession area has the largest cluster of old Italian architecture outside of Italy.
Located 85 miles east of Beijing, Tianjin is the largest coastal city in northern China.
Tianjin is now a modern, developed city. Tianjin has a reputation throughout China for
being extremely friendly, safe and a place of delicious food. Welcome to Tianjin.

The proceeding will be published by Springer and indexed by EI. Papers with high quality
will be included in a special issue of ?Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing
Research?/ ?Journal of Phonetics? after revision.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not restricted to the following:

?        Perception-action control
?        Intra- and inter-speaker variability
?        Articulatory synthesis
?        Mapping between articulatory and acoustic events
?        Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion
?        Coarticulation
?        Prosody
?        Biomechanical modeling
?        Models of motor control
?        Audiovisual synthesis
?        Aerodynamic models
?        Cerebral organization and neural correlates of speech
?        Disorders of speech motor control
?        Instrumental techniques
?        Speech and language acquisition
?        Audio-visual speech perception
?        Plasticity of speech production and perception

    For more information about ISSP2017, please refer to the conference webpage:
www.issp2017.org.cn


Important Dates:

2-page abstract submission deadline       1 March 2017

Notification of paper acceptance             1 May 2017

Full paper upload deadline                       1 August 2017

Author?s registration deadline                 1 September 2017

best

--
Qiang Fang
Phonetics Lab.
Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
No.5, Jian Guo Men Nei Da Jie, Beijing, China


 

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ASRU 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop December 16-20, 2017 Okinawa, Japan http://asru2017.org CALL FOR PAPERS The biennial IEEE ASRU workshop has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting to discuss problems of common interest in automatic speech recognition, understanding, and related fields of research. The workshop includes keynotes, invited talks, poster sessions and will also feature challenge tasks, panel discussions, and demo sessions. TOPICS AND FOCUS We invite papers in all areas of spoken language processing, with emphasis placed on the following topics: - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) - ASR in adverse environments - New applications of ASR - Speech-to-speech translation - Spoken document retrieval - Multilingual language processing - Spoken language understanding - Spoken dialog systems - Text-to-speech systems VENUE The ASRU workshop will take place in Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is a subtropical island located roughly 640 kilometers (400 mi) south of the main islands of Japan. It is one of Japanfs main tourist destinations because of its warm weather, its rich natural resources, and its unique blend of cultures that evolved through centuries of trade with China, Korea and other Southeast Asian countries. FORMAT The workshop features one keynote and one or two invited talks a day. Regular papers are presented as posters. ASRU 2017 will also include challenge tasks, panel discussions and demo sessions. SCHEDULE Paper Submission............. June 29, 2017 Paper Notification........... August 31, 2017 Early Registration Period:... August 31 - Oct 5, 2017 Camera Ready Deadline........ Sept 21, 2017 Workshop..................... Dec 16-20, 2017 MORE INFORMATION For updates see http://www.asru2017.org

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