INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON DEEP LEARNING
 
DeepLearn 2017
 
Bilbao, Spain
 
July 17-21, 2017
 
Organized by:
University of Deusto
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/DeepLearn2017/
 
************************************************************
  
Regular registration deadline: July 14, 2017 ---
  
  
********************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
DeepLearn 2017 will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning. This is a branch of artificial intelligence covering a spectrum of current exciting machine learning research and industrial innovation that provides more efficient algorithms to deal with large-scale data in neuroscience, computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, drug discovery, biomedical informatics, recommender systems, learning theory, robotics, games, etc. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.
 
Most deep learning subareas will be displayed, and main challenges identified through 4 keynote lectures, 30 six-hour courses, and 1 round table, which will tackle the most active and promising topics. The organizers are convinced that outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event. An open session will give participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
In principle, graduate students, doctoral students and postdocs will be typical profiles of participants. However, there are no formal pre-requisites for attendance in terms of academic degrees. Since there will be a variety of levels, specific knowledge background may be assumed for some of the courses. DeepLearn 2017 is also appropriate for more senior academics and practitioners who want to keep themselves updated on recent developments and future trends. All will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.
 
REGIME:
 
In addition to keynotes, 3-4 courses will run in parallel during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they wish to attend as well as to move from one to another.
 
VENUE:
 
DeepLearn 2017 will take place in Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country, famous for its gastronomy and the seat of the Guggenheim Museum. The venue will be:
 
DeustoTech, School of Engineering
University of Deusto
Avda. Universidades, 24
48014 Bilbao, Spain
 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: (to be completed)
 
Richard Socher (Salesforce), Tackling the Limits of Deep Learning
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES:
 
Narendra Ahuja (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), [introductory/intermediate] Basics of Deep Learning with Applications to Image Processing, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision
 
Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning: Theory and Applications to the Natural Sciences
 
Sven Behnke (University of Bonn), [intermediate] Visual Perception using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks 
 
Mohammed Bennamoun (University of Western Australia), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning for Computer Vision
 
Hervé Bourlard (Idiap Research Institute), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Sequence Modeling: Historical Perspective and Current Trends
 
Thomas Breuel (NVIDIA Corporation), [intermediate] Segmentation, Processing, and Tracking, with Applications to Video, Gaming, VR, and Self-driving Cars
 
George Cybenko (Dartmouth College), [intermediate] Deep Learning of Behaviors
 
Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine), [introductory] Algorithms for Reasoning with Probabilistic Graphical Models
 
Li Deng (Microsoft Research), tba
 
Jianfeng Gao (Microsoft Research), [introductory/intermediate] An Introduction to Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
 
Michael Gschwind (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), [introductory/intermediate] Deploying Deep Learning Applications at the Enterprise Scale
 
Yufei Huang (University of Texas, San Antonio), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning for Precision Medicine and Biomedical informatics
 
Soo-Young Lee (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), [intermediate/advanced] Multi-modal Deep Learning for the Recognition of Human Emotions in the Wild
 
Li Erran Li (Columbia University), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Reinforcement Learning: Recent Advances and Frontiers
 
Michael C. Mozer (University of Colorado, Boulder), [introductory/intermediate] Incorporating Domain Bias into Neural Networks
 
Roderick Murray-Smith (University of Glasgow), [intermediate] Applications of Deep Learning Models in Human-Computer Interaction Research
 
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University), [intermediate/advanced] Speech Recognition and Machine Translation: From Statistical Decision Theory to Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks
 
Jose C. Principe (University of Florida), [intermediate/advanced] Cognitive Architectures for Object Recognition in Video
 
Marc?Aurelio Ranzato (Facebook AI Research), [introductory/intermediate] Learning Representations for Vision, Speech and Text Processing Applications
 
Maximilian Riesenhuber (Georgetown University), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning in the Brain
 
Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Carnegie Mellon University), [intermediate/advanced] Foundations of Deep Learning and its Recent Advances
 
Alessandro Sperduti (University of Padua), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning for Sequences
 
Jimeng Sun (Georgia Institute of Technology), [introductory] Interpretable Deep Learning Models for Healthcare Applications
 
Julian Togelius (New York University), [intermediate] (Deep) Learning for (Video) Games
 
Joos Vandewalle (KU Leuven), [introductory/intermediate] Data Processing Methods, and Applications of Least Squares Support Vector Machines
 
Ying Nian Wu (University of California, Los Angeles), [introductory/intermediate] Generative Modeling and Unsupervised Learning
 
Eric P. Xing (Carnegie Mellon University), [intermediate/advanced] Statistical Machine Learning Perspectives of Extending Deep Neural Networks: Kernels, Logics, Regularizers, Priors, and Distributed Algorithms
 
Georgios N. Yannakakis (University of Malta), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning for Games - But Not for Playing them
 
Scott Wen-tau Yih (Microsoft Research), [introductory/intermediate] Continuous Representations for Natural Language Understanding
 
Richard Zemel (University of Toronto), [introductory/intermediate] Learning to Understand Images and Text
 
OPEN SESSION:
 
An open session will collect 5-minute voluntary presentations of work in progress by participants. They should submit a half-page abstract containing title, authors, and summary of the research to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 9, 2017.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A specific session will be devoted to demonstrations of practical uses of deep learning in industrial processes. Companies/people interested in contributing are welcome to submit a 1-page abstract containing the program of the demonstration, the duration requested and the logistics necessary. At least one of the people participating in the demonstration should have registered for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 2, 2017.
 
EMPLOYERS SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in deep learning will have a space reserved for one-to-one contacts. At least one of the people in charge of the search should have registered for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 2, 2017.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Pablo García Bringas (co-chair)
José Gaviria
Carlos Martín (co-chair)
Manuel Jesús Parra
Iker Pastor
Borja Sanz (co-chair)
David Silva
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/DeepLearn2017/registration.php
 
The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an approximation of the respective demand for each course.
 
Since the capacity of the venue is limited, registration requests will be processed on a first come first served basis. The registration period will be closed and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue will be complete. It is much recommended to register prior to the event.
 
FEES:
 
Fees comprise access to all courses and lunches. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline.
 
ACCOMMODATION:
 
A suggestion for accommodation is available on the website.
 
CERTIFICATE:
 
Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance indicating the number of hours of lectures.
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Universidad de Deusto
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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UEF SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 Joensuu, Finland http://summerschool.uef.fi/ August 14-25, 2017 ***** Registration deadline: May 26, 2017 ***** -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Course: Machine Learning Applied to Bioinformatics and Speech Technology http://www.uef.fi/en/web/summerschool/machine-learning-applied-to-bioinformatics-and-speech-technology Course has two options: * Lectures + learning diary (August 14 - 18), total 2 ECTS * Lectures + learning diary + individual project (August 14 - 25), total 5 ECTS Teaching language: English Level: Doctoral, Master University of Eastern Finland (UEF) hosts a number of different summer courses in August 2017. The course on Machine Learning Applied to Bioinformatics and Speech Technology is co-organized by the School of Computing (Speech track) and Institute of Biomedicine (Bioinformatics track). Contact teaching takes place from August 14th to 18th. Individual optional project work is from August 21th to 25th. Contents The first two days include a general introduction to machine learning including topics such as deep learning, Bayesian graphical models and modeling sequential data. Course is intended to be self-contained with no prior knowledge of machine learning required. After the introductory part, the participants will choose one of the alternative course tracks (speech technology or bioinformatics). The lectures are delivered physically in two different locations of the UEF campuses, Joensuu and Kuopio (150 km apart). But it is possible to attend the lectures of either course from both campuses remotely through a video connection provided by UEF. The speech processing teaching takes place in Joensuu and bioinformatics teaching in Kuopio. In the speech/audio track we focus on state-of-the-art automatic speaker verification (ASV) and spoken language identication (LID) technology. In addition to introducing the basic models and software tools for session/channel compensation to increase robustness (e.g. factor analysis and i-vectors), the topics include also audio forensics and speech anti-spoofing (or presentation attack detection) techniques, including the ASVspoof challenge series. Using these techniques system would be able to know whether recorded audio was tampered somehow or that the spoken by a human or produced by a machine. Open-source software tools will also be introduced. The speech track is recommended especially for PhD students (and MSc students close to graduation) who might be already familiar with the basics of speech processing and interested in obtaining a quick overview of both basic principles, state-of-the-art techniques and selected emerging trends in speaker and language recognition. Speech processing confirmed lecturers: Cemal Hanilci, Bursa Technical University, Turkey Ville Hautamäki, University of Eastern Finland (organizer) Tomi Kinnunen, University of Eastern Finland (organizer) Kong Aik Lee, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore Modes of study: Lectures (4 days), hands on practicals (1 day), project work (1 week) and learning diary Social program: We will also organise some guided social programme in the evenings and during the weekend. This will include a welcome dinner, a guided city tour by bus, sauna evening, a one-day trip to Koli national park during the weekend etc. The activities will mostly be included in your course fee, but some of them may have a small participation fee. Assessment: pass/fail. Students who pass will receive certificate. Registration: http://www.uef.fi/en/web/summerschool/how-to-apply Registration fee: 500 EUR Accommodation: http://www.uef.fi/en/web/summerschool/accommodation More information: villeh@cs.uef.fi and tkinnu@cs.uef.fi

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

SigDial 2017 Special Session:

Natural Language Generation for Dialogue Systems

First Call for Papers

Paper Submission: 18th April 2017

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference18/

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

* MOTIVATION

While natural language generation (NLG) for dialogue interaction has been a long-standing research topic, there has been a recent explosion of work due to industrial interest in conversational assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant. Recent advances in the field of deep learning together with the availability of large corpora of human dialogues from social media has also contributed to new research techniques for language generation. However, to date, neural methods have not been able to replicate much of the rich dialogue phenomena targeted by previous rule-based, statistical and data-driven approaches for language generation for dialogue.

* TOPIC SUBMISSION

We invite submissions which address specific issues including but not limited to:

- Generation in the context of a dialogue with appropriate use of anaphoric forms, such as pronouns and ellipses;

- Generation of turns where information is structured using rhetorical relations, as in the case of recommendations or other persuasive genres;

- Selection and organization of content in a dialogue turn;

- Sentence planning and lexical choice for dialogue interaction;

- Evaluation of language generation for dialogue systems;

- Corpus-based analyses of human-human dialogue to inform NLG for dialogue systems;

- Critical comparison between capabilities of different kinds of models.

- Providing and investigating new resources, such as data sets and tools.

- We also welcome submissions which make use of the new E2E NLG challenge data set (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/InteractionLab/E2E/).

* SUBMISSION FORMAT

Long paper submissions will follow the SigDial 2017 format and will be part of the general conference submission and review system. They will be treated as regular SIGDIAL papers and become archival.

- Long papers must be no longer than eight pages + unlimited pages for references + 2 additional pages for appendix (linguistic examples, algorithms etc.)

- Short position papers (2 pages + unlimited pages for references) with a single point to make, e.g. a proposal for a shared task for NLG for dialogue. These will be presented as short talks or posters, and the papers will be added to the web page for the special session (TBA), but will not count as an archival publication.

* IMPORTANT DATES

We will follow the SigDial 2017 schedule, and papers should be submitted using the SIGDIAL conference submission site. http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference18/

Paper Submission Deadline: Tuesday, 18 April 2017 (23:59, GMT-11)

Paper Notification: Friday, 9 June 2017

Final Paper Submission: Friday, 7 July 2017

Conference: Tuesday, 15 August 2017 to Thursday, 17 August 2017

* CONTACT

Marilyn Walker

* ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Marilyn Walker, University of California Santa Cruz (Chair)

Verena Rieser, Heriot-Watt University

Vera Demberg, Universität des Saarlandes

Dietrich Klakow, Universität des Saarlandes

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Google Research

David M. Howcroft, Universität des Saarlandes

Shereen Oraby, University of California Santa Cruz

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PACLING 2017
August 16 - 18, 2017, Sedona Hotel, Yangon, Myanmar

http://pacling.ucsy.edu.mm/pacling/index.html

Contact: pacling2017@gmail.com

PACLING 2017 will be a high-quality, workshop-style conference whose aim is to promote friendly scientific interaction relating to computational linguistics among Pacific Rim countries. The emphasis of the conference is on interdisciplinary scientific exchange demonstrating openness towards original high-quality research including one which might fall outside current dominant schools of thought, and on technological transfer within and across the Pacific region.
The conference represents a unique forum for scientific and technological exchange, being smaller than ACL and COLING, and more regional with extensive representation from the Pacific.
TOPICS

Substantial, original, and unpublished research is welcome on any topics in computational linguistics, including, but not limited to the following:

•     Phonology and Phonetics
•     Morphology and Morphological Analysis
•     Syntax and Syntactic Analysis
•     Semantics and Semantic Analysis
•     Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
•     Spoken Language and Dialogue
•     Language Resources
•     Corpora and Corpus-based Language Processing
•     Text and Message Understanding
•     Text and Message Generation
•     Information Extraction and Text Mining
•     Information Retrieval and Question-Answering
•     Text Summarization
•     Language Learning
•     Machine Translation
•     Natural Language Interfaces
•     Semantic Web and Semantic Computation

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: April 19, 2017
Notification of acceptance: May 25, 2017
Camera-ready copy due:    July 10, 2017
Conference dates: August 16 - 18, 2017

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Authors should prepare submissions in English of up to 6 pages including references. Guidelines and style sheets (based on the IEEE format) are available here:

[LaTex style files]

[MS Word example file]

Papers that are being submitted to other conferences, whether verbatim or in essence must declare this fact. If a paper appears at another conference, it must be withdrawn from PACLING 2017. Papers that violate these requirements are subject to rejection without review.

The submitted papers need not be anonymous.

All papers will be submitted electronically in PDF format, through the web-based conference management system called EasyChair. To submit through EasyChair, go to the PACLING 2017 EasyChair page: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pacling2017

    Login using your existing EasyChair account, or create a new account following the instructions on the site.
    Once you have logged in, click on the 'New Submission' link located in the top-left corner of the menu bar, and then follow the instructions to submit your paper.

BEST PAPER AWARD AND BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD
Awards for best paper and best student paper will be selected based on the reviews by the program committee.

PUBLICATION
All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings in CD-ROM and made available on the website (after a given date).

ORGANIZATION

Program Chair: Koiti Hasida, Professor, Social ICT Research Center University of Tokyo

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Call for Paper INTERSPEECH 2017 Special session on Incremental Processing and Responsive Behaviour
======================================================================================

Incremental processing ? i. e., the online, and ideally real-time processing of streams of information about an ongoing event, as it happens ? has become a highly relevant research area. Is is particularly true for speech, which is an inherently sequential medium, and in interactive situations, where responsivity is key. Incremental processing techniques are used across speech recognition and synthesis, voice conversion, understanding, generation, syntax parsing, machine translation, and in applications such as dialogue systems, situated and multimodal interaction, robotics, or speech-to-speech translation.

The aspect of incrementality is largely orthogonal to the typical session/topic layout at Interspeech and hence work on incremental processing is usually spread over a multitude of sessions at Interspeech (and related conferences), which leads to a fragmentation of expertise and discussions. Our special session sets out to unite the spread-out field in order to provide a venue for joint discussion of incrementality itself rather than having to focus on the individual problems tackled.

We are inviting researchers interested in incrementality in all its aspects such as:
·      solving specific problems of automatic speech and language processing in an incremental fashion
·      methodology and theory of incremental processing including its evaluation
·      psycholingiustic findings and interaction of modalities
·      predictive/reactive frameworks and the integration of incrementality into systems
·      researching the influence on interactions in end-to-end systems (as well as human-human interaction)
·      reactive/human-centered machine learning
·      reactive behaviour based on partial understanding, and more.

The topic of our special session is to be connected with a follow-up special issue in Computer, Speech & Language.

We invite you to submit original papers on any of the research themes listed above. When submitting papers, please make sure that you select scientific area topic: [11.13] Special Session on ' Incremental Processing and Responsive Behaviour' in the INTERSPEECH 2017 submission system.

Sincerely yours,

Timo Baumann, Thomas Hueber, David Schlangen

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION/PAPERS

1st International Workshop on Vocal Interactivity in-and-between
Humans, Animals and Robots (VIHAR-2017)

25-26 August 2017
University of Skövde, Sweden

http://vihar-2017.vihar.org

Almost all animals exploit vocal signals for a range of
ecologically-motivated purposes: from detecting predators/prey and
marking territory, to expressing emotions, establishing social
relations and sharing information. Whether it?s a bird raising an
alarm, a whale calling to potential partners, a dog responding to
human commands, a parent reading a story with a child, or a
businessperson accessing stock prices using Siri on an iPhone,
vocalisation provides a valuable communications channel through which
behaviour may be coordinated and controlled, and information may be
distributed and acquired. Indeed, the ubiquity of vocal interaction
has led to research across an extremely diverse array of fields, from
assessing animal welfare, to understanding the precursors of human
language, to developing voice-based human-machine interaction.
Clearly, there is potential for cross-fertilisation between
disciplines; for example, using robots to investigate contemporary
theories of language grounding, using machine learning to analyse
different habitats or adding vocal expressivity to the next generation
of autonomous social agents. However, many opportunities remain
unexplored, not least due to the lack of a suitable forum.

VIHAR-2017 aims to bring together researchers studying vocalisations
and speech-based interaction in-and- between humans, animals and
robots from a variety of different fields. The workshop is being
organised by participants of a recent Dagstuhl Seminar on the same
topic, and follows the publication of a short review article:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frobt.2016.00061/full.
VIHAR-2017 will provide a timely opportunity for scientists and
engineers from different fields to share theoretical insights, best
practices, tools and methodologies, and to identify common principles
underpinning vocal behaviour in a multi-disciplinary environment.

We invite original submissions of four-page INTERSPEECH-style papers
(plus one page of references) or two-page extended abstracts
(including references) in all areas of vocal interactivity. Suggested
workshop topics may include, but are not limited to, the following
areas:
* physiological and morphological similarities/differences between
vocal systems in animals
* properties and functions of animal signals
* evolution of vocal interactivity
* vocal imitation and learning
* conveyance of emotion
* comparative analyses of human and animal vocalisations
* use of vocalisation
* vocal interactivity between non-conspecifics
* spoken language systems
* technology-based research methods

Paper submissions should conform to the format as detailed in the
INTERSPEECH 2017 Author?s Kit
(http://www.interspeech2017.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IS2017_paper_kit.zip).

Key Dates:
Submission deadline - 2 June 2017
Notification of acceptance - 30 June 2017
Workshop - 25-26 August 2017

Organisers:
Robert Eklund, Linköping University
Angela Dassow, Carthage College
Ricard Marxer, University of Sheffield
Roger K. Moore, University of Sheffield
Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University
Rita Singh, Carnegie Mellon University
Serge Thill, University of Skövde
Benjamin Weiss, Technical University of Berlin

VIHAR-2017 takes place immediately after INTERSPEECH in Stockholm
(http://www.interspeech2017.org) and is supported by the International
Speech Communication Association (http://www.isca-speech.org).

For details, visit the VIHAR-2017 website: http://vihar-2017.vihar.org

If you wish to join the VIHAR community, please subscribe to our
mailing list by entering your e-mail address at
http://www.freelists.org/list/vihar and then responding to the
confirmation e-mail that you will receive from the list server.

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Call for papers GLU 2017
====================
First International Workshop on
Grounding Language Understanding (GLU 2017)

ISCA Satellite Workshop of Interspeech 2017
Stockholm University, August 25th 2017

Important Dates
=============
Paper Submission: **Wednesday, 31 May 2017**
Paper Notification Acceptance: **Wednesday, 28 June 2017**
Publication of Full Programme: **Wednesday, 12 July 2017**
Camera-ready Paper Due: **Wednesday, 26 July 2017**
Registration Deadline: **Wednesday, 2 August 2017**
Workshop: **Friday, 25 August 2017**

http://www.speech.kth.se/glu2017/

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines (linguistics, language, robotics, systems neuroscience, cognitive science, signal processing, etc.) working with modeling different aspects of grounding language acquisition and understanding.
Although speech and language technology have reached a level of maturity, machines still fall short of human performance, especially when considering flexibility and robustness. It is therefore desirable to extend the machine learning approach which has been applied to speech and language technology, and emulate more closely the way humans and living systems acquire language. Desirable properties of the new learning approaches would include:
* being less dependent on annotated data,
* acquiring knowledge from multimodal inputs (acoustic, visual, tactile),
* learning from interaction,
* relating learning to the situational context,
* grounding language in the perceptual, emotional and sensorimotor experience of the agent
This requires a highly multidisciplinary approach, combining the field of human language processing, speech technology, machine learning, developmental robotics and cognitive and systems neuroscience.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
========================
* Emmanuel Dupoux, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.
* Katerina Pastra, Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Athens, Greece
* Robert Legenstein, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Scientific Area Topics
=================
* Language Learning via Grounded Dialogue
* Language Generation for Embodied Tasks
* Grounded Knowledge Representations
* Skill Learning via Interactive Dialogue
* Aligning and Translating Language to Situated Actions
* Instructions for Navigation/Articulation/Manipulation
* Mapping Language and World
* Grounded Reinforcement Learning
* Language-based Game Playing for Grounding
* Structured and Deep Learning Models for Embodied Language
* New Datasets for Embodied Language
* Better Evaluation Metrics for Embodied Language

Submission and Format
===================
We invite original submissions from 3 pages including references to 4 pages of text, plus one page (maximum) for references in the INTERSPEECH format. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Scientific Review Committee.

Submit your paper through EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glu2017

Proceedings and Publication
=======================
Accepted papers will be published in the open access GLU2017 (indexed)
proceedings.

Registration
==========
We are trying to keep the costs as low as possible. Registration fees should be around 150?. These will include the lunch, coffee breaks and the evening dinner on the day of the workshop.

Sponsors
========
GLU2017 is supported by the CHIST-ERA/IGLU consortium and is an ISCA sponsored event and a satellite event for Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm.

MORE Details at the workshop website: http://www.speech.kth.se/glu2017/

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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: 30 December 2016 (closed)
Satellite Workshop proposals: 20 February 2017   
Tutorial proposals: 5 March 2017 
Full paper submissions: 5 March 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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===========================================================

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 EUSIPCO 2017 Announcement:  CALL FOR TUTORIALS

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

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

Prospective tutorial speakers are invited to submit their proposals via e-mail in PDF by February 17, 2017, to the Tutorials Chairs, Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu and Aggelos Pikrakis (tutorials@eusipco2017.org), indicating:

- Title for the proposed tutorial, its outline and motivation

- List of presenters, including their CVs in a total of at most two pages

- A short description of the tutorial goal, content and the material to be covered

EUSIPCO'2017 tutorial proposals will be judged notably by their technical quality, relevance and timeliness of the topic, quality of the proposal, qualification of the speakers, and presence of similar topics or same speakers at recent EUSIPCOs or other conferences. 

Eight half-day tutorials are foreseen which will be held on Monday, August 28, 2017. Tutorials with less than 10 registrations a week after the early registration deadline will not be run unless otherwise explicitly decided by the Tutorials Chairs.

For details regarding the Tutorial Proposal Form, please visit: 

http://www.eusipco2017.org/call-for-tutorials/

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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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****************************
CLEF 2018
Avignon, France - September 10-14, 2018
http://clef2018.clef-initiative.eu/
 *****************************

 
Call for Labs Proposals

CLEF is a leading annual international conference exploring topics in information access technologies. CLEF uniquely combines evaluation laboratories and workshops with research presentations, panels, poster and demo sessions. CLEF 2018 (http://clef2018.clef-initiative.eu/) will be held on 10-14 September 2018 at Avignon University, Avignon, France.

Researchers and practitioners from all areas of information access and related communities are invited to submit proposals for evaluation labs for consideration for inclusion in CLEF 2018. Lab proposals will be reviewed by the lab selection committee. Organizers of selected proposals will be invited to include their lab in the CLEF 2018 lab programme, possibly subject to small suggested modifications to their proposal to better suit the CLEF lab workflow or timeline.

Background

The CLEF Initiative (http://www.clef-initiative.eu/) is a self-organized body whose main mission is to promote research, innovation, and development of information access systems with an emphasis on multilingual information in different modalities - including text and multimedia - with various levels of structure. CLEF promotes research and development by providing an infrastructure for:

• independent evaluation of information access systems;
• investigation of the use of unstructured, semi-structured, highly-structured, and semantically enriched data in information access;
• creation of reusable test collections for benchmarking;
• exploration of new evaluation methodologies and innovative ways of using experimental data;
• discussion of results, comparison of approaches, exchange of ideas, and transfer of knowledge.

CLEF 2018 will be the ninth edition of the current CLEF conference launched as a continuation of the annual CLEF evaluation campaign series which ran with great success from 2000 to 2009 contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks.

Scope of CLEF Labs

Proposals are accepted for two different types of labs (see 2017 Lab at http://clef2017.clef-initiative.eu/index.php?page=Pages/labs_info.php):

• Evaluation Labs that are a 'campaign-style' evaluation for specific information access problems (during the twelve month period preceding the conference), similar in nature to the traditional CLEF campaign 'tracks'. Topics covered by campaign-style labs can be inspired by any information access-related domain or task.
• Labs that follow a more classical 'workshop' pattern, exploring issues of evaluation methodology, metrics, processes etc. in information access and closely related fields, such as natural language processing, machine translation, and human-computer interaction.

If the organisers of the proposal are new to CLEF or other shared task evaluation campaigns, we highly recommend that a lab workshop first be organised to discuss the format, the problem space, and the practicalities of the shared task. The CLEF 2018 programme will reserve about half of the conference schedule for lab sessions. The labs will present their overall results 'overview presentations' during the plenary scientific paper sessions to allow non-participants to get a sense of where the research frontiers are moving. Organisers of each lab are expected to organise the separate sessions for their lab at the conference so that they contain ample time for general discussion and engagement by all participants - not just those presenting campaign results and papers. Organisers should plan time in their sessions for activities such as panels, demos, poster sessions etc. as appropriate. CLEF is always interested in receiving and facilitating innovative lab proposals. Potential task proposers who are unsure of the suitability of their task proposal or its format for inclusion at CLEF are encouraged to contact the CLEF 2018 Lab Organizing Committee Chairs to discuss its suitability or design at an early stage.

Proposal Submission

Lab proposals must provide sufficient information to judge the relevance, timeliness, scientific quality, benefits for the research community, and the competence of the proposers to co-ordinate the lab. Each lab proposal should identify one or more organizers as responsible for ensuring the timely execution of the lab. Proposals should be 3-4 pages long and should provide the following information:

1. Title of the proposed lab.
2. A brief description of the lab topic and goals, its relevance to CLEF and the significance for the field.
3. A brief but clear statement of usage scenarios or domain to which the activity is intended to contribute, including the evaluation setup and metrics.
4. Details on the lab organizer(s), including identifying the task chair(s) responsible for ensuring the running of the task. This should include details of any previous of involvement in organising or participating in evaluation tasks at CLEF or similar campaigns.
5. The planned format of the lab, i.e. campaign-style ('track') or workshop.
6. Is the lab a continuation of an activity from previous year(s) or a new activity?   
   a.    For activities continued from previous year(s): Statistics from previous years (number of participants/runs for each task), a clear statement on why another edition is needed, an explicit listing of the changes proposed, and a discussion of lessons to be learned or insights to be made.
   b.    For new activities: A statement on why a new evaluation campaign is needed and how the community would benefit from the activity.
7. Details of the expected target audience, i.e. who do you expect to participate in the task(s), and how do you propose to reach them.
8. Brief details of tasks to be carried out in the lab. The proposal should clearly motivate the need for each of the proposed tasks and provide evidence of its capability of attracting enough participation. The dataset which will be adopted by the Lab needs to be described and motivated in the perspective of the goals of the Labs; also indications on how the dataset will be shared are useful. It is fine for a lab to have a single task, but labs often contain multiple closely related tasks, needing a strong motivation for more than 3 tasks, to avoid useless fragmentation.
9. Expected length of the lab session at the conference: half-day, one day, two days. This should include very high level details of planned structure of the session, e.g. participant presentations, invited speaker(s), panels, etc., to justify the requested session length.
10. Arrangements for the organization of the lab campaign: who will be responsible for activities within the task; how will data be acquired or created, what tools or methods will be used, e.g., how will necessary queries be created or relevance assessment carried out; any other information which is relevant to the conduct of your lab.
11. If the lab proposes to set up a steering committee to oversee and advise its activities, include names, addresses, and homepage links of people you propose to be involved.

Reviewing Process

Each submitted proposal will be reviewed by the CLEF 2018 lab organizing committee. The decision will be sent by email to the responsible organizer by September 13, 2017. The final length of the lab session will be determined based on the overall organization of the conference and the number of participant submissions received by a lab. Organizers of accepted labs are expected to announce and briefly present their lab at the final session of CLEF 2017 on the 14 September in Dublin, Ireland.

Important Dates

• Final lab proposals: 3 September 2017
• Notification of lab acceptance: 13 September 2017
• Labs registration opens: 3 November 2017

Submission Details

Lab proposals (or questions) should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2018.
Questions on lab proposals should be directed to the CLEF 2018 Lab Chairs:
?    Jian-Yun Nie (nie@iro.umontreal.ca)
?    Laure Soulier (laure.soulier@lip6.fr)
Further information on CLEF 2018 is available at: http://clef2018.clef-initiative.eu/.

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Joint SPECOM 2017 and ICR 2017

SPECOM 2017: 19th International Conference on Speech and Computer  

ICR 2017: 2nd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics

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

April 15, 2017 ......... Submission of full papers (final date)

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).

Organisers:

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.

Organisers:

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.

Organisers:

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)

Invited Speakers

Prof Mark Gales, University of Cambridge: ?Low-Resource Speech Recognition and Keyword-Spotting?.

Prof Björn Schuller, University of Passau and Imperial College London: ?Big Data, Deep Learning ? At the Edge of X-Ray Speaker Analysis?.

https://sites.google.com/site/specom2017/invited-speakers

Satellite Event

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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 ==== Second Call for Participation ====

Germeval Task 2017 - Shared Task on Aspect-based Sentiment in Social Media Customer
Feedback

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/

We invite everyone from academia and industry to submit to the shared task on German
Sentiment Analysis!

 **** Jun 2017 Updates ***
*** Evaluation script for download *** Java baseline system available ****

---- Introduction ----

In the connected, modern world, customer feedback is a valuable source for insights on
the quality of products or services. This feedback allows other customers to benefit from
the experiences of others and enables businesses to react on requests, complaints or
recommendations. However, the more people use a product or service, the more feedback is
generated, which results in the major challenge of analyzing huge amounts of feedback in
an efficient, but still meaningful way.

We conduct a shared task on automatically analyzing customer reviews about ?Deutsche
Bahn? - the German public train operator with about two billion passengers each year. The
task is associated with the GSCL 2017 conference in Berlin, and will take place there as
a workshop on September 12, 2017.


---- Data ----
The data for the task has been annotated as part of a joint project between TU Darmstadt
and Deutsche Bahn, see https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/data for details.
All together it consists of 22,000 messages from various social media and web sources.
The data is annotated with relevance, document sentiment, aspect-based sentiment and
opinion target expressions and is provided in both xml and tsv.

---- Task description ----

To exploit the richness of the data, we subdivided the task into four subtasks.
Participants can freely choose in what and how many sub-tasks they participate.

Subtask A) Relevance Classification
Determine whether a social media post contains feedback about the 'Deutsche Bahn' or if
the post is off-topic/contains no evaluation.
Example: ?Ehrlich die männer in Der Bahn haben keine manieren??
In the given post, the task is to identify that the post is 'relevant'.

Subtask B) Document-level Polarity
Identify, whether the customer evaluates the 'Deutsche Bahn' or travel as positive,
negative or neutral.
Example: 'Ingo Lenßen Guten morgen Ingo...bei mir kein regen aber bahn fehr wieder
nicht...'
In the given post, the task is to identify the posts' polarity : negative

Subtask C) Aspect-level Polarity
Identify all aspects which are positively and negatively evaluated within the review. In
order to increase comparability, the aspects are previously divided into predefined
categories. Consequently, the aim of the subtasks is to identify all contained categories
and their associated polarity.
Example: ?Alle so 'Yeah, Streik beendet'' Bahn so 'Okay, dafür werden dann natürlich die
Tickets teurer' Alle so 'Können wir wieder Streik haben???
In the given post, the task is to identify the aspects and their polarity:
< Ticketkauf#Haupt:negativ> <allgemein#Haupt:positive>

Subtask D) Opinion Target Extraction
Identify the linguistic expression in the posts which are used to express the
aspect-based sentiment (subtask C). The opinion target expression is defined by its
starting and ending offsets.
Example: @m_wabersich IC 2151? Der fährt nicht. Ich habe Ihnen die Alternative bereits
genannt. /je
In the given post the task ist to identify the target expression <fährt nicht> (from='26'
to='37').

The organizers provide a baseline system and an evaluation method that may be used to
lower the obstacles for participation.
For both the baseline system and the evaluation method the organisers release executables
and open-source code to enable an easy integration into the participating systems:
- baseline system + instructions : https://github.com/uhh-lt/GermEval2017-Baseline
- evaluation method + instructions: https://github.com/muchafel/GermEval2017

Data, baseline system, evaluation method as well as the description of the tasks are
distributed to the participants via the website
https://sites.google.com/view/germeval2017-absa/.

Participating team/participants may submit several runs.

Submissions consist of one TSV or XML file per subtask providing predictions for the test
data and a paper of 4 pages (excluding references) describing the chosen approach and
analyzing the performance. Each participating team/participant should submit only one
paper regardless of how many subtasks they participate in; per subtask, participants can
add 1 page to the paper, up to a maximum of 7 pages. Papers should follow the GSCL 2017
style files. We expect authors to present summaries of their systems at the GSCL workshop
and to participate in the discussions.

---- Important Dates ----

* March 2017 Release of Trial Data
* April 2017 Release of Training Data
* July 24, 2017 Release of Test Data
* August 14, 2017 Submission of System Runs
* August 21, 2017 Submission of System Description papers
* September 1, 2017 Feedback on System Description papers
* September 8, 2017 Final Submission of System Description papers
* September 12, 2017 Workshop co-located with GSCL 2017

---- Organizing committee ----

* Chris Biemann, Language Technology, Uni Hamburg, biemann[at]informatik.uni-hamburg.de
* Eugen Ruppert, Language Technology, Uni Hamburg, ruppert[at]informatik.uni-hamburg.de
* Michael Wojatzki, Language Technology Lab, Uni Duisburg-Essen,
michael.wojatzki[at]uni-due.de
* Torsten Zesch, Language Technology Lab, Uni Duisburg-Essen, torsten.zesch[at]uni-due.de


We encourage all interested teams to join the GermEval 2017 ABSA mailing list at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/germeval2017-absa, which will be the primary
source for updates on dates and test conditions.
To contact the organizing committee, please post to this mailing list or send an e-mail
to Michael Wojatzki for private communication.

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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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----------------2nd CALL FOR PAPERS------------------------------------

ESSEM@ACII 2017
3rd International Workshop on
Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM 2017):
User Engagement and Interaction

http://di.unito.it/essem17

Co-located with the seventh International Conference on Affective
Computing and Intelligent Interaction
ACII 2017 (http://acii2017.org/), San Antonio, Texas
October 23, 2017

***Submission deadline: June 15, 2017***

Keynote speaker: Georgios Yannakakis, Institute of Digital Games, Univ.
of Malta

*NEWS*

- ESSEM 2017 is supported by: CELI Language Technology -
https://www.celi.it/en/
- Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Xplore (indexed by Scopus)

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

The role of emotional intelligence is increasing at fast speed in
everyday computer-mediated interactions, thanks to the integration of
more or less explicit affective elements in social networks, apps,
virtual assistants, etc. Expressed through emojis, color, tags or
speech, affect has become part of our relationships with computers,
adding depth and involvement to them. The technical advancement of the
available expressive means, from 3D to language technologies, is one of
the key factors of this process.
ESSEM 2017 addresses the expression of emotions in many-to-many
interaction and in one-to-one interaction as a tool for promoting,
analysing and measuring user engagement. In particular, we are
interested in tools and models that rely on NLP, acoustic and video
analysis; theories and methods that bridge the expression of emotions
from language to media are especially needed to overcome the limitations
of language-specific and media-specific approaches.
ESSEM 2017 focuses on interaction as a testbed for the models and tools
developed for social and expressive media. The ultimate goal is to
devise socio-emotional strategies to foster user engagement. We
encourage contributions on applications that specifically address the
role of sentiment and emotions in the interactions that occur through
social and expressive media, with a special focus on cultural heritage,
artistic expression, education and entertainment (e.g., storytelling,
artistic curation, audience development, games and edutainment). ESSEM
aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners both from
academia and industry. It wants to take an active part in growing a new
field in terms of multidisciplinary research and to investigate open
issues by cross-validating different approaches in emotion research.
Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Affect-related phenomena in social media
- Affect-related phenomena in expressive media
- Affect-related phenomena in the user's engagement process
- Subjectivity, sentiments and emotions in social & expressive media
- Affect and figurative language, stance or deception in social &
expressive media
- Design of engaging agents
- Socio-emotional strategies for user engagement
- User engagement in human-human and human-agent interactions using NLP
& audio-video analysis
- Grounding affect in conversational context
- Affect and regulation of human-agent interaction
- Affect and emotions in embodiment
- Affect in interactive entertainment (drama, storytelling, games, etc.)
and art (artistic curation, audience development, etc.)
- Applications of affective computing in multimodal interaction
- Applications of sentiment analysis and emotion detection in social &
expressive media

*Important dates*

- June 15, 2017: Paper submission deadline
- July 15, 2017: Notification of acceptance
- August 18, 2017: Final manuscripts due (hard deadline for all workshops)
- Workshop date: October 23, 2017)

*Paper submission*

Standard research papers should be a maximum of 6 pages long. We also
encourage submission of short research papers (including opinion
statements) of maximum 3 pages long.
Submissions must be anonymous and follow the ACII 2017 formatting
guidelines: http://acii2017.org/submission

All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the main
conference platform:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ACII2017/, (track ESSEM).

Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Xplore.

*Organizers*

Cristina Bosco, University of Torino, Italy
Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Chloé Clavel, LTCI, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay University, Paris,
France
Rossana Damiano, University of Torino, Italy
Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Italy
Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain

*Programme Committee*

Alexandra Balahur, European Commission Joint Research Centre
Andrea Bolioli, CELI, Italy
Zoraida Callejas, University of Granada, Spain
Lea Canales, Universitat d?Alacant, Spain
Paula Carvalho, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Marc Cavazza, Teesside University, UK
Antonio Chella, University of Palermo, Italy
Giuseppe Riccardi, University of Trento, Italy
Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, India
Berardina Nadja De Carolis, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Guillaume Dubuisson-Duplessis, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay
University, France
Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Carlos A. Iglesias, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Aditya Joshi IITB-Monash Research Academy, Mumbai, India
Emiliano Lorini, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento, Italy
Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Nicole Novielli, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Magalie Ochs, LSIS, University of Aix Marseille, France
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
Austria
Rémi Ronfard, INRIA, France
Saif Mohammad, National Research Council, Canada
Björn Schuller, University of Passau, Germany, Imperial College London, UK
Candace Sidner, WPI, US
Mariët Theune, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Marko Tkalcic, Free University of Bozen, Italy
Serena Villata, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
Emilio Vivancos, UPV, Spain
Gualtiero Volpe, University of Genova, Italy
Enrico Zovato, Nuance Communications, USA

**Follow us!* *

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Essem2017
Spread the news: #essem2017

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Essem2017

*Flyer*

http://www.di.unito.it/~patti/essem17/CFP_ESSEM-flyer2017.pdf

If have any enquiries/comments about the workshop or the submission
procedure, please just contact us via email: essem4acii2017@gmail.com

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5th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING
 
SLSP 2017
 
Le Mans, France
 
October 23-25, 2017
 
Organized by:
 
Computer Science Lab (LIUM)
University of Le Mans
 
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/SLSP2017/
 
**********************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large, well-known conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2017, significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.
 
VENUE:
 
SLSP 2017 will take place in Le Mans, in the region Pays de la Loire, a city with well-preserved Gallo-Roman remnants. The venue will be:
 
Claude Chappe Informatics Institute
University of Le Mans
Avenue Laënnec
72085 Le Mans Cedex 9
 
SCOPE:
 
The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical models (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
anaphora and coreference resolution
authorship identification, plagiarism and spam filtering
computer-aided translation
corpora and language resources
data mining and semantic web
information extraction
information retrieval
knowledge representation and ontologies
lexicons and dictionaries
machine translation
multimodal technologies
natural language understanding
neural representation of speech and language
opinion mining and sentiment analysis
parsing
part-of-speech tagging
question-answering systems
semantic role labelling
speaker identification and verification
speech and language generation
speech recognition
speech synthesis
speech transcription
spelling correction
spoken dialogue systems
term extraction
text categorisation
text summarisation
user modeling
 
STRUCTURE:
 
SLSP 2017 will consist of:
 
invited talks
peer-reviewed contributions
posters
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: (to be completed)
 
Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Keikichi Hirose (University of Tokyo, JP)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, IE)
Tomi Kinnunen (University of Eastern Finland, FI)
Elizabeth D. Liddy (Syracuse University, US)
Xunying Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, JP)
Marie-Francine Moens (KU Leuven, BE)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, QA)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Holger Schwenk (Facebook, FR)
Phil Woodland (University of Cambridge, UK)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Walid Aransa (Le Mans)
Adrien Bardet (Le Mans)
Abdessalam Bouchekif (Le Mans)
Fethi Bougares (Le Mans)
Nathalie Camelin (Le Mans)
Yannick Estève (Le Mans, co-chair)
Mercedes García Martínez (Le Mans)
Sahar Ghannay (Le Mans)
Anthony Larcher (Le Mans)
Antoine Laurent (Le Mans)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Salima Mdhaffar (Le Mans)
Manuel J. Parra Royón (Granada)
Simon Petitrenaud (Le Mans)
David Silva (London)
Natalia Tomashenko (Le Mans)
Kévin Vythelingum (Le Mans)
 
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, graphics, 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=slsp2017
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNAI 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/SLSP2017/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Extended paper submission: June 18, 2017
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: July 11, 2017
Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNAI proceedings: July 21, 2017
Early registration: July 21, 2017
Late registration: October 9, 2017
Submission to the journal special issue: January 25, 2018
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david.silva409@yahoo.com
 
POSTAL ADDRESS:
 
SLSP 2017
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Université du Maine
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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ACII 2017 – Call for Papers

Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

October 23-26, 2017 San Antonio, Texas

http://www.acii2017.org or follow us on Twitter @acii2017

Call for papers

The Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) invites you to join us at our seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), which will be held in San Antonio, Texas on October 23-26, 2017. The Conference series is the premier international forum for interdisciplinary research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena.

A selection of the best articles will appear in a “Best of ACII2017” special section of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing. Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore. The theme of ACII2017 is “Affective Computing in Action,” highlighting the impact of affective computing technologies in the wider world.

Program

ACII2017 will feature a broad program, with regular talks, posters, demos, workshops, special sessions, a doctoral consortium, special industry panel session on affective computing applications and keynote talks by James Russell (Boston College), Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell University) and Thomas R. Insel (former NIHM). We will have two special sessions: “Emotions in Cognition, Adaptive Behavior and Action Selection” and “Utilising Big Unlabelled and Unmatched Data for Affective Computing”.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Recognition of Human Affect: Uni- or multimodal recognition of affect from face, body, gesture, voice text, or physiology; affective face/body animation; expression and gesture recognition; sentiment analysis
• Synthesis of Human Affect: Affective speech synthesis, modeling and animation, synthesis of auditory affect bursts, synthesis of multimodal affective behavior
• Affective Interfaces: Affective brain-computer interfaces, design of affective loop and affective dialog systems; mobile, tangible, haptic and virtual/augmented interfaces; affectively-smart environments; affectively proactive interfaces
• Social and Behavioral Science Involving Affective Computing: Cognitive affective models; models of moral decision-making; tools for social science research; computational models of emotion; psychological factors in affective computing (personality, culture); ethical issues; dyadic and group affective processes
• Affective and Social Robotics and Virtual Agents: Emotions in robot cognition and action, embodied issues in emotion; affective virtual agents; memory, reasoning, and learning of affective systems; affective architectures for virtual & robotic systems
• Affective Applications: Databases and tools; biometrics; medical; assistive; virtual reality; entertainment; education; ambient intelligence; industrial

Important dates

Proposals for workshops: February 24, 2017

Proposals for tutorials: April 21, 2017

Regular paper submission: May 2, 2017

Doctoral consortium submission: June 9, 2017

Demos submission: July 21, 2017

Organization

General Chairs: Carlos Busso and Julien Epps

Program Chairs: Hayley Hung, Emily Mower Provost and Mohammad Soleymani

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Appel à communication

Colloque « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », 13 et 14 novembre 2017, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3
Lieu : Site de Saint-Charles 2, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3

Le projet CORAL, les laboratoires PRAXILING (UMR 5267) et DIPRALANG (EA 739) organisent conjointement un colloque intitulé « Corpus oraux, corpus écrits : pratiques croisées », qui aura lieu les 13 et 14 novembre 2017 sur le site Saint Charles.

Les conférenciers invités sont Stefan Evert (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Bente Maegaard (Centre for Language Technologie, University of Copenhagen), Damon Mayaffre (BCL UMR 7320, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) et Christophe Parisse (Modyco UMR 7114, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre).

L?objectif de ce colloque est de faire dialoguer ces différentes communautés de chercheurs, qu?ils soient producteurs ou utilisateurs de ressources et/ou d?outils. Les approches méthodologiques qui associent différents modes d?exploitation et d?analyse de corpus oraux et écrits seront particulièrement attendues.
Il s?agira notamment d?aborder les problématiques suivantes :
- Annotation (phonétique, prosodique, gestuelle, morphosyntaxique, sémantique, etc.) ;
- Standardisation des annotations et du balisage ;
- Mise en place d?un format commun aux corpus écrits et oraux, permettant d?assurer l?interopérabilité entre les deux types de données ;
- Exploitation automatique ou semi-automatique et analyse des données ;
- Mutualisation des ressources (corpus annotés, schémas d?annotation, lexiques, patrons ou grammaires?) ;
- Adaptation et/ou création d?applications pour le traitement et l?exploitation des données orales et écrites.

Format des communications :
Les interventions pourront se faire dans trois formats différents : communication orale de 20 minutes, posters et/ou démo (corpus, applications, etc.). Il sera possible de combiner la présentation d?un poster avec une démo. Il est demandé aux auteurs d?exprimer leur préférence au moment de la soumission.

Modalités de soumission :
Les propositions doivent être envoyées à l?adresse suivante : coralmontpellier3@univ-montp3.fr avant le 30 juillet 2017.
Elles prendront la forme d?un résumé anonymisé (en français ou en anglais) d?une longueur maximale de 500 mots (bibliographie non comprise) au format pdf (en Times New Roman 12). Dans le corps du message, doivent être indiqués le nom, prénom et l?affiliation de l?auteur.

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International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)

Glasgow, Scotland. November 13-17th, 2017

https://icmi.acm.org/2017/

First Call for Papers

Due May 12th, 2017. Rebuttals July 21st-July 25th. Decisions on August 25th. Camera Ready due Sept 22nd.

Submit: http://precisionconference.com/~icmi

**********

The 19th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development.

This year, ICMI welcomes contributions on human-computer interaction as a particular topic of interest. We are keen to showcase novel input and output modalities and interactions to the ICMI community.  ICMI 2017 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers, technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations), demonstrations, exhibits and doctoral spotlight papers. The conference will also feature workshops and grand challenges. The proceedings of ICMI'2017 will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and Digital Library.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Affective Computing and interaction

• Cognitive modeling and multimodal interaction

• Gesture, touch and haptics

• Healthcare, assistive technologies

• Human communication dynamics

• Human-robot/agent multimodal interaction

• Interaction with smart environment

• Machine learning for multimodal interaction

• Mobile multimodal systems

• Multimodal behavior generation

• Multimodal datasets and validation

• Multimodal dialogue modeling

• Multimodal fusion and representation

• Multimodal interactive applications

• Speech behaviors in social interaction

• System components and multimodal platforms

• Visual behaviors in social interaction

• Virtual/augmented reality and multimodal interaction

Submission Process

There are two different submission categories:

• Long paper :The maximum length is 8 pages in the two-column ACM conference format (excluding references). An accompanying demonstration can be presented during the demo session (see Demonstration section). Accepted long papers will be presented as either a long talk or a poster.

• Short paper :The maximum length is 4 pages in the two-column ACM conference format (excluding references). Accepted short papers will be presented as either a short talk or a poster.

There will be a mixture of oral and poster presentations at the conference. The decision of a poster or an oral presentation will be made by the program committee. Please note that the main difference between short and long papers is in the size of contributions and not in the importance of the contributions. In other words, a paper in eight pages will be expected to have more contribution than one with four pages. Rejected long papers will not be considered for acceptance as short papers, unless the reviewers unanimously believe this is the right decision. Authors are asked to carefully consider the category of each submitted paper.

Rebuttal Period

During this period (from July 21st to July 25th, 2017), authors will be able to see the reviews and post a short rebuttal addressing any major misinterpretation or error. The rebuttal period will be followed by a discussion period between the reviewers and Senior Program Committee members (not visible to authors). Authors will be notified of the final decision on August 25th, 2017.

Online Submission

For online paper submissions is through Precision Conference: https://precisionconference.com/~icmi/

Extra material (e.g. videos) up to 40MB can be attached in the same submission website.

Important Dates

Paper submission: 12th May 2017

Rebuttal period: July 21st to July 25th

Notification of acceptance: 25th August 2017

Camera-ready submission: September 22nd, 2017

Conference dates: 13th-17th November 2017

More info: https://icmi.acm.org/2017/index.php?id=cfp

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General Conference Information

The 2017 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2017, which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland between 13th and 17th November 2017. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development. ICMI 2017 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers, grand challenges (due Jan 13th), workshops (due Feb 22nd), technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations, due May 12th), exhibits and doctoral consortium papers (due July 3rd) and demonstrations (due August 11th). The proceedings of ICMI'2017 will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and Digital Library.

For up to date information, see the conference website: https://icmi.acm.org/2017/

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Workshop on L2 Phonetics & Phonology of L1 Romance Learners (L2PHROL). Turin, Italy.

16-17 November 2017

The University of Turin (Laboratorio Sperimentale di Fonetics ?Arturo Genre?) and the University of Paris 8 (Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage) are pleased to announce that the L2PHROL workshop (L2 Phonetics and Phonology of L1 Romance Learners) will be held in Turin (Italy) on 16-17 November 2017. The L2PHROL workshop is jointly organized by universities in France and Italy and aims at bringing together researchers working on the L2 phonetics and phonology of Romance L1 learners.


Topics of the workshop:

We welcome contributions focusing on Romance L1 learners of any L2, involving any of the following 5 broad themes:

1)      The acquisition of new phonological/phonetic/prosodic features in production and/or perception by speakers of a Romance L1, or by simultaneous bilinguals with at least one Romance language.

2)      Common characteristics and common difficulties encountered by Romance native speakers learning an L2, such as tense-lax vowel contrasts, glottal fricative /h/, aspirated stops, stress-timed rhythm, phonological vowel length, lexical tones, prosodic realisation of contrastive focus.

3)      Other phonetic characteristics of L2 speech by L1 Romance speakers.

4)      The validation of phonetic/phonological theories in the light of L2 data by speakers whose L1 is a Romance language, or by simultaneous bilinguals with at least one Romance language

5)      Teaching techniques or materials addressing L1 pronunciation and phonological awareness for Romance L1 learners of any L2.


Abstract submission

We invite abstracts in English (Times New Roman, 12-point font size, max. 1 page in A4 size plus optionally a second page for references and figures). Anonymous abstracts must be submitted by 1st September 2017 and will be peer-reviewed by members of the scientific committee (see http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ricerca/L2PHROL/committees.html ). More details about the submission procedure will be published on the website.


Registration
Registration will open on 16th September 2017. There will be no registration fee.


For further information, visit our workshop website http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ricerca/L2PHROL/ , or contact L2PHROL2017 AT gmail.com<http://gmail.com/>.

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Pour plus d?informations : www.gipsa-lab.fr/colloque/DeveloppementArticulation

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First call for papers ICNLSP 2017

ICNLSP 2017 is the International Conference On Natural Language Processing and Speech Processing to be held 5-6 December, 2017, In Casablanca ? Morocco

Conference site: http://icnlsp.isga.ma

The main goal of ICNLSP is to provide a forum for presentation, discussion and dissemination of the scientific findings in the area of Natural Language and Speech Processing. The conference welcomes papers describing original works and tool demonstration papers.

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical, experimental, or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

• Signal processing, acoustic modeling.
• Architecture of speech recognition system.
• Switch code and Arabic dialects
• Language processing of social network data
• Deep learning for speech recognition
• Speech comprehension
• Speech Translation
• Speech synthesis.
• Speaker and language identification
• Phonetics, phonology and prosody.
• Cognition and natural language processing
• Information retrieval on social network
• Neural network language models.
• Machine Learning
• Text Mining
• Video processing in social network
• Human-Machine Dialogue
• Text summarization

Invited speakers:

Jean-Paul Haton (Professor Emeritus at university of Lorraine)

Yves Lepage (Professor at University of Waseda ? Japan)

Olivier Siohan (Senior Researcher at Google ? USA)

Imed Zitouni (Senior Researcher at Microsoft ? USA)

 

Program Committee

Frédéric Béchet ( Professor  University Aix-Marseille, France)
Laurent Besacier (Professor  University of Grenoble, France)
Khalid Choukri (Executive director of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA))
Mona Diab (Associate Professor George Washington University)
Yannick Estève (Professor University of Le Mans, France)
Dominique Fohr (researcher  CNRS, France)
Jean-Paul Haton (Professor emeritus, University Lorraine, France)
Salma Jamoussi (Assistant Professor University of Sfax, Tunisia)
Denis Jouvet (Researcher  INRIA Lorraine, France)
David Langlois (Assistant Professor Lorraine University, France)
Chiraz Latiri (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Yves Lepage (Professor University Waseda, Japan)
Mikolaj Leszcuk (Assistant Professor, Poland)
Khalifa Mansouri (Assistant Professor University Hassan II)
Odile Mella (Assistant professor at University of Lorraine)
Franck Poirier (Professor University of Bretagne sud)
Fatiha Sadat (Associate Professor UQAM, Canada)
Khaled Shaalan (Professor The British University in Dubai, UAE)
Olivier Siohan (Researcher  Google, USA)
Yahya Slimani (Professor University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Kamel Smaili (Professor University Lorraine, France)
Juan-Manual Torrès (Assistant Professor University of Avignon, France)
Imed Zitouni (Researcher at Microsoft, USA)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to four pages (double column) for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references. Submissions will be done via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icnlsp2017


We apologize for cross-posting and kindly ask you to forward this information to interested persons.

Best regards

Pr K. Smaïli
PC chair

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DSTC6: Call for Track Proposals
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 ================================================================================= IHCI
2017: 9th International Conference on Intelligent Human-Computer Interaction
Evry, France, December 11-13, 2017, http://ihci2017.sciencesconf.org
================================================================================= The 9th
international conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI 2017) will be
held in Evry, near Paris, France, from 11 to 13 of December 2017.

IHCI allows researchers and practitioners to exchange on recent results in the area of
human-computer interaction, related technologies (including signal processing, multimodal
analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive modelling) and their
applications. The conference will bring together researchers from academia, industry and
research organizations from various disciplines, around theoretical, practical and
application-oriented contributions.

This year, along with usual topics, IHCI 2017 will focus on human cognition modelling for
interaction, including human cognitive process modelling (for task analysis...),
human-robot interaction (for companion robots...), cognition for interaction in virtual
worlds (for autonomous conversational agents...).

Keynotes will be given by :
- Pr. Alain Berthoz, Honorary Professor at Collège de France, member of the French
Academy of Science and Academy of Technology, on 'Simplexity and vicariance. On human
cognition principles for man-machine interaction'
- Pr. Mohamed Chetouani, Professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University, France, on
'Interpersonal Human-Human and Human-Robot Interactions',
- Pr. Antti Oulasvirta, Associate Professor at Aalto University, Finland, on 'Can
Machines Design? Optimizing User Interfaces for Human Performance'.

The IHCI topics include but are not limited to:

Human Cognition Modelling:
- Cognitive models of intelligence
- Modelling perceptual processes
- Modelling of learning and thinking
- Modelling of memory
- Cognitive task analysis

User adaptation and Personalization:
- Adaptive learning
- Affective computing for adaptive interaction
- Reinforcement learning

Brain Computer Interfaces:
- Brain computer integration
- Brain activity understanding for interaction

Machine Perception of Humans:
- Speech detection and recognition
- Natural language processing
- Face and emotion detection
- Body sensors and communication
- Gesture recognition
- Human motion tracking

Tactile interfaces:
- Haptics fundaments
- Haptic feedback for interaction
- Haptic feedback for robot collaboration

Human-Robot Interaction and collaboration:
- Collaborative learning
- Collaborative systems
- Temporal coordination modelling

Applications:
- Natural User Interfaces
- Human-robot interaction
- Virtual and augmented reality
- Remote and face-to-face collaboration
- Embodied conversational agents
- Mobile interfaces
- Interface design for accessibility and rehabilitation
- Interaction and cognition for education
- Health
- Serious games

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**NEW:* The conference proceedings will be published as an open access volume in the
Springer series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and indexed in the ISI
Conference Proceedings Citation Index, Scopus, EI Engineering Index, Google Scholar,
DBLP, etc. Papers can be either long papers (10 to 12 pages) or short papers (4 to 6
pages), and must conform to the LNCS templates (see the guidelines for authors). *
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Papers must be written in English and describe original work that has not been published
and is not under review elsewhere. In order to enforce blind reviewing, papers must be
made anonymous before submitting (by removing the author?s names and institution from the
header).

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: *June 30, 2017 (EXTENDED) *
- Decision notification: September 10, 2017 (tentative)
- Final version due: October 1st, 2017

Patrick Horain (Telecom SudParis), Chair
Catherine Achard (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), Co-Chair
Malik Mallem (Université Evry Val d'Essonne), Co-Chair

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 10 th International Workshop MAVEBA2017.

http://maveba.dinfo.unifi.it/

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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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2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
     Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence: Changing the World

                      ICASSP 2018  Seoul KOREA
                          April 22-27, 2018

                    https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/

                 CALL FOR SPECIAL-SESSION PROPOSALS

The program for ICASSP 2018 will include Special Sessions that complement the traditional program with new and emerging  topics of interest to the signal-processing community, particularly those that are in line with the theme of the conference. The aim of a special session is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art as well as to highlight current research directions and challenges in specific fields of signal processing.

Prospective organizers of Special Sessions should submit proposals indicating:

  + Title of the Special Session
  + Motivation, indicating the novelty of the topic and why it is timely.
  + Short biography of the organizers
  + List of six (6) contributed papers (including titles, authors, contact information of the corresponding author, and a short abstract of each contribution). Each organizer may not contribute more than one paper, and organizers should contact the authors of contributed papers and secure their participation prior to submission of the proposal.

Only a maximum of three organizers per Special Session is allowed.

Proposals will be evaluated based on the timeliness and attractiveness of the topic as well as on the qualifications of the organizers and the authors of the contributed papers.

Special session proposals are due by August 4, 2017, and notification of accepted proposals will be on September 8, 2017. Just as with regular conference papers, five page papers for approved Special Sessions must be submitted by October 27, 2017.

The papers in each accepted Special Session will undergo a review process identical to that of regular papers. It is the responsibility of the organizers to ensure that their Special-Session papers meet ICASSP quality standards. In case a paper in a Special Session does not meet the expected quality, it will be rejected, and an effort will be made to draw papers from the regular-submission process to fill the gap. If too few papers for a given Special Session are accepted in the review process, and we are unable to find suitable substitutes from the regular review pool, the Special Session may be canceled?in such a case, the accepted papers from a canceled Special Session will be placed into the regular program.

Inquiries about Special Sessions can be sent to specialsessions@2018.ieeeicassp.org and submissions can be made through https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/SpecialSessions.asp

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LREC 2018, 11th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation -
Phoenix Seagaia Resort, Miyazaki, Japan
7-12 May 2018

Main Conference: 9-10-11 May 2018
Workshops and Tutorials: 7-8 & 12 May 2018

Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2018/lrec2018.htm
Twitter: @LREC2018

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 11th edition of LREC, organised with the support of international organisations ? many from Asia: the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), Oriental COCOSDA, the Association of Natural Language Processing - Japan, the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, the Linguistic Data Consortium, ...

CONFERENCE AIMS
LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, communicate on-going and planned activities, identify industrial uses and needs, and address requirements from e-science and e-society, with respect to scientific, technology, policy and organisational issues.

For this edition, LREC goes East in order to support a stronger interaction and synergy with the Asian NLP community and to help promoting Asian Language Resources and Language Technologies.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from a wide spectrum of related disciplines to discuss issues and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LTs) and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS
Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data
* Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
* Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
* Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
* Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
* LRs and Semantic Web
* LRs and Crowdsourcing
* Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up


Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications
* Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication
* LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, etc.
* Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
* Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications, digital humanities, social sciences, etc.
* Industrial LRs requirements
* User needs, LT for accessibility

Issues in LT evaluation
* LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
* Validation and quality assurance of LRs
* Benchmarking of systems and products
* Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
* User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
* International and national activities, projects and initiatives
* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
* Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
* Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
* Replicability and reproducibility issues
* Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

LREC 2018 HOT TOPICS

Asian Language Resources
Special attention will be devoted to highlight the wide variety of initiatives for the creation, use and evaluation of Asian Language Resources and Technologies. Special attention will be paid to Less-Resourced Languages in the Asian area, including (local) Sign Languages.

International Contribution to Olympics 2020
LREC 2018 would like to promote all LTs that would support better interactions and communications between the Olympics 2020 visitors and the local hosts. This involves all speech- and text-based computer interactions, speech/sign to speech/sign translations, human-human communications mediated by computers, etc. Assessment of the above mentioned technologies is also an important area within LREC 2018.

Language Resources in the Online World
In a time in which more and more (language) data are generated, either by human beings or by machines, and directly streamed, the question arises how LRs and LTs can cope with this development. A first challenge is to address and to provide for correctives to hate speeches, cyberbullying, fake news, etc. Can LT provide means to process and respond in a timely manner to such language data streamed in a huge amount at high speed? In this context, language technologists have to intensify cooperation with humanities, especially social and political sciences, psychology but also economics, and more.


DESCRIBE AND SHARE YOUR LRs!
In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map ? now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences ? LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community.
When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.
We will also organise an Industrial Track.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES
Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: September 25, 2017
* LREC2018 asks for extended abstracts of no less than 3000 words (references excluded), which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet which will be available on the conference website. Extended abstracts should be submitted through START and will be peer-reviewed.
Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: September 25, 2017
* Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS
The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. Final papers will range from 4 to 8 pages, with no difference in quality between shorter and longer submissions.
There is also no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.
The importance of LREC in Natural Language Processing is reflected by the H5-Index citation ranking in Google Scholar: LREC is ranked 3rd among Computational Linguistics conferences. In addition, since 2010, LREC Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari ? CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri ? ELRA, Paris - France
Christopher Cieri ? Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia - USA
Thierry Declerck ? DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Koiti Hasida ? The University of Tokyo, Tokyo - Japan
Hitoshi Isahara ? Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi - Japan
Bente Maegaard ? Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani ? LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay - France
Asuncion Moreno ? Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain
Jan Odijk ? UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis ? Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece
Takenobu Tokunaga ? Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo ? Japan

CONFERENCE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Sara Goggi, CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa, Italy
Hélène Mazo, ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France

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