IBEREVAL? 2018: Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages

Call for Tasks Proposals

Researchers and practitioners from all areas of Natural Language Processing and related
communities are invited to submit proposals for evaluation tasks on computational
problems that involve text processing in at least one of the following Iberian languages:
Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque and Galician. The outcome of accepted tasks will be
discussed in the IBEREVAL workshop to be held in conjunction with SEPLN 2018 in Seville
(Spain) in September.

Two types of proposals are expected:
? Standard evaluation campaigns in the style of TREC, CLEF, SemEval, NTCIR, or FIRE
evaluation exercises.
? More exploratory initiatives that aim to settle the foundations for future evaluation
campaigns, discussing tasks, methodologies, metrics, test collections, etc.

Proposals should include the following information:
? Title of the track.
? Name(s) of organizers and contact details, with one?paragraph statements of their
research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organizing related events.
? Brief description of the task goal, including their significance for the field and the
expected target audience.
? Arrangements for the organization of the task: who will be responsible for which
activities, description of the data or how will data be acquired or created, available
funding, proposed
schedule, and any other relevant issues.

Proposals must be submitted to [ibereval2018organizers@listserv.uned.es].

We strongly encourage the Latin America NLP research community to organize tasks and
participate in IberEval campaigns.

Task Selection

Each submitted proposal will be reviewed by the IBEREVAL steering committee, and
decisions will be sent to organizers by January 31, 2017. At least one of the organizers
of each accepted
track is expected to attend the IBEREVAL workshop and present the results of the track.

Important Dates
Task proposals due: January 14, 2017
Notifications of acceptance: January 31, 2018

IBEREVAL Workshop: September, 2018

Steering Committee:
Eneko Agirre (UPV?EHU Donostia?San Sebastián, Spain)
César Antonio Aguilar (UC Santiago, Chile)
Doaa Ahmed Samy (MINETAD Madrid, Spain)
Enrique Amigó (UNED Madrid, Spain)
Mikhail Alexandrov (RPANEPA Moscow, Russia)
Rodrigo Alfaro Arancibia (UCV Valparaiso, Chile)
Victoria Arranz (ELDA/ELRA Paris, France)
Javier Artiles (SmartNews Palo Alto, U.S.A.)
Alexandra Balahur (EC?JRC Varese, Italy)
Rafael Banchs (Ins. Infocomm Research, Singapore)
Alberto Barron?Cedeno (QCRI, Qatar)
Nuria Bel (UPF Barcelona, Spain)
Rafael Berlanga (UJI Castellón, Spain)
Xavier Carreras (NAVER LABS Meylan, France)
Davide Buscaldi (Univ?paris13 Villetaneuse, France)
Marcelo Errecalde (UNSL San Luis, Argentina)
Miguel Ángel García Cumbreras (UJA Jaén, Spain)
Xavier Gómez Guinovart (UVIGO Vigo, Spain)
Fabio A. Gonzalez (UNAL Bogota, Colombia)
Yoan Gutiérrez (UA Alicante, Spain)
Antonio Jimeno (IBM Melbourne, Australia)
Martin Krallinguer (CNIO Madrid, Spain)
David Losada (USC Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Eugenio Martínez (UGR Granada, Spain)
Paloma Martínez (UC3M Leganés, Spain)
Patricio Martínez (UA Alicante, Spain)
José Eladio Medina (CENATAV Habana, Cuba)
Diego Molla?Aliod (MQU Sydney, Australia)
Soto Montalvo (URJC Móstoles, Spain)
Manuel Montes (INAOEP Puebla, Mexico)
Viviane Moreira (UFRGS Porto Alegre, Brazil)
Lluis Padró (UPC Barcelona, Spain)
Ferrán Pla (UPV Valencia, Spain)
David Pinto (BUAP Puebla, Mexico)
Jordi Porta (RAE Madrid, Spain)
Paulo Quaresma (UE Evora, Portugal)
Francisco Manuel Rangel (Autoritas Consulting Valencia, Spain)
German Rigau (UPV?EHU Donostia?San Sebastián, Spain)
Horacio Saggion (UPF Barcelona, Spain)
Marc?Franco Salvador (Symanto Valencia, Spain)
Eric San Juan (IUT STID Avignon, France)
Grigori Sidorov (IPN Mexico City, Mexico)
Thamar Solorio (UH Houston, U.S.A.)
Mariona Taulé (UB Barcelona, Spain)
Javier Tejada (UCSP Arequipa, Peru)
José Antonio Troyano (US Sevilla, Spain)
Luis Alfonso Ureña (UJA Jaén, Spain)
Antonio Valderrábanos (Bitext Madrid, Spain)
Rafael Valencia (UM Murcia, Spain)
Juan Velasquez (UCHILE Santiago, Chile)
Jesús Vilares (UDC A Coruña, Spain)
Manuel Vilares (UVIGO Vigo, Spain)
Aline Villavicencio (UFRGS Porto Alegre, Brazil)
Julio Villena (MeaningCloud Madrid, Spain)
Dina Wonsever (UDELAR Montevideo, Uruguay)

Top

Les Ateliers Sciences et Voix reprennent pour une nouvelle Saison ASV5, de novembre 2017 à juin 2018 (http://atelier-sciences-voix.fr/).

Nous vous retrouverons les jeudis matins de 9h30 à 12h à l?Amphi2 du Bâtiment Stendhal de l?Université Grenoble Alpes (Attention, le lieu change par rapport aux saisons précédentes). Le Bâtiment Stendhal s?étend sur le Campus de l?UGA, du 1086 au 1366 Avenue Centrale (arrêt des tramways B ou C - 'Bibliothèques Universitaires'). Les amphis sont orientés comme indiqué sur le plan ci-dessous; l'Amphi2 est situé dans le Hall Nord du Bâtiment Z.

Les ateliers seront toujours accessibles également sur internet, en podcast live ou différé. Voici le programme préliminaire de la Saison ASV5:

• Jeudi 18 Janvier 2018 : « Biomécanique du pli vocal » par Lucie Bailly, Chercheuse CNRS au Laboratoire 3SR, Grenoble
• Jeudi 08 Février 2018 : « Breathing behaviour and voice » par Johan Sundberg, Professeur émérite au TMH KTH, Stockholm, Suède
• Jeudi 08 Mars 2018 : « Voix et criminalistique » par Jean-François Bonastre, Professeur au LIA, Avignon
• Jeudi 05 Avril 2018 : « Les émotions en voix chantée » par Klaus Scherer, Professeur à l?Université de Genève
• Jeudi 03 Mai 2018 : «  La petite voix dans la tête » par Hélène Loevenbrück, Chercheuse CNRS au LPNC, Grenoble
• Jeudi 14 Juin 2018 : « La voix des enseignants : usages et prévention » par Maëva Garnier, Chercheuse CNRS au GIPSA-lab, Grenoble

En espérant vous retrouver nombreux à ces occasions,

Top

4th INTERNATIONAL WINTER SCHOOL ON BIG DATA
 
BigDat 2018
 
Timisoara, Romania
 
January 22-26, 2018
 
Organized by:
West University of Timisoara
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/BigDat2018/
 
*******************************************************
  

--- Regular registration deadline: January 19, 2018 ---

 
*******************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
BigDat 2018 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 big data, which covers a large spectrum of current exciting research and industrial innovation with an extraordinary potential for a huge impact on scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, business models, and society itself. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.
 
Most big data subareas will be displayed, namely foundations, infrastructure, management, search and mining, security and privacy, and applications (to biological and health sciences, to business, finance and transportation, to online social networks, etc.). Major challenges of analytics, management and storage of big data will be identified through 2 keynote lectures, 25 five-hour and fifteen-minute 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. Also, there will be two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
Master students, PhD students, postdocs, and industry practitioners 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. Overall, BigDat 2018 is addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who want to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends. All will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.
 
STRUCTURE:
 
3 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:
 
BigDat 2018 will take place in Timi?oara, which has been nominated one of the European Capitals of Culture in 2021. The venue will be:
 
Universitatea de Vest
Blvd. Vasile Parvân, nr. 4
300223 Timi?oara
 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: (to be completed)
 
tba
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES:
 
Paul Bliese (University of South Carolina), [introductory/intermediate] Using R for Mixed-effects (Multilevel) Models
 
Hendrik Blockeel (KU Leuven), [intermediate] Decision Trees for Big Data Analytics
 
Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), [intermediate] tba
 
Nick Duffield (Texas A&M University), [introductory/intermediate] Sampling for Big Data
 
Sa?o D?eroski (Jo?ef Stefan Institute), [introductory/intermediate] Multi-target Prediction: Techniques and Applications
 
Geoffrey C. Fox (Indiana University, Bloomington), [intermediate] Integration of HPC, Big Data Analytics and Software Ecosystem
 
Minos Garofalakis (Technical University of Crete), [intermediate/advanced] Data Streaming Analytics
 
David W. Gerbing (Portland State University), [introductory] Data Visualization with R
 
Maurizio Lenzerini (Sapienza University of Rome), [intermediate/advanced] Semantic Technologies for Open Data Publishing
 
Bing Liu (University of Illinois, Chicago), [intermediate/advanced] Lifelong Learning and its Applications in NLP
 
B.S. Manjunath (University of California, Santa Barbara), [introductory] Unstructured (Big) Data
 
Folker Meyer (Argonne National Laboratory), [introductory/intermediate] Efficient Multi Cloud Execution of Reproducible Data Analytics using Common Workflow Language, AWE and SHOCK
 
Wladek Minor (University of Virginia), [introductory/advanced] Big Data in Biomedical Sciences
 
Fionn Murtagh (University of Huddersfield), [introductory/advanced] The New Science of Big Data Analytics, Based on the Geometry and the Topology of Complex, Hierarchic Systems
 
Raymond Ng (University of British Columbia), [introductory] Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations
 
Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Ohio State University), [introductory/intermediate] Network Science Fundamentals
 
Hanan Samet (University of Maryland, College Park), [introductory/intermediate] Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial, and Metric Data Structures for Applications in Spatial Databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Location-based Services
 
Kyuseok Shim (Seoul National University), [introductory/intermediate] MapReduce Algorithms for Big Data Analysis
 
Jaideep Srivastava (Qatar Computing Research Institute), [introductory/intermediate] Social Computing
 
Jeffrey Ullman (Stanford University), [introductory] Big-data Algorithms That Aren't Machine Learning
 
Pascal Van Hentenryck (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), [intermediate] Big Data in Transportation and Mobility
 
Sebastián Ventura (University of Córdoba), [intermediate/advanced] Pattern Mining on Big Data
 
Haixun Wang (Facebook), [intermediate/advanced] Understanding Natural Language: End-to-end and Structure Learning Approaches
 
Xiaowei Xu (University of Arkansas, Little Rock), [introductory/advanced] Mining Big Networked Data
 
Zhongfei Zhang (Binghamton University), [introductory/advanced] Relational and Media Data Learning and Knowledge Discovery
 
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 January 15, 2018.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A session will be devoted to demonstrations of practical applications of big data in industry. Companies 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 January 15, 2018.
 
EMPLOYER SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in big data 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 January 15, 2018.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Carlos Martín-Vide (co-chair)
Viorel Negru
Manuel J. Parra Royón
Dana Petcu
Monica Sancira (co-chair)
David Silva
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/BigDat2018/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. During the event, participants will be free to attend the courses they wish.
 
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 if the capacity of the venue is exhausted. It is highly 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:
 
Suggestions for accommodation will be available in due time.
 
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:
 
Universitatea de Vest din Timisoara
Universitat Rovira i Virgili4^th

Top

12th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
 
LATA 2018
 
Ramat Gan, Israel
 
April 8-12, 2018
 
Organized by:
           
Department of Computer Science
Bar-Ilan University
 
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2018/
************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field organized by Rovira i Virgili University since 2002, LATA 2018 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas.
 
VENUE:
 
LATA 2018 will take place in Ramat Gan, in the district of Tel Aviv and home to one of the world's major diamond exchanges. The venue will be the Faculty of Exact Sciences of Bar-Ilan University.
 
SCOPE:
 
Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
algebraic language theory
algorithms for semi-structured data mining
algorithms on automata and words
automata and logic
automata for system analysis and programme verification
automata networks
automatic structures
codes
combinatorics on words
computational complexity
concurrency and Petri nets
data and image compression
descriptional complexity
foundations of finite state technology
foundations of XML
grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, unification, categorial, etc.)
grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
graphs and graph transformation
language varieties and semigroups
language-based cryptography
mathematical and logical foundations of programming methodologies
parallel and regulated rewriting
parsing
patterns
power series
string processing algorithms
symbolic dynamics
term rewriting
transducers
trees, tree languages and tree automata
weighted automata
 
STRUCTURE:
 
LATA 2018 will consist of:
 
invited talks
peer-reviewed contributions
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
 
Christel Baier (Technical University of Dresden, DE)
Pablo Barceló (University of Chile, CL)
Francine Blanchet-Sadri (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, US)
Alexander Clark (King's College London, UK)
Frank Drewes (Umeå University, SE)
Manfred Droste (University of Leipzig, DE)
Dora Giammarresi (University of Rome Tor Vergata, IT)
Erich Grädel (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Peter Habermehl (Paris Diderot University, FR)
Jeffrey Heinz (Stony Brook University, US)
Pedro Rangel Henriques (University of Minho, PT)
Christian Höner zu Siederdissen (University of Leipzig, DE)
Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom (Leiden University, NL)
David Janin (University of Bordeaux, FR)
Marcin Jurdzi?ski (University of Warwick, UK)
Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics, JP)
Jarkko Kari (University of Turku, FI)
Shmuel Tomi Klein (Bar-Ilan University, IL)
Salvatore La Torre (University of Salerno, IT)
Salvador Lucas (Polytechnic University of Valencia, ES)
Stuart W. Margolis (Bar-Ilan University, IL)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Fernando Orejas (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, ES)
Paritosh K. Pandya (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, IN)
Gennaro Parlato (University of Southampton, UK)
Dominique Perrin (University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, FR)
Detlef Plump (University of York, UK)
Matteo Pradella (Polytechnic University of Milan, IT)
Kai Salomaa (Queen's University, CA)
Sven Schewe (University of Liverpool, UK)
William F. Smyth (McMaster University, CA)
Jiri Srba (Aalborg University, DK)
Benjamin Steinberg (City College of New York, US)
Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, SG)
K.G. Subramanian (University Sains Malaysia, MY)
Klaus Sutner (Carnegie Mellon University, US)
Margus Veanes (Microsoft Research, US)
Éric Villemonte de la Clergerie (INRIA, FR)
Mahesh Viswanathan (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, US)
Mikhail Volkov (Ural State University, RU)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Shmuel Tomi Klein (Ramat Gan, co-chair)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Manuel Jesús Parra Royón (Granada)
Dana Shapira (Ariel)
David Silva (London)
 
SUBMISSIONS:
 
Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (all included) 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). If necessary, exceptionally authors are allowed to provide missing proofs in a clearly marked appendix.
 
Submissions have to be uploaded to:
 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2018
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.
 
A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.
 
REGISTRATION:
 
The registration form can be found at:
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2018/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Paper submission: November 17, 2017
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: December 24, 2017
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: January 4, 2018
Early registration: January 4, 2018
Late registration: March 25, 2018
Submission to the journal special issue: July 12, 2018
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com
 
POSTAL ADDRESS:
 
LATA 2018
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
?????????? ??-????
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Top

IEEE ICASSP 2018 UPDATE
New Date and Location

15-20 April 2018 | Calgary, AB, Canada

Dear SPS Members,

As a follow up to the message sent last week, we are excited to announce that ICASSP 2018 will be held from 15-20 April 2018 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and we are now accepting papers! We are very excited about the level of support and enthusiasm received by SPS members and the global community of this flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. We are looking forward to seeing you all in Calgary!

Call for Papers: Paper Submission Deadline 27 October 2017

 Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers of not more than four pages of technical content including figures and references, with an optional fifth page containing only references. 

As we witness the rapid increase in smart technologies, the theme of ICASSP 2018 is ?Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence: Changing the World.' The conference will feature world-class international speakers, tutorials, exhibits, lectures and poster sessions from around the world. Topics include but are not limited to:

TOPICS OF INTEREST

• Audio and acoustic signal processing

• Sensor array & multichannel signal processing

• Bio-imaging and biomedical signal processing

• Signal processing education

• Design & implementation of signal processing systems

• Signal processing for communication & networking

• Image, video & multidimensional signal processing

• Signal processing theory & methods

• Industry technology tracks

• Signal processing for Big Data

• Information forensics and security

• The Internet of Things & RFID

• Machine learning for signal processing

• Speech processing

• Spoken language processing

• Multimedia signal processing

• Remote Sensing and signal processing

• Signal Processing for Brain Machine Interface

• Signal Processing for Smart Systems

• Signal Processing for Cyber Security

• Computational Imaging

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission Deadline: 27 October 2017

A selection of best papers will be made by the ICASSP 2018 committee upon recommendations from Technical Committees. All papers must be submitted in PDF form. LaTeX and Word templates will be provided. Authors are encouraged to prepare their papers using LaTeX. For more details, visit: https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/CallForPapers.asp
 
Thanks to the efforts and dedication performed by the ICASSP 2018 Organizing Committee, and especially the engagement from our Korean SPS community, this has all been possible.  We invite you all to submit papers and we look forward to seeing you in Calgary!
 
Kind regards,
Monty Hayes & Hanseok Ko
Co-General Chairs, IEEE ICASSP 2018
http://2018.ieeeicassp.org

Top

CFA 2018 Le Havre ? 23?27 avril 2018
14ème Congrès Français d?Acoustique
http://www.cfa2018-sfa.fr

Top

Welcome to ICNLSP 2018 (www.icnlsp.org), an IEEE technically co-sponsored conference. It is the second edition of the International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing. The first edition ICNLSP 2015 (www.icnlsp.org/icnlsp2015) was held in Algiers on October 2015.

In addition to regular papers representing finished work, position papers describing ongoing research are also appreciated.

Signal processing, acoustic modeling
Architecture of speech recognition system
Deep learning for speech recognition
Analysis of speech
Paralinguistics in Speech and Language
Pathological speech and language
Speech coding
Speech comprehension
Summarization
Speech Translation
Speech synthesis
Speaker and language identification
Phonetics, phonology and prosody
Cognition and natural language processing
Information retrieval
Text categorization
Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
Computational Social Web
Arabic dialects processing
Under-resourced languages: tools and corpora
New language models
Arabic OCR

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

- Lluis Marquez, Principal scientist, QCRI, Qatar
- Gérard Chollet, Emeritus CNRS researcher, France
- Djamel Bouchaffra, Professor, CDTA, Algeria

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Chair: Mourad Abbas
Mourad Abbas Researcher, CRSTDLA, Algeria
Ahmed Abdelali Researcher, QCRI, Qatar
Mohamed Afify Researcher, Microsoft, Egypt
Mansour Alghamdi Professor, KACST, Saudi Arabia
Farah Benamara Zitoune, Associate Professor, Paul Sabatier Univ., France
Daoud Berkani Professor, ENP, Algeria
Djamel Bouchaffra Professor, CDTA, Algeria
Youcef Chibani Professor, USTHB, Algeria
Gérard Chollet Emeritus researcher,CNRS, France
Kareem Darwish Researcher, QCRI, Qatar
Mohamed Elfeky Researcher, Google Inc., USA
Ahmed Guessoum Professor, USTHB, Algeria
Valia Kordoni Associate professor, Humboldt University, Germany
Eric Laporte Professor, UPEM, France
Georges Linarès Professor, University of Avignon, France
Walid Magdy Associate professor, University of Edinburgh, UK
Lluis Marquez Researcher, QCRI, Qatar
Preslav Nakov Researcher, QCRI, Qatar
Ahmed Rafea Professor, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Khaled Shaalan Professor, The British University in Dubai, UAE
Otakar Smrz Researcher, D?ám-e D?am Language Institute, Czech Republic
Rudolph Sock Professor, University of Strasbourg, France
Stephan Vogel Researcher, QCRI, Qatar
Marcos Zampieri Researcher, University of Wolverhampton, UK

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: 18 December 2017
Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2018
Camera-ready paper due: 28 February 2018
Conference dates: 25, 26 April 2018

CONTACT
Dr. Mourad Abbas
m_abbas04@yahoo.fr

Top

 Colloque international de Sciences du langage 
 26-28 avril 2018 
 Université d’Opole, Pologne

Argumentaire
 
La rencontre sera centrée sur la perception en langue, en discours et en parole, thème qu’il s’agira avant tout d’aborder sous ses diverses coutures linguistiques, soient-elles grammaticales, morphologiques, syntaxiques, sémantiques, pragmatiques, discursives, logiques, cognitives, phonétiques, sociolinguistiques, psycholinguistiques, etc. L’objectif général du colloque sera ainsi de s’interroger sur la question de savoir comment notre langage prend en charge nos perceptions, tant en termes de construction, de profilage, de transmission que de réception, pour tenter de rendre plus nets les contours encore flous de l’expression linguistique de la perception, d’en approfondir l’étude des propriétés et/ou spécificités connues voire d’en mettre au jour de nouvelles. De manière plus spécifique, il s’agira entre autres, à partir de l’observation de la façon dont elles s’inscrivent dans le langage, de faire ressortir la dualité des ontologies de la perception (sensorielle vs intellectuelle). En pratique, à partir de la langue, du discours et de la parole, l’on interrogera le moule et la matrice linguistiques de la perception à travers, notamment, les axes suivants :
 
- descriptif (quels outils et/ou mécanismes instruisent nos perceptions, les décrivent, les véhiculent ou en rendent compte ?) ; - lexicologique (comment les dictionnaires traitent-ils des vocables et des structures de la perception ?) ; - prospectif (les grammaires, ouvrages grammaticaux, manuels scolaires ou autres référentiels pédagogiques de demain devront-ils intégrer la perception comme contenu à part entière, et si oui, comment ?) ; - didactique (faut-il enseigner la perception comme un contenu indépendant, et si oui, comment ? ; quel(s) lien(s) établir entre perception et acquisition d’une langue étrangère ?) ; - épistémologique (qu’est-ce qu’une perception, quels en sont les fondements, les modes et les dynamiques de production, d’évolution, d’organisation, de réception et/ou de validation ?) ; - contrastif (qu’est-ce qui distingue la perception d’un évènement de celle d’un objet, d’un fait ou d’une action ? ; qu’est-ce qui distingue un compte rendu de perception en français d’un compte rendu de perception dans d’autres langues données ?) ; - traductologique (quelles difficultés concrètes représente la traduction des comptes rendus de perception du français vers une langue cible donnée, et comment pallier ces problèmes ?) ; - historique (quand les notions de perception, de contenu et compte rendu de perception sont-elles apparues en linguistique, et comment ont-elles évolué ?).
 
À cet effet, qu’elles soient théoriques ou appliquées, systématiques ou expérimentales, contextuelles ou indépendantes, synchroniques ou diachroniques, prescriptives, descriptives ou programmatiques, intra ou interdisciplinaires, les propositions de communication ainsi sollicitées devront nécessairement s’inscrire dans au moins l’un des domaines fondamentaux des Sciences du langage. En outre, toutes les langues et tous les types de langages, naturels comme non naturels, pourront être pris comme base empirique. Enfin, quelle que soit l’approche envisagée, les démarches expérimentales et/ou cliniques seront très appréciées.
 
La Perception en langue et en discours (3e éd.) Université d’Opole, 26-28 avril 2018
3
 
 Comité scientifique
 
Elżbieta BIARDZKA (Université de Wrocław, Pologne) – Krzysztof BOGACKI (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Laura CALABRESE (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique) – Joanna CHOLEWA (Université de Białystok, Pologne) – Bernard COMBETTES (Université de Lorraine, France) – Ivana DIDIRKOVÁ (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgique) – Christelle DODANE (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) – María Luisa DONAIRE FERNANDEZ (Université d’Oviedo, Espagne) – Brigitte GARCIA (Université Paris 8, France) – Teresa GIERMAK-ZIELIŃSKA (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Geneviève GIRARD-GILLET (Université Paris 3, France) – Christopher GLEDHILL (Université Paris 7, France) – Aude GREZKA (CNRS, France) – Fabrice HIRSCH (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) – Małgorzata IZERT (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Alicja KACPRZAK (Université de Łodź, Pologne) – Greta KOMUR-THILLOY (Université de Haute-Alsace, France) – Anna KRZYŻANOWSKA (Université Marie Curie-Skłodowska, Lublin, Pologne) – Radosław KUCHARCZYK (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Katarzyna KWAPISZ-OSADNIK (Université de Silésie, Pologne) – Christelle LACASSAIN-LAGOIN (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France) – Jan LAZAR (Université d’Opole, Pologne) – Sébastien MARENGO (Université de Sherbrooke & Université de Montréal, Canada) – Claude MULLER (Université Bordeaux 3, France) – Sylvester OSU (Université de Tours, France) – Urszula PAPROCKAPIOTROWSKA (Université catholique de Lublin, Pologne) – Sebastian PIOTROWSKI (Université catholique de Lublin, Pologne) – Jean-Christophe PELLAT (Université de Strasbourg, France) – Mária PAĽOVÁ (Université P.J. Šafárik de Košice, Slovaquie) – Ewa PILECKA (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Jérémi SAUVAGE (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) – Laura PINO SERRANO (Université de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, Espagne) – Elżbieta SKIBIŃSKA (Université de Wrocław, Pologne) – Dorota ŚLIWA (Université catholique de Lublin, Pologne) – Maciej SMUK (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) – Rudolph SOCK (Université de Strasbourg, France) – Agnès STEUCKARDT (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) – Witold UCHEREK (Université de Wrocław, Pologne) – Danièle VAN DE VELDE (Université Lille 3, France) – Dan VAN RAEMDONCK (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique) – Béatrice VAXELAIRE (Université de Strasbourg, France) – Bertrand VERINE (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) – Sadia ZOUBIR-SHAW (Université du Kentucky, États-Unis d’Amérique)
 
 
 Comité d’organisation
 
Elżbieta BIARDZKA (Université de Wrocław, Pologne) Magdalena DAŃKO (Université d’Opole, Pologne) Fabrice HIRSCH (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) Greta KOMUR-THILLOY (Université de Haute-Alsace, France) Katarzyna KWAPISZ-OSADNIK (Université de Silésie, Pologne) Christelle LACASSAIN-LAGOIN (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France) Fabrice MARSAC (Université d’Opole, Pologne) Mária PAĽOVÁ (Université P.J. Šafárik de Košice, Slovaquie) Ewa PILECKA (Université de Varsovie, Pologne) Rudolph SOCK (Université de Strasbourg, France) Sadia ZOUBIR-SHAW (Université du Kentucky, États-Unis d’Amérique)
 
La Perception en langue et en discours (3e éd.) Université d’Opole, 26-28 avril 2018
4
 
 Renseignements pratiques
 
Les propositions de communication, nécessairement établies à partir du fichier « PropCom » ci-joint et non anonymées, devront être envoyées simultanément à Magdalena Dańko : mdanko@uni.opole.pl et à Fabrice Marsac : fmarsac@uni.opole.pl avant le 15 décembre 2017 (indiquer « PLD 2018 » comme objet). Les notifications d’acceptation ou de rejet des propositions de communication seront transmises aux auteurs au plus tard le 25 janvier 2018 et un premier programme provisoire du colloque suivra à compter du 15 février. Les communications devront ne pas dépasser 20 minutes de temps de parole (auxquelles s’ajouteront 10 minutes pour les questions) et la langue de présentation sera préférablement le français (même si l’anglais est également possible). Ultérieurement, les contributions écrites retenues par le Comité scientifique convoqué à cet effet feront l’objet d’une publication, dans le courant de l’année civile 2019, comme volume(s) thématique(s) dans la Collection Dixit Grammatica (L’Harmattan, France). Les frais d’inscription (de 400 PLN ou 100 €) comprennent le dîner de gala du premier jour (jeudi 26), la sortie culturelle nocturne du deuxième jour (vendredi 27) et la publication des contributions. Les frais de logement et autres frais de restauration sont exclusivement à la charge des participants. Le colloque se tiendra au Département des Philologies de l’Université d’Opole (situé au 11a de la Place Kopernika : http://www.uni.opole.pl/en). Le Comité d’organisation prévoit, entre autres activités gratuites, une visite guidée de la ville et de ses principaux attraits culturels et touristiques.
 
 
Dans le vif espoir de vous compter parmi nous à l’occasion de cette troisième édition de « La Perception en langue et en discours »,
 
 
Pour le Comité d’organisation,
 
Magdalena Dańko et Fabrice Marsac

Top

The schedule for all the LREC 2018 Workshops and Tutorials is online at
http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/workshops-and-tutorials/

On this web page you will find a link to each Workshop Call for Papers/Web site and each
Tutorial Outline, when available.

Don't hesitate to contact Workshop and/or Tutorial organisers if you have specific
questions on their event.

For general LREC 2018 matters, please contact us at lrec@lrec-conf.org.


LREC 2018 in Miyazaki (Japan), May 7-12, 2018

www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2018
Follow us on Twitter: @LREC2018

Top

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://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/
Twitter: @LREC2018

SECOND 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, the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand, the Korean Society for Language and Information, the Korean Special Interest Group of Human and Cognitive Language Technology, ...

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, which celebrates its 20th anniversary, 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

General submission page: http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/

Submission of extended abstracts for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 25 September 2017

    LREC 2018 asks for a 3 to 4 pages (references excluded) extended abstract which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet. Extended abstracts must be submitted through START @ https://www.softconf.com/lrec2018/main/ and will be peer-reviewed. Submissions are NOT anonymous.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 25 September 2017

    Workshop and Tutorial Proposals must be submitted online @ http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/ 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

Top

AREA - Annotation, Recognition and Evaluation of Actions ==========================================
Call for Papers

AREA will take place in conjunction with the 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018) and is organized as a half-day session with plenary talks, posters and demonstrations. AREA is a SIGSEM-sponsored workshop.

Date: 7 May 2018
Venue: the Phoenix Seagaia Resort
Location: Miyazaki, Japan
http://www.areaworkshop.org/


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION MOTIVATION AND TOPICS
=============================================
There has recently been increased interest in modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and as depicted by images and videos. Additionally, action modeling has emerged as an important topic in robotics and HCI.  The goal of this workshop is to gather and discuss advances in research areas in which actions are paramount e.g., virtual embodied agents, robotics, human-computer communication, document design, as well as modeling multimodal human-human interactions involving actions.  Action modeling is an inherently multi-disciplinary area, involving contributions from computational linguistics, AI, semantics, robotics, psychology, and formal logic.

While there has been considerable attention in the community paid to the representation and recognition of events (e.g., the development of ISO-TimeML and associated specifications, and the 4 Workshops on ?EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation?), the goals of this workshop are focused specifically on actions undertaken by embodied agents as opposed to events in the abstract. By concentrating on actions, we hope to attract those researchers working in computational semantics, gesture, dialogue, HCI, robotics, and other areas, in order to develop a community around action as a communicative modality where their work can be communicated and shared. This community will be a venue for the development and evaluation of resources regarding the integration of action recognition and processing in human-computer communication.

We invite submissions on foundational, conceptual, and practical issues involving modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and as depicted by images and videos. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- dynamic models of actions
- formal semantic models of actions
- affordance modeling
- manipulation action modeling
- linking multimodal descriptions and presentations of actions (image, text, icon, video)
- automatic action recognition from text, images, and videos
- communicating and performing actions with robots or avatars for joint tasks
- action language grounding
- evaluation of action models


IMPORTANT DATES
================
Deadline for paper submission: 7 January 2018
Review deadline: 1 February 2018
Notification of acceptance: 11 February 2018
Deadline for camera-ready version: 1 March 2018
Early registration deadline: TBA
Workshop Date: 7 May 2018


SUBMISSION
==========
Three types of submissions are invited:
- Research papers, describing original research; these can be either long (6-8 pages, not including references) or short (3-4 pages, not including references);
- Project notes, describing recent, ongoing or planned projects (2-4 pages including references);
- Demonstration notes, accompanying demonstration of software, tools, or systems (2-4 pages including references).

We will decide whether to have an oral or poster presentation, depending on reviewer suggestions and the overall workshop schedule.

Papers should be in compliance with the style sheet adopted for the LREC Proceedings. The AREA proceedings will be published in the LREC 2018 proceedings.

Papers should be submitted through the START conference manager set up for LREC 2018. When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).


MORE INFORMATION
=================
For more information visit the workshop webpage at: http://www.areaworkshop.org/
Or contact us at: jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu, i.f.van.der.Sluis@rug.nl


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
======================
Jan Alexanderson        DFKI
Yiannis Aloimonos        University of Maryland
Anja Belz            University of Brighton
Johan Bos            University of Groningen
Kirsten Bergmann        Bielefeld University
Harry Bunt            Tilburg University
Simon Dobnik            University of Gothenburg
Eren Erdal Aksoy        Karlsruhe Institut fur Technologie
Kristiina Jokinen        AIRC AIST
Johan Kwisthout        Radboud University Nijmegen
Nikhil Krishnaswamy        Brandeis University
Alex Lascarides        University of Edinburgh
Andy Lucking         Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Siddharth Narayanaswamy    University of Oxford
Paul Piwek             Open University
Matthias Rehm        Aalborg University
Gisela Redeker        University of Groningen
Daniel Sonntag        DFKI
Michael McTear        University of Ulster
Mariet Theune            University of Twente
David Traum            USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Florentin Wörgötte        Georg-August University Göttingen
Luke Zettlemoyer        UW CSE


ORGANIZERS
===========
James Pustejovsky         Brandeis University
Ielka van de Sluis        University of Groningen

Top

Call For Papers

LREC 2018 Industry Track will take place on 10 May, 2018

http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/industry-track/

The European Language Resource Association (ELRA, www.elra.info) 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, the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand, the Korean Society for Language and Information, the Korean Special Interest Group of Human and Cognitive Language Technology, and a number of industrial partners and supporters.

Since the first LREC held in Granada in 1998, LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Language Technologies (LT) with over 1200 attendees from all over the world. LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support to investigations in language sciences, progress and innovation in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards. As a hot LREC 2018 topic, an industry track will take place during the main conference.

Track Description
Human language technologies have become increasingly important parts of our lives. These technologies have emerged from decades of collaborations between academic and industrial research organizations; collaborations are made possible by the unique strengths of both communities and a set of shared practices (algorithms, evaluation methods, datasets, and the like). But despite this, there are substantial differences between research in academic and industrial settings.

In contrast to academic research: industrial speech and language technologies may pose unique challenges of scale; language resources from industry may demand different algorithms or evaluation methodologies than in academic settings; and the practices of academic and industrial settings may converge on distinct methods for the same problem; industrial systems and practices may pose ethical challenges not present in academic settings.

Topics of Interest
Topics include but not limited to:

    Industrial systems
For this topic we welcome submissions which discuss industrial systems. They may describe technical innovations which are enabled by the industrial setting, or they may describe the implementation of a deployed industrial system. We also welcome submissions which discuss failures to replicate 'state-of-the-art' performance when provided with the affordances of an industrial setting. Finally, we also welcome opinion papers which discuss similarities and differences between academic and industrial practices for system development and evaluation, or which consider ethical issues specific to systems deployed at industry scale.

    Tools and platforms for data collection
Data collected in an industry setting may pose specific technical, legal, and ethical challenges not normally encountered in academic settings. The infrastructure within which developers in industry operate can provide tremendous advantages, but also unique challenges. There can be significant differences in the context of a tool's operator or a data platform's customer in industry vs. academic applications. Platforms may be globally distributed, and the scale itself of the data and of the deployment of industry technologies can add significant complexity, which may demand innovative approaches. Industry developers may also face special problems in defining users, their orientation to their tasks, and what constitutes a successful interaction from the standpoint of the user and of data acquisition efforts. We welcome submissions which discuss industrial tools and platforms used to collect data.

    Human computation in industry
Industrial language technologies depend on machine learning methods, which in turn require large, diverse collections of labeled data collected from humans for rapid iterative development and refinement. We welcome submissions which discuss issues in experimental design for human computation, the challenges of quality, diversity, and representation in crowdsourcing, and ethical issues posed by data collection via crowdsourcing and outsourcing.

    Asian languages
One goal for this year's LREC is to strengthen connections with the Asian speech and language community. Therefore we welcome submissions which discuss industrial resources and technologies specific to the challenges posed by Asian languages.

    Spoken languages and dialects
We are particularly interested in work which describes industrial resources and technologies for spoken languages, non-standard dialects, and therefore we welcome submissions which focus on these topics, especially those submissions which contrast spoken and written language?or standard and non-standard language?resources and technologies.

    Less-resourced languages
One special topic for this year's LREC is less-resourced languages, especially those used in Asia, and therefore we welcome submissions which discuss resources and technologies for such languages in an industry setting.

Submission

We encourage submissions of papers for oral or poster presentation. Papers should follow theLREC stylesheet. The working language of the track is English. Submitted papers must be written and delivered in English and be up to 4 pages in length.

Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2018/IndustryTrack/. 

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!
Describing your language resources (LRs) in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). This LREC feature is available to submissions within this track and highly recommended.

To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about ?Sharing LRs? (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new ?regular? feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2018 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each LR. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

Important Dates & Deadlines

•     Paper submission: 10 February 2018
•     Notification of acceptance: 12 March 2018
•     Camera-ready paper: 26 March 2018
•     Track Date: 10 May 2018

Organizing Committee

• Linne Ha, Director of Research Program in NLU, Research & Machine Intelligence, Google (New York)
• Kyle Gorman, Software Engineer, Speech & Language Algorithms, Research & Machine Intelligence, Google (New York)
• Jimmy Kunzmann, Manager Research and Development, European Media Laboratory GmBH (EML), (Heidelberg)
• Constantine Lignos, Computer Scientist, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
• Richard Sproat, Senior Research Scientist, Speech & Language Algorithms, Research & Machine Intelligence, Google (New York)
• Martin Jansche, Software Engineer, NLU, Research & Machine Intelligence, Google (London)
• Ryan MacDonald, Research Scientist, NLU, Research & Machine Intelligence, Google (London)
• Tomoki Nagase, Senior Researcher,  Artificial Intelligence Lab., Fujitsu Laboratories (Tokyo)
• Khalid Choukri, ELDA CEO (Paris)

Industry Track Contact
Send your inquiries to: lrec2018-industry-track@googlegroups.com

Top

First Call for Papers

MULTIMODAL CORPORA 2018:
Multimodal Data in the Online World

Top

 IMPORTANT NOTICE: To avoid a clash with ICASSP 2018 new schedule and location, the committee has agreed to reschedule IWSDS to 14-16 May 2018 (see below for all the new dates). 

Top

2ème APPEL A COMMUNICATION - JOURNÉES D'ÉTUDES SUR LA PAROLE 2018

Top

Objectifs

Afin d’encourager le dialogue et les rencontres transdisciplinaires, sous l’égide de l’Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP), le comité d’organisation des JEP 2018 lance un appel à l’organisation d’ateliers transversaux, ciblés sur une thématique particulière. Ces ateliers seront co-organisés par au moins deux laboratoires sous une forme ouverte et participative, par exemple une table ronde, débat, session pratique ou workshop... Quatre ateliers prendront place la matinée du vendredi 8 juin 2018 à l’issue des JEP 2018. Ils disposeront d’un créneau de 3 heures au maximum. 

L’organisation d’atelier sera confiée aux responsables des projets d’atelier acceptés. Ils seront chargés d’assurer la sollicitation ou l’appel à communications, la définition du programme scientifique et la communication avec les participants à l’atelier. Ils devront s'assurer de l'inscription à l’atelier des participants, inscrits ou non-inscrits aux JEP. Les organisateurs des JEP prendront en charge la partie logistique des ateliers (gestion des salles, pauses café et diffusion des articles et constitution des actes). Les invitations dans le cadre de ces ateliers ne seront pas prises en charge par l’organisation des JEP 2018.

Calendrier

• Date des ateliers : vendredi 8 juin 2018
• Date limite de soumission de la proposition : 15 janvier 2018
• Réponse du comité de programme des JEP (CA AFCP) : 2 février 2018
• Ouverture des inscriptions aux ateliers : 2 février
• Clôture des inscriptions aux ateliers : 15 mai 2018

Modalités de proposition

Les propositions d'ateliers (2 pages maximum) comprendront les éléments suivants :

• Titre de l'atelier
• Nom, prénom, affiliation, adresse électronique des responsables de l’atelier
• Nom, prénom et coordonnées de la personne de contact pour la communication avec les organisateurs
• Une description synthétique de la thématique de l'atelier
• Le format envisagé
• Comité scientifique
• Participants invités ou attendus

Les propositions seront envoyées en format pdf à l’adresse suivante : jep2018.atelier@lpl-aix.fr. Elles seront soumises à l’avis au comité de programme des JEP, à savoir de comité d’administration de l’AFCP.

Publication dans les actes

Le format souhaité suivra les recommandations des JEP2018.

Comité d'organisation des ateliers

• Anna Marczyk (LPL)
• Thierry Legou (LPL)

Contact et informations

jep2018.atelier@lpl-aix.fr

www.jep2018.sciencesconf.org

Top

The 9th Speech Prosody Conference will be held from 13 to 16 June, 2018 at Collegium Iuridicum Novum, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Speech Prosody is the biennial flagship conference of SProSIG with 300 - 400 participants each time. 

The deadline for Workshop, Tutorial & Special Session proposal submission is 15 September. We encourage you to make proposals by sending e-mail to prosodist@gmail.com and jolabachan@gmail.com

The paper submission deadline is 10 December. (Submission page will open on 1 October.)

For details, please go to Speech Prosody 2018 home page http://sp9.home.amu.edu.pl/index.php

Top

The Sixth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages will be held in Berlin, Germany from Monday June 18 to Wednesday June 20, 2018.  This symposium follows the successful TAL 2016 conference in Buffalo, NY, USA.  TAL 2018 will be organized at Beuth University Berlin conveniently located in the city center close to all major attractions.  TAL 2018 is timed after Speech Prosody 2018 in Poznan, Poland, June 13-16, only a quick train ride away. 

Websites and deadlines:

TAL 2018: http://public.beuth-hochschule.de/~mixdorff/tal2018/

Speech Prosody 2018: http://sp9.home.amu.edu.pl/, paper deadline 10 December 2017

Top

2018 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

We are pleased to invite one page research proposals for a workshop on Machine Learning for Speech and Language Technology at Johns Hopkins University June 25 to August 3, 2018 (Tentative)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: Monday, October 9th, 2017.

 One-page proposals are invited for the annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Workshop in Speech and Language Technology. Proposals should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT) or related areas of Machine Intelligence, including Computer Vision and Healthcare. Proposals may address emerging topics or long-standing problems. Areas of interest in 2018 include but are not limited to:

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY: Any aspect of information extraction from speech signals; techniques that generalize in spite of very limited amounts of training data and/or which are robust to input signal variations; techniques for processing of speech in harsh environments, etc.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Knowledge discovery from text; new approaches to traditional problems such as syntactic/semantic/pragmatic analysis, machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, summarization, etc.; domain adaptation; integrated language and social analysis; etc. * MULTIMODAL HLT: Joint models of text or speech with sensory data; grounded language learning; applications such as visual question-answering, video summarization, sign language technology, multimedia retrieval, analysis of printed or handwritten text.

* DIALOG AND LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING: Understanding human-to-human or human-to-computer conversation; dialog management; naturalness of dialog (e.g. sentiment analysis).

* LANGUAGE AND HEALTHCARE: information extraction from electronic health records; speech and language technology in health monitoring; healthcare delivery in hospitals or the home, public health, etc.

These workshops are a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series, and will be hosted by various partner universities on a rotating basis. The research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops should serve as good examples for prospective proposers: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/. An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated by October 13th, 2017. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on November 10-12th, 2017. Proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected at this meeting for the 2018 workshop. We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue research on the selected topics. Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students. Authors of successful proposals typically lead these teams. Other senior participants come from academia, industry and government. Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, are rising star seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise. If you are interested in participating in the 2018 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed. If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the topics to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available to participate in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith commitment that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week participation possible.
 Proposals must be submitted to jsalt2018@clsp.jhu.edu by 5PM EDT on Monday, 10/09/2017. 

Top

The 6th international workshop on spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages (SLTU'18) will be held in Gurugram, India on 29-31 August 2018

The workshop on spoken language technologies for under- resourced languages is the sixth in a series of even-year SLTU workshops. Five previous workshops were successfully organized: SLTU'16 in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), SLTU'14 in St. Petersburg (Russia), SLTU'12 in Cape Town (South Africa), SLTU'10 in Penang (Malaysia) and SLTU'08 in Hanoi (Vietnam).

There are more than 6000 languages in the world and only few are well represented digitally. India alone, with a country of 780 spoken languages and 86 different scripts that reflect its incredible diversity, has lost around 250 languages in the last 50 years and many more are at the verge of getting extinct. A major focus of this workshop is on Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages, but study on other under resourced languages are also encouraged. The workshop is being planned as a satellite workshop to INTERSPEECH 2018.


Contact: kiit.sltu2018@gmail.com <mailto:kiit.sltu2018@gmail.com>  Website: http://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2018 <http://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2018>

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers up to 4 pages for technical content (including figures, tables, etc) plus one additional page containing only references.

Areas/Topics
q Language resource development, acquisition and representation
q Linguistic theories, Corpus Development and Resources
q Linguistic and cognitive studies
q Unsupervised discovery of linguistic units
q Code switched lexical modelling
q Multi-lingual and cross-lingual spoken language processing
q Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech processing
q Machine translation and dialogue systems
q Application of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages.

Important Dates
q Full Paper Submission: 15th June, 2018
q Acceptance Notification: 10th July, 2018
q Camera Ready Papers: 17th July, 2018
q Early Registration: 24th July, 2018
q Workshop Dates: 29-31st August, 2018

Top

EUSIPCO  2018

26th European Signal Processing Conference

Rome, Italy

September 3-7, 2018

http://www.eusipco2018.org

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

The 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) will be held in Rome, the Eternal City, in Italy from September 3 to September 7, 2018. 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, demo and ongoing work sessions 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

- Optimization methods

- Machine learning

- Statistical signal processing

- Compressed sensing and sparse modeling

- Bio-medical image and signal processing

- Signal processing for computer vision and robotics

- Computational imaging/Spectral imaging

- 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/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 2018 website (www.eusipco2018.org). 

Important dates 

Tutorial proposals:                                     18 February 2018

Full paper submissions:                              18 February 2018

Notification of paper acceptance:                18 May 2018

Camera-ready papers:                                18 June 2018

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.

TUTORIAL AND SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS: Tutorials will be held on September 3, 2018. 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.

3 MINUTE THESIS (3MT):

EUSIPCO 2018 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.

SATELLIT? WORKSHOP PROPOSALS:

The 2018 edition of EUSIPCO is proud to organize a half day of thematic workshops on Friday, September 7, 2018, 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.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: 

GENERAL CHAIR

Patrizio Campisi, Roma Tre University, Italy

GENERAL CO-CHAIR

Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK

TECHNICAL CO-CHAIRS

Sergio Barbarossa, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Moncef Gabbouj, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

Augusto Sarti, Polythecnic University of Milan, Italy

PLENARY TALKS

Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK

Enrico Magli, Polythecnic University of Turin, Italy

SPECIAL SESSIONS

Paulo Lobato Correia, IST Lisbon, Portugal

Andreas Uhl, Salzburg University, Austria

TUTORIALS AND DEMO

Bulent Sankur, Bogazici University, Turkey

Marco Carli, Roma Tre University, Italy

STUDENT ACTIVITIES CHAIR

Juan Ramon Troncoso-Pastoriza, EPFL, Switzerland 

PUBLICATIONS CHAIR

Emanuele Maiorana, Roma Tre University, Italy

FINANCE CHAIR

Francesco De Natale, University of Trento, Italy

PUBLICITY CHAIRS

Carmen Garcia Mateo, University of Vigo, Spain

Stefania Colonnese, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

INTERNATIONAL LIAISON

Ajay Kumar, PolyU, Hong Kong

Shantanu Rane, PARC, USA 

Anderson Rocha, University of Campinas, Brazil

Top

Call for papers CBMI 2017 - La Rochelle, France 4-6 Sept 2018
International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing
(Main submission deadline May 04, 2018)

CBMI aims at bringing together the various communities involved in all aspects of
content-based multimedia indexing for retrieval, browsing, management, visualization and
analytics.

After 15 successful editions of the CBMI workshop, the event is now becoming a conference
whose next edition will be held in La Rochelle, France.
The scientific program will include invited keynote talks and regular, special and demo
sessions.

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished research papers in the broad
field of content-based multimedia indexing and applications. We wish to highlight
significant contributions addressing the main problem of search and retrieval but also
the related and equally important issues of multimedia content management, user
interaction, large-scale search, learning in retrieval, social media indexing and
retrieval. Additional special sessions are planned in areas such as deep learning for
retrieval, social media retrieval, cultural heritage, surveillance and security.

The CBMI proceedings are traditionally indexed and distributed by IEEE Xplore and ACM DL.
In addition, authors of the best papers of the conference will be invited to submit
extended versions of their contributions to a special issue ofMultimedia Tools and
Applications journal (MTAP,
http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems+and+applications/journal/11042).

Topics:
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

    ? Audio and visual and multimedia indexing;
    ? Multimodal and cross-modal indexing;
    ? Deep learning for multimedia indexing;
    ? Visual content extraction;
    ? Audio (speech, music, etc) content extraction;
    ? Identification and tracking of semantic regions and events;
    ? Social media analysis;
    ? Metadata generation, coding and transformation;
    ? Multimedia information retrieval (image, audio, video, text);
    ? Mobile media retrieval;
    ? Event-based media processing and retrieval;
    ? Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for multimedia retrieval;
    ? Multimedia data mining and analytics;
    ? Multimedia recommendation;
    ? Large scale multimedia database management;
    ? Summarization, browsing and organization of multimedia content;
    ? Personalization and content adaptation;
    ? User interaction and relevance feedback;
    ? Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools;
    ? Evaluation and benchmarking of multimedia retrieval systems;
    ? Applications of multimedia retrieval, e.g., medicine, lifelogs, satellite imagery,
video surveillance;
    ? Cultural heritage applications.

Important dates:
Full/short paper submission:    May 04, 2018
Demo paper submission:                May 18, 2018
Special sessions paper submission:    May 18, 2018
Notification of acceptance:        June 29, 2018
Camera-ready papers due:            July 13, 2018

Top

EUSIPCO  2018

Top

All the best,

Top

09************************************************************
        TSD 2018 - PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL for WORKSHOPS
       ************************************************************

Twenty-first International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2018)
              Brno, Czech Republic, 11-14 September 2018
                    http://www.tsdconference.org/

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen.  The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.


CALL for SATELLITE WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

The TSD 2018 conference will be accompanied by one-day satellite workshops
or project meetings with organizational support by the TSD organizing
committee. The organizing committee can arrange for a meeting room at the
conference venue and prepare a workshop proceedings as a book with ISBN by
a local publisher. The workshop papers that will pass also the standard TSD
review process will appear in the Springer proceedings.  Each workshop is
a subject to proposal that should be sent to the contact e-mail
tsd2018@tsdconference.org ahead of the respective deadline.


TOPICS

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

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

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

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

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

    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, emotions
    and personality modelling)

Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Kenneth Church, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Elmar Noeth, Germany (general chair)
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Vladimir Benko, Slovakia
    Paul Cook, Australia
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia
    Kamil Ekstein, Czech Republic
    Karina Evgrafova, Russia
    Darja Fiser, Slovenia
    Eleni Galiotou, Greece
    Björn Gambäck, Norway
    Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, USA
    Tino Haderlein, Germany
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Yannis Haralambous, France
    Hynek Hermansky, USA
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Maria Khokhlova, Russia
    Daniil Kocharov, Russia
    Miloslav Konopik, Czech Republic
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Valia Kordoni, Germany
    Pavel Král, Czech Republic
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Bernardo Magnini, Italy
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    France Mihelic, Slovenia
    Roman Moucek, Czech Republic
    Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Poland
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Maciej Piasecki, Poland
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    German Rigau, Spain
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Anna Rumshisky, USA
    Milan Rusko, Slovakia
    Pavel Rychlý, Czechia
    Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Stefan Steidl, Germany
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands
    Yorick Wilks, United Kingdom
    Marcin Wolinski, Poland
    Victor Zakharov, Russia


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will
be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.


CONFERENCE PROGRAM

The conference program will include oral presentations and
poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of
the issues raised.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 15 2018 ............ Submission of abstracts
March 22 2018 ............ Submission of full papers
May 16 2018 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2018 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
August 8 2018 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 15 2018 ........... Notification of acceptance for
                           demonstrations sent to the authors
September 11-14 2018 ..... Conference date

The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings
that will be made available to participants at the time of the
conference.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
   
    Ales Horak, TSD 2018
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2018@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2018 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2018


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London and Munich,
and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

Top

ICMI 2018: CALL FOR MULTIMODAL GRAND CHALLENGES

20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction

https://icmi.acm.org/2018/index.php?id=cfc

Proposals due: January 14th, 2018

Contact: grandchallenge.ICMI18@gmail.com

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

Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges

The International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. Developing systems that can robustly understand human-human communication or respond to human input requires identifying the best algorithms and their failure modes. In fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, computational (para-) linguistics and physiological signal processing, for example, the availability of datasets and common tasks have led to great progress. We invite the ICMI community to collectively define and tackle the scientific Grand Challenges in our domain for the next 5 years. ICMI Multimodal Grand Challenges aim to inspire new ideas in the ICMI community and create momentum for future collaborative work. Analysis, synthesis, and interactive tasks are all possible. Challenge papers will be indexed in the proceedings of ICMI.

The grand challenge sessions are still to be confirmed. We invite organizers from various fields related to multimodal interaction to propose and run Grand Challenge events. We are looking for exciting and stimulating challenges including but not limited to the following categories:

• Dataset-driven challenge. This challenge will provide a dataset that is exemplary of the complexities of current and future multimodal problems, and one or more multimodal tasks whose performance can be objectively measured and compared in rigorous conditions. Participants in the Challenge will evaluate their methods against the challenge data in order to identify areas of strengths and weakness.
  
  
• Use-case challenge. This challenge will provide an interactive problem system (e.g. dialog-based or non-verbal-based) and the associated resources, which can allow people to participate through the integration of specific modules or alternative full systems. Proposers should also establish systematic evaluation procedures.
  
  
• Health challenge. This challenge will provide a dataset that is exemplary of a health related task, whose analysis, diagnosis, treatment or prevention can be aided by Multimodal Interactions. The challenge should focus on exploring the benefits of multimodal (audio, visual, physiological, etc) solutions for the stated task.

We are also soliciting proposals that align with the theme of the conference which is machine learning for multimodal interactions.

Prospective organizers should submit a five-page maximum proposal containing the following information: 

• Title
• Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion
• Distinctive topics to be addressed and specific goals
• Detailed description and relevance of the Challenge to multimodal interaction
• Length (full day or half day)
• Plan for soliciting participation
• Description of how submissions (challenge?s submissions and papers) will be evaluated, and a list of proposed reviewers
• Proposed schedule for releasing datasets (if applicable) and/or systems (if applicable) and receiving submissions
• Short biography of the organizers (preferably from multiple institutions)
• Funding source (if any) that supports or could support the challenge organization
• Draft call for papers; affiliations and email address of the organisers; summary of the Grand Challenge; list of potential Technical Program Committee members and their affiliations, important dates

Proposals will be evaluated based on originality, ambition, feasibility, and implementation plan. A Challenge with dataset(s) or system(s) that has had pilot results to ensure its representativity and suitability to the proposed task will be given preference for acceptance; an additional 1 page description must be attached in such case. Continuation of or variants on the 2017 challenges are welcome, though we ask for submissions of this form to highlight the number of participants that attended during the previous year and describe what changes will be made from the previous year.

The ICMI organizers will offer support with basic logistics, which includes rooms and equipment?s to run the Workshop, coffee breaks can be offered if synchronised with the main conference.

Important Dates and Contact Details

Proposals should be emailed to both ICMI 2018 Multimodal Grand Challenge Chairs, Dr. Nicholas Cummins and Dr. Fabien Ringeval via grandchallenge.ICMI18@gmail.com. Prospective organizers are also encouraged to contact the co-chairs if they have any questions. Proposals are due by January 14th, 2018. Notifications will be sent on February 1st, 2018.

Top

CALL FOR PAPERS

XV1^th International Conference of Creole Studies

'Creole Worlds, Creole Languages and Development: Educational, Cultural and Economic Challenges'

28 October 2018 - 3 November 2018, Mahé, Seychelles

The International Committee for Creole Studies (Comité International des Etudes Créoles (CIEC)) has organized International Conferences on Creole Studies for the past fifty years, at regular intervals. In 2018, the XVIth International Conference of Creole Studies will be held in Seychelles; the organization has been entrusted to the University of Seychelles in liaison with the CIEC.

The international community (UNESCO, UNDP etc.) and the Organization Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) support the educational linguistic policy and the possible institutionalization of Creole languages in the dozen of Creole-speaking countries (France and its Departments, Haiti, Dominica, Mauritius, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, San Tome and Principe) that are members of OIF. Creole studies are called upon to contribute decisively to these programs and endeavours.

The importance of Creole studies stems primarily from its contributions to the linguistic, cultural and social development of Creole -speaking societies. Beyond, the study of the genesis and development of Creole social, linguistic and cultural systems constitutes a remarkable field of study for human and social sciences, because 'Creole' societies have been formed recently (three to four centuries of existence as a rule) and because of how they are composed and evolve.

The XVIth International Symposium on Creole Studies will focus on:

'Creole Worlds, Creole Languages, Development: Educational, Cultural and Economic Challenges'.

This theme invites philosophers, historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, linguists and other researchers in human and social sciences to present their work on contemporary Creole societies in their historical, linguistic, social, political, economic and cultural evolution.

The focus of the colloquium will be on the following four major themes:

A. Creole languages and education

B. Creole Worlds and their Cultural and Economic Challenges of Development

C. Creole languages in a multilingual environment: description and analysis of the dynamics of Creole languages

D. Creole grammar: typology, variation and teaching

Presentation of the themes of the Conference

A. Creole languages and education

Faced with the challenges of education for all, in basic and middle schools, sovereign countries that use a French Creole language have introduced some measure of Creole language teaching in their schools. Some states, such as Seychelles or Haiti, have acquired a vast experience in the domain that should be examined. Mauritius has recently also embarked on this venture which calls for evaluation. The Creole-speaking Outremer Departments, whose creoles are recognized regional languages of France and which benefit from the texts regulating the teaching of regional languages in France, have also many educational practices to share.

B. Creole Worlds and their Cultural and Economic Challenges of Development

Anthropology and the history of Creole worlds are called upon to account for how the creole-speaking social formations, resulting from European colonial expansion, are facing the challenges of development and globalization.

The role of Creole languages in the development of economy (tourism, reception of migrants, etc.) has to be assessed.

Literary production in the Creole speaking islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean has developed greatly in recent years in French and English as well as in Creole languages. The study of this renewal of literature and cultural practices also forms part of theme B.

The migratory movements of creole speakers (see also topic C) will also be discussed.

What are the paths of the institutionalization of the Creole languages in their respective areas of influence (see the question of Creole language academies)? Creole militant practices may also be mentioned.

C. Creole languages in a multilingual environment: description and analysis of the dynamics of Creole languages.

Recent globalization have caused many displacements of Creole-speaking populations towards more developed economic zones. New Creole-speaking communities have thus been created outside the territories of birth, such as Haitian communities in North America, populations from the Creole speaking Departments in metropolitan France, Mauritians in Australia and Seychellois in the United Kingdom. Creole speaking newcomers are found in prosperous creole-speaking areas, for instance, Haitians in Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean.Immigration to Creole-speaking areas also leads to the emergence of neo-learners of Creole languages. Globalization has led to an unprecedented diffusion of Creole languages, including via language and culture industries. These new sociolinguistic situations of diffusion have hardly been described to date. Similarly, little is known about the impact of these migratory movements on the dynamics of Creole languages. To these themes may be added the study of the genesis and evolution of Creole languages.

D. Creole grammar: typology, variation and teaching

The description of Creole language systems (phonology, grammar) remains necessary. The analysis of the variation of Creole languages and of their linguistic systems is still unsatisfactory. This theme should bring together contributions that attempt to analyze and explain phonological, morphological and grammatical systems in a typological perspective.

This theme may also include work on grammar for teaching. Indeed, in Haiti, the Seychelles and Mauritius, as in the French DROMs, questions arise concerning 'grammar models' and the use of linguistic analyses for teacher training and for teaching of Creole languages as first languages.

Questions

Topics that could be addressed, either in the form of individual papers or as workshops (please contact the organizers), include the following:

- 'Creole' diasporas and their linguistic practices

- Creole varieties developed outside the territories of birth

- The linguistic varieties of neo-learners of Creole languages

- The co - presence of Creole and French

- The development of literacy programs in Creole

- Bilingual education programs integrating the Creole language

- Literatures of Creole-speaking countries

- The state of research on Creole language corpora

- Creole development at school

- Morphology, Syntax etc. of creole languages

- The diachronic studies of Creole languages

- Relations between Creole languages and languages of the slave population (African languages, Malagasy, etc.)

- Creole history, landscape and society

- Creolization and the development of Creole societies

- Philosophy and history of ideas in Creole societies.

Enoch Aboh, Christian Barat, Arnaud Carpooran, Penda Choppy, Guillaume Fon Sing, Renaud Govain, Marie-reine Hoareau, Thom Klingler, Sibylle Kriegel, Ralph Ludwig, Carpanin Marimoutou, Salikoko Mufwene, Joelle Perreau, Laurence Pourchez, Lambert-Félix Prudent, Gillette Staudacher-Valliamee, Albert Valdman, Justin Valentin, Daniel Véronique

The papers and proposals for workshops may be included in one of the themes of the Conference and / or in a cross-cutting theme.

Proposals for papers or workshops (groupings of 3/4 papers) written in French, English or any French Creole language, with the address and institutional affiliation of the communicant (s) must reach the following e-mail address: Ciec.Sez2018@gmail.combefore 15 January 2018.

The abstracts will describe the theme of the paper, the database, the results expected and will not exceed 3,000 characters or 500 words (including bibliography). Submit 2 copies of the proposal, one anonymous (which will be used for the review), the other with the author's name, address and institutional affiliation.

After evaluation, acceptance or refusal of the proposal will be notified as from the 9 April 2018.

Top

Workshop on the Processing of Prosody across Languages and Varieties (ProsLang)
Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand
29-30 November 2018
 
Call for Papers
We invite submissions for the Workshop on the Processing of Prosody across Languages and Varieties (ProsLang), to be held at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, 29-30 November 2018.
 
The Workshop is coordinated with the 17th Speech Science &amp; Technology Conference,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, 4-7 December 2018.
 
Aim
As an integral part of spoken language, prosody has been shown to play an important role in many speech production and perception processes. However, our knowledge of the role of prosody in speech processing draws on a relatively narrow range of (mostly closely related) languages. There is an urgent need for more psycholinguistic research looking at commonalities and differences in the use of prosodic cues in speech processing across different languages, and also different varieties of major languages. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working in this area. We are particularly interested in research on: (i) the role of prosody in semantic interpretation, including information structure; and (ii) prosody as an organisational structure for speech production and perception, including multimodal perspectives.
 
Invited Speakers
Anne Cutler, MARCS, Western Sydney University
Bettina Braun, Universität Konstanz
Jennifer Cole, Northwestern University
Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne
Nicole Gotzner, Leibniz-ZAS Berlin
 
Topics
Topics include, but are not limited to, cross-linguistic and cross-varietal commonalities and differences in:
- the role of prosody in signalling information structure, particularly in the activation and resolution of contrast and contrastive alternatives
- the integration of prosody and morphosyntactic cues in speech comprehension, e.g. as cues to information structure
- the role of prosody in the management and interpretation of discourse
- prosodic structure as an organisational frame in speech production or perception
- links between prosodic structure and multimodal speech cues such as gesture
 
Submissions       
We invite submissions of one-page abstracts following the guidelines on the Workshop website:
https://proslang.wordpress.com/about/
 
Abstract deadline: 16 April 2018
Notification of acceptance: 30 April 2018
Workshop: 29-30 November 2018
 
Organisers
Sasha Calhoun, Paul Warren, Olcay Türk, Mengzhu Yan, VUW; Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne
Please direct any enquiries about the Workshop to: proslangworkshop@gmail.com.
  
  

Top

IEEE SLT2018 | 18 - 21 December 2018

Athens, Greece

www.slt2018.org

The next IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) conference will be held in

Athens, Greece from 18-21 December 2018.

Athens is a historic city and the capital of Greece, located in the most southern-east

part of the Mediterranean Sea. The emblematic city of democracy provides for

amazing sightseeing, great food tastings and endless strolls for shopping in the

buzzing festive capital.

The special theme for SLT2018 will be “Spoken Language Technology in the Era

of Deep Learning: Challenges and Opportunities”.

Important Dates:

• July 2, 2018: Paper submission deadline

• May 7, 2018: Special Session/Tutorial proposal deadline

• Sept 3, 2018: Notification of paper acceptance

• Sept 17, 2018: Author registration & revised paper upload

• Sept 24, 2018: Demo submission deadline

• Nov 5, 2018: Early-registration deadline

You can browse all conference information on the website: www.slt2018.org.

Follow updates on Twitter #SLT2018.

All papers related to spoken language technology are welcome. As part of

special theme, we particularly welcome the submission of papers that address

challenges and limitations in current deep learning approaches and opportunities for

overcoming them (including but not limited to hybrid approaches using deep

learning and traditional knowledge-based methods).

Top

FIRST JOINT CALL for Workshop Proposals: ACL/COLING/EMNLP/NAACL 2018

Proposal Submission Deadline: October 22, 2017

Notification of Acceptance: November 17, 2017

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), and the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT) invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACL 2018, COLING 2018, EMNLP 2018, or NAACL HLT 2018. We solicit proposals on any topic of interest to the ACL communities. Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:

ACL 2018 (the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics) will be held in Melbourne, Australia, July 15 - July 20, 2018, with workshops to take place on July 19-20: http://acl2018.org/

COLING 2018 (the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics) will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, August 20 - August 25, 2018, with workshops to be held on August 20-21, 2018: http://coling2018.org/

NAACL HLT 2018 (the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies) will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, June 1 - June 6, 2018 with workshops to be held on June 5-6, 2018: http://naacl2018.org/

EMNLP 2018 (the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2018) will be held later in 2018 (after the other three conferences). Exact details on dates and venue for EMNLP workshops will be announced later.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Proposals should be submitted as PDF documents. Note that submissions should essentially be ready to be turned into a Call for Workshop Papers within one week of notification (see Timelines below).

The proposals should contain:

- A title and brief (2-page max) description of the workshop topic and content.

- The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organising workshops and related events.

- A list of Programme Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. It is highly desirable for proposals to have at least 75% of the Programme Committee reviewers confirmed at the time of the submission. Organizers should do their best to estimate the number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to: (a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives 3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time, and more thorough and thoughtful reviews.

- A list of invited speakers, if applicable, with an indication of which ones have already agreed and which are indicative, and sources of funding for the speakers.

- An estimate of the number of attendees.

- A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and estimate of the number of participants.

- A description of special requirements and technical needs.

- The preferred venue(s) (ACL/COLING/NAACL/EMNLP), if any, and description of any constraints (e.g. if the workshop is compatible with only one of these events, logistically, thematically or otherwise)

- If the workshop has been held before, a note specifying where previous workshops were held, how many submissions the workshop received, how many papers were accepted (also specify if they were not regular papers, e.g. shared task system description papers), and how many attendees the workshop attracted.

Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single free workshop registration for an invited speaker; all other costs must be borne independently by the workshop organizers.

In addition, you will need to specify the following information when you submit via the START System (not in the PDF proposal):

- A very brief advertisement or tagline for the workshop, up to 140 characters, that highlights any key information you wish prospective attendees to know, and which would be suitable to be put onto a web-based survey (see below).

- A URL for the workshop website which will be shown in the web-based survey.

- A list of organizers’ names which will be shown in the web-based survey.

The proposals should be submitted no later than October 22, 2018, 11:59 PM Samoa Standard Time (SST) (UTC/GMT-11). Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at

https://www.softconf.com/i/acl-workshops2018

The workshop proposals will be evaluated according to their originality and impact, as well as the quality of the organizing team and Programme Committee. In addition, to estimate the attendance of the different workshops, a new voting mechanism will be implemented, where attendees of ACL-affiliated events from the past 3-5 years will be able to vote on which workshops they would like to attend in 2018. (A representative prototype of the survey is shown here, but is subject to change: https://goo.gl/3cuZON.) The overall diversity of the workshops will also be taken into account to ensure the conference program is varied and balanced. The workshop co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the four conferences, taking into account the location preferences and technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers.

Organizers of accepted proposals will be responsible for publicizing and running the workshop, including reviewing submissions, producing the camera ready workshop proceedings, and organizing the meeting days. It is crucial that organizers commit to all deadlines. In particular, failure to produce the camera ready proceedings on time will lead to the exclusion of the workshop from the unified proceedings and author indexes.  Workshop organizers cannot accept submissions for publication that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, although they are free to set their own policies on simultaneous submission and review. Since the conferences will occur at different times, the timelines for the submission and reviewing of workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be different for each conference. Suggested timelines for each of the conferences are given below. Workshop organizers should not deviate from this schedule unless absolutely necessary, and with explicit agreement from the relevant Workshop Chairs.

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL's general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and the financial policy for SIG workshops at:

http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Conference_Handbook

TIMELINE FOR 2018 WORKSHOPS

Timeline:

October 22, 2018: Proposal Submission Deadline

November 17, 2018: Notification of Acceptance

Individual dates:

* ACL:

Dec 11, 2018: First Call for Workshop Papers

Mar 5, 2018: Second Call for Workshop Papers

April 8, 2018: Workshop Paper Due Date

May 7, 2018: Notification of Acceptance

May 28, 2018: Camera-ready papers due

July 19-20, 2018: Workshop Dates

* COLING:

TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers

TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers

TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date

TBA: Notification of Acceptance

TBA: Camera-ready papers due

Aug 20-21, 2018: Workshop Dates

* NAACL:

27 November 2017: First Call for Workshop Papers

8 January 2018: Second Call for Workshop Papers

2 March 2018: Workshop Paper Due Date

2 April 2018: Notification of Acceptance

16 April 2018: Camera-ready papers due

5-6 June 2018: Workshop Dates

* EMNLP:

TBA: First Call for Workshop Papers

TBA: Second Call for Workshop Papers

TBA: Workshop Paper Due Date

TBA: Notification of Acceptance

TBA: Camera-ready papers due

TBA: Workshop Dates

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

* ACL:

Brendan O’Connor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Eva Maria Vecchi, University of Cambridge

* COLING:

Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne

Yoav Goldberg, Bar Ilan University

Jing Jiang, Singapore Management University

* NAACL:

Marie Meteer, Brandeis University

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research

* EMNLP:

TBA

For inquiries, send email to the workshop organizers at:

acl-coling-emnlp-naacl-workshops@googlegroups.com

Top