Tenth Christian Benoît Award conferred by the International Speech Communication Association  and the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée
  Deadline May 15, 2019
 
The Christian Benoît Award has been conferred periodically by the Association Christian Benoit until 2017. In 2018, the oversight of this Award was assumed  by ISCA and sponsored jointly by both ISCA and AFCP. It is awarded through a competitive nomination and review process to promising young scientists in the domain of SPEECH COMMUNICATION to further their career in the field. The focus of the award’s research topic may emphasize basic science or applied research projects.
 
The Award provides the elected scientist with financial support for the development of a personal short-term research project that:  (1) illustrates concretely the achievements of her/his research work; (2) could help in promoting his/her work in the scientific community, institutions and grant agencies in their geographical region/country; (3) gives an overall view of the state of the art in the particular research domain.  The proposed research project can take on the form of a demonstration, a technical product/system, or of a pedagogical multi-media product (movie, website, interactive software…).
 
The Award is valued at 7,500 Euros(*)
 
The commitments of the elected scientist who receives the award are: -- to attend the Interspeech-2019 Conference in Graz, Austria -- to deliver the final product of the project within 2 years -- to present her/his results at a future ISCA-endorsed event, specific to the research domain of the applicant.
 
In the application, the candidate should provide -- a statement of research interests (2 pages max), -- a detailed curriculum vitae including a list of the most relevant publications for the project. -- a description of the proposed short-term research project (5 to 15 pages max). The description should include a presentation of the scientific and/or pedagogical objectives and the methodological aspects, a link to the former research work of the applicant, and a detailed description of the provisional budget.
 
Applications will be evaluated by an international committee including experts in the field of Speech Communication and representatives of the institutions supporting the award.
 
Applications should be sent to gerard.bailly@gipsa-lab.fr before Monday May 15, 2019 Electronic submissions are mandatory
 
The successful candidate will be notified by June 15, 2019. The Award will be conferred at the Interspeech-2019 Conference in Graz, Austria (www.interspeech2019.org)
 
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* 3,500 Euros will be given immediately; with the remaining 4,000 Euros  available on reception of the multimedia project by the chair of the ISCA Award committee. Travel and registration costs necessary to attend the Interspeech 2019 Conference will have to be paid from this grant.
** For details about the Association Christian Benoît and the past awardees of the Christian Benoît Award see http://www.gipsa-lab.fr/acb/

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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2019 CONFERENCE

September 11-13, 2019

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/

The 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019) will be held on September 11-13, 2019 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with Interspeech 2019, which will be held on September 15-19 in Graz, Austria (https://www.interspeech2019.org). 

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing a series of nineteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.

Keynote Speakers:  Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, Helen Meng

TOPICS OF INTEREST

 We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

• Discourse Processing
  Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering and information retrieval.

• Dialogue Systems
  Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications.

• Corpora, Tools and Methodology
  Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.

• Pragmatic or Semantic Modeling
  Pragmatics or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e., beyond a single sentence).

• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

SPECIAL SESSIONS

SIGDIAL 2019 will include two special sessions (TBA).

Please see the individual special session pages (TBA) for additional information and submission details. In order for papers submitted to special sessions to appear in the SIGDIAL conference proceedings, they must undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process.

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be accepted as long papers for oral presentation or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

• Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for appendices containing sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials, such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos and sound files.

Multiple Submissions
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2019 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Blind Review
Building on previous year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2019 will follow the ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

Submission Format
All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. Authors are expected to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Link and Deadlines
Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of their paper before the May 19 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until May 19, 23:59 GMT.

https://www.softconf.com/j/sigdial2019/

IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2019 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review. 

Preserving Double Blind Review
The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of the double-blind reviewing process and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected or withdrawn.

• You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

• If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask that you do not advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

• Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible.

Citations and Comparison
If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

• You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted or is not widely cited).

• In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than three months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation or in-depth analysis.

MENTORING

Acceptable submissions that require language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for mentoring, and accepted with a recommendation to revise with the help of a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2019 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Long, Short & Demonstration PDF Submission: 19 May 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 28 June 2019

• Final Paper Submission: 21 July 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Conference: 11-13 September, 2019

SIGDIAL 2019 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Milica Gasic, Saarland University, Germany

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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SIGDIAL 2019

11?13 September 2019, Stockholm, Sweden

Call for Special Sessions

http://workshops.sigdial.org/conference20

Special Session Submission Deadline: January 28, 2019 Special Session Notification: February 18, 2019

The Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals.

A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference, and may be organized as a poster session, a panel session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session.

Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions.

The papers submitted to special sessions are handled by the special session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular papers. The reviewers for the special session papers will be taken from the SIGDIAL program committee itself, taking into account the suggestions of the session organizers, and the program chairs will make acceptance decisions. In other words, special session organizers decide what appears in the session, while the program chairs decide what  appears in the proceedings and the rest of the conference program.

We welcome special session proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End?to?end systems.

Submissions:

Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate in the session; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral  session).

These proposals should be sent to conference[at]sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co?chairs.

Links:

Those wishing to propose a special session may want to look at some of the sessions organized at recent SIGDIAL meetings.

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference19/sessions.htm

https://robodial.github.io/

http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

SIGDIAL 2019 Organizing Committee

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Milica Ga?i?, Cambridge University, UK

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alex Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair:

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

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HSCR19 - The 3rd International Workshop on the HISTORY OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

13-14 September, 2019 in Vienna, Austria

<https://hscr19.kfs.oeaw.ac.at>

CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are interested in historical aspects of all areas of speech communication research (SCR) with a focus on the interdisciplinary nature of the different fields of research.

A special interest of the 2019 workshop is on the relation between science and technology that can be exemplified through the history of SCR ? including methods from the 20th century that are no longer the state-of-the-art but of historical relevance. Interesting questions in this respect are: How can knowledge transfers between science and technology be exemplified by the history of SCR? What is the relation between SCR and artistic practices? How was speech communication research influenced by the medical sciences?

Like the past HSCR workshops that were held in 2015 in Dresden and 2017 in Helsinki this workshop is a satellite event of the INTERSPEECH conference which will be held in Graz, Austria <https://www.interspeech2019.org/>, a meeting that advertises with the Austro-Hungarian speech communication pioneer Wolfgang von Kempelen.

Invited speaker is Peter Donhauser from the Institute for Media Archeology in Vienna.

Important Dates:

Full paper submission: May 24, 2019

Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2019

Camera-ready paper submission: July 19, 2019

Workshop: September 13-14, 2019

The proceedings will be published in the book series 'Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation' at TUDpress (Technical University Dresden).

Workshop organisation:

Michael Pucher, Acoustics Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

Juergen Trouvain, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany

Carina Lozo, Acoustics Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

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Event: The 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2019)

Location: Graz, Austria

Dates: September 20 - 21, 2019

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/slate2019

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