6^th INTERNATIONAL WINTER SCHOOL ON BIG DATA
 
BigDat 2020
 
Ancona, Italy
 
January 13-17, 2020
 
Co-organized by:
 
Department of Information Engineering, Marche Polytechnic University
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA)
Brussels / London
 
https://bigdat2020.irdta.eu/
 
********************************************************
 
--- Early registration deadline: December 16, 2019 ---
 
********************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
BigDat 2020 will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants on 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 22 four-hour and a half 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. Moreover, there will be two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
Master's 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 2020 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 2020 will take place in Ancona, a city founded by Greek settlers and today one of the main ports on the Adriatic Sea. The venue will be:
 
Department of Information Engineering
Marche Polytechnic University
Via Brecce Bianche 12
60131 Ancona
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES:
 
Sanchita Bhattacharya (University of California, San Francisco), [introductory/advanced] Big Data in Immunology: Sharing, Dissemination, and Repurposing
 
Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), [introductory] Virtual Knowledge Graphs for Data Integration
 
Sheelagh Carpendale (University of Calgary), [introductory] Data Visualization
 
Nitesh V. Chawla (University of Notre Dame), [intermediate/advanced] Learning in the Presence of Class Imbalance and Changing Distributions
 
Amr El Abbadi (University of California, Santa Barbara), [introductory/intermediate] An Introduction to Blockchain
 
Charles Elkan (University of California, San Diego), [intermediate] A Rapid Introduction to Modern Deep Learning
 
Minos Garofalakis (Technical University of Crete), [intermediate/advanced] Private Data Analytics at Scale
 
Jiawei Han (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), [intermediate/advanced] From Unstructured Text to TextCube: Automated Construction and Multidimensional Exploration
 
Xiaohua Tony Hu (Drexel University), [introductory/advanced] Machine Learning Methods for Big Microbiome Data Analysis
 
Craig Knoblock (University of Southern California), [intermediate/advanced] Building Knowledge Graphs
 
Wladek Minor (University of Virginia), [introductory/advanced] Big Data in Biomedical Sciences
 
Bamshad Mobasher (DePaul University), [intermediate] Context-aware Recommender Systems
 
Jayanti Prasad (Embold Technologies), [introductory/intermediate] Big Code
 
Lior Rokach and Bracha Shapira (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), [introductory/intermediate] Recommender Systems
 
Peter Rousseeuw (KU Leuven), [introductory] Anomaly Detection by Robust Methods
 
Asim Roy (Arizona State University), [intermediate] Hardware-based (GPU, FPGA based) Machine Learning That Exploits Massively Parallel Computing ? An Overview of Concepts, Architectures and Neural Network Algorithm Implementation
 
Hanan Samet (University of Maryland), [introductory/intermediate] Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial, and Metric Data Structures for Applications in Spatial and Spatio-textual Databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Location-based Services
 
Rory Smith (Monash University), [introductory/intermediate] Learning from Data, the Bayesian Way
 
Jaideep Srivastava (University of Minnesota), [introductory/intermediate] Social Computing
 
Mayte Suárez-Fariñas (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai), [intermediate/advanced] Meta-analysis Methods for High-dimensional Data
 
Jeffrey Ullman (Stanford University), [introductory] Big-data Algorithms That Aren't Machine Learning (remote)
 
Wil van der Aalst (RWTH Aachen University), [introductory/intermediate] Process Mining: A Very Different Kind of Machine Learning That Can Be Applied in Any Organization
 
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@irdta.eu by January 5, 2020.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A session will be devoted to 10-minute 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 and the logistics needed. People participating in the demonstration must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by January 5, 2020.
 
EMPLOYER SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in big data will have a space reserved for one-to-one contacts. It is recommended to produce a 1-page .pdf leaflet with a brief description of the company and the profiles looked for, to be circulated among the participants prior to the event. People in charge of the search must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by January 5, 2020.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Emanuele Frontoni (Ancona, co-chair)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel J. Parra-Royón (Granada)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
Flavio Tonetto (Ancona, industrial chair)
Domenico Ursino (Ancona, co-chair)
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
https://bigdat2020.irdta.eu/registration/
 
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 estimation 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 when 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 are available at
 
https://bigdat2020.irdta.eu/accommodation/
 
CERTIFICATE:
 
A certificate of successful participation in the event will be delivered indicating the number of hours of lectures.
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david@irdta.eu
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA) ? Brussels/London
 
CONFINDUSTRIA Marche Nord
 
CINI AIIS National Lab
 
CINI Big Data Laboratory

Top

14th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
 
LATA 2020
 
Milan, Italy
 
March 2-6, 2020
 
Co-organized by:
           
Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication
University of Milano-Bicocca
 
and
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice
Brussels/London
 
lata2020.irdta.eu
*************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. LATA 2020 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 2020 will take place in Milan, the third largest economy among European cities and one of the Four Motors for Europe.
 
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 2020 will consist of:
 
invited talks
peer-reviewed contributions
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
 
Jorge Almeida (University of Porto, PT)
Franz Baader (Technical University of Dresden, DE)
Alessandro Barenghi (Polytechnic University of Milan, IT)
Djamal Belazzougui (CERIST, DZ)
Marcello Bonsangue (Leiden University, NL)
Bruno Courcelle (University of Bordeaux, FR)
Laurent Doyen (ENS Paris-Saclay, FR)
Manfred Droste (Leipzig University, DE)
Rudolf Freund (Technical University of Vienna, AT)
Pawe? Gawrychowski (University of Wroc?aw, PL)
Tero Harju (University of Turku, FI)
Jeffrey Heinz (Stony Brook University, US)
Lane A. Hemaspaandra (University of Rochester, US)
Marcin Jurdzi?ski (University of Warwick, UK)
Juhani Karhumäki (University of Turku, FI)
Jarkko Kari (University of Turku, FI)
Dexter Kozen (Cornell University, US)
François Le Gall (Kyoto University, JP)
Markus Lohrey (University of Siegen, DE)
Parthasarathy Madhusudan (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, US)
Sebastian Maneth (University of Bremen, DE)
Nicolas Markey (IRISA, Rennes, FR)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Giancarlo Mauri (University of Milano-Bicocca, IT)
Victor Mitrana (University of Bucharest, RO)
Paliath Narendran (University at Albany, US)
Gennaro Parlato (University of Molise, IT)
Dominique Perrin (University of Paris-Est, FR)
Nir Piterman (Chalmers University of Technology, SE)
Sanguthevar Rajasekaran (University of Connecticut, US)
Wojciech Rytter (University of Warsaw, PL)
Kai Salomaa (Queen?s University, CA)
Helmut Seidl (Technical University of Munich, DE)
William F. Smyth (McMaster University, CA)
Ji?í Srba (Aalborg University, DK)
Edward Stabler (University of California, Los Angeles, US)
Benjamin Steinberg (City University of New York, US)
Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, SG)
Jan van Leeuwen (Utrecht University, NL)
Margus Veanes (Microsoft Research, US)
Tomá? Vojnar (Brno University of Technology, CZ)
Mikhail Volkov (Ural Federal University, RU)
James Worrell (University of Oxford, UK)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Alberto Leporati (Milan, co-chair)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel Parra-Royón (Granada)
Dana Shapira (Ariel)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
Bianca Truthe (Giessen)
Claudio Zandron (Milan, co-chair)
 
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=lata2020
 
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:
 
lata2020.irdta.eu/registration
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Paper submission: October 18, 2019
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: November 25, 2019
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: December 2, 2019
Early registration: December 2, 2019
Late registration: February 17, 2020
Submission to the journal special issue: June 6, 2020
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david (at) irdta.eu
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
 
IRDTA ? Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice, Brussels/London

Top

Nous avons le plaisir de vous informer que les inscriptions pour la 12ème édition de l'International Conference on Voice Physiology and Biomechanics (ICVPB2020), qui se tiendra du 18 au 20 Mars 2020 à Grenoble, sont ouvertes.

A cette occasion, nous célébrerons 40 ans de recherches scientifiques sur la physiologie de la voix humaine !

Vous trouverez ci-après les grandes thématiques qui seront abordées lors de la conférence:

• Physiologie et neurophysiologie du larynx et de la voix
• Contrôle neuromusculaire de la phonation saine et pathologique
• Acoustique, aérodynamique et cinématique de la production vocale
• Voix Chantée
• Bioacoustique : vocalisation animale
• Interactions fluide-structure-acoustique en phonation saine et pathologique
• Biomécanique des voies respiratoires supérieures : tissus mous, muscles, cartilages et os.
• Approches multi-échelles, micro et nanomécaniques
• Biologie moléculaire et cellulaire du pli vocal
• Mécanobiologie, cicatrisation, croissance et remodelage des tissus
• Médecine régénérative et ingénierie tissulaire
• Modélisation et simulation de la production vocale
• Analyse et synthèse de la voix
• Intelligence artificielle pour applications vocales
• Optique biomédicale, techniques d'imagerie pour l'évaluation de la voix
• Technologie portable

Deux jours de pré-cours (en anglais) se tiendront du 16 au 17 Mars (https://icvpb2020.sciencesconf.org/program). Pour l'inscription à ces pré-cours, un tarif préférentiel est proposé aux adhérents de l'AFCP et d'autres sociétés savantes françaises associées à cet événement scientifique : SFA, SFB, SFPL, AFPC-EVTA France.

Bien cordialement,

Lucie Bailly et Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, pour le Comité d'Organisation ICVPB2020

icvpb2020@sciencesconf.org

Top

ESANN 2020: European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks,

Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning

Bruges, Belgium, 22-23-24 April 2020

https://www.esann.org/

Call for papers

The call for papers is available at https://www.esann.org.  Deadline for submissions: November 18, 2019.

The ESANN conferences cover machine learning, artificial neural networks, statistical information processing and computational intelligence. Mathematical foundations, algorithms and tools, and applications are covered.  In addition to regular sessions, 7 special sessions will be organized on the following topics:

- Learning from partially labeled data

- Machine Learning applied to Computer Networks

- Tensor Decompositions in Deep Learning

- Language processing in the era of deep learning

- Machine learning in the pharmaceutical industry

- Quantum Machine Learning

- Frontiers in Reservoir Computing

ESANN 2020 builds upon a successful series of conferences organized each year since 1993. ESANN has become a major scientific event in the machine learning, computational intelligence and artificial neural networks fields over the years.

The conference will be organized in Bruges, one of the most beautiful medieval towns in Europe. Designated as the 'Venice of the North', the city has preserved all the charms of the medieval heritage. Its centre, which is inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage list, is in itself a real open air museum.

We hope to receive your submission to ESANN 2020 and to see you in Bruges next year!

Top

 ----------------------------------------------
                       Announcement
    6th CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
                  Launch Date: December 2019
               Workshop: Barcelona, May 4, 2020

       htttp://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge
       ----------------------------------------------

Dear colleague,

It gives us great pleasure to announce the 6th CHiME Speech Separation
and Recognition Challenge (CHiME-6).

The new challenge will revisit the CHiME-5 24-microphone dinner party
conversational speech recognition scenario by:
- providing an accurate array synchronization script,
- introducing a new multichannel diarization track in the line of the
DIHARD-II challenge
- offering upgraded, state-of-the-art diarization, enhancement, and
recognition baselines.

FORUM

If you are considering participating, please join the CHiME Google
group for discussions and further announcements.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chime5/join

DATASET LICENCE

Participants will need to acquire a licence for the CHiME-5 dataset.
Licence applications are typically processed within 48 hours. Apply
now at:
https://licensing.sheffield.ac.uk/i/data/chime5.html
Non-commercial license requests are processed within 2-3 days once
they have been approved by an authorized representative of your
institution. Commercial licenses are also available for companies and
are required for challenge participation. Note that licenses acquired
before Dec 31, 2018, are no longer valid.

IMPORTANT DATES

Dec, 2019 ? Release of data and baseline systems
10th April, 2020 ? System submission
4th May, 2020 ? CHiME-6 Workshop (satellite of ICASSP 2020) and
release of results

ORGANISERS

Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Michael Mandel, CUNY, USA
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria, France

Top

Now Accepting Papers for ICASSP 2020

The 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing heads to Barcelona, Spain in May, and the conference paper submission site is now live!

Top

LREC 2020, 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation -
Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France
11-16 May 2020

Main Conference: 13-14-15 May 2020
Workshops and Tutorials: 11-12 & 16 May 2020

Conference web site: https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/
Twitter: @LREC2020


FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 12th edition of LREC, organised with the support of national and international organisations among which AFCP, AILC, ATALA, CLARIN, ILCB, LDC, ...

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, on-going and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to policy issues as well as to scientific/technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas 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 (LT) 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 (including Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, etc.)
•     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, 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

LRs in the age of deep neural networks

•     Semi-supervised, weakly-supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches
•     Representation Learning for language
•     Techniques for (semi-)automatically generating training data
•     Cross-language NLP & Cross-domain NLP with reduction of human effort

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 2020 HOT TOPICS

Less Resourced and Endangered Languages
Special attention will be devoted to less resourced and endangered languages: it is expected that LREC2020 makes room to activities carried out to support indigenous languages, building on the United Nations/UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages being celebrated in 2019.

Language and the Brain
Studying the neural basis of language helps in understanding both language processing and the brain mechanisms. LREC2020 will encourage all submissions addressing language and the brain. Among possible subtopics, submissions could focus on new datasets and resources (neuroimaging, controlled corpora, lexicons, etc.), methods aiming at new multimodal experimentations (e.g. EEG in virtual reality), language processing applications (e.g. brain decoding, brain-computer interfaces), etc.

Machine/Deep Learning
The availability of LRs is a key element of the development of high quality Human Language Technologies based on AI/Machine Learning approaches, and LREC is the best place to get access to this data, in many languages and for many domains. In addition to submissions addressing ML issues based on large quantities of data, those applied to languages for which only small, noisy or sparse data exist are also most welcomed.

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 and a Reproducibility Track: for these there will be separate Calls.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

Submission of oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 25 November 2019

    LREC2020 asks for full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more pages for references if needed) , which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet which will be available on the conference website. Papers must be submitted through the LREC2020 submission platform (it uses START from Softconf) and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for workshops, tutorials and panels: 24 October 2019

    Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.

There is 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.

LREC 2010, LREC 2012 and LREC 2014 Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index. The other editions are being processed.

LREC Proceedings are indexed in Scopus (Elsevier).

Substantially extended versions of papers selected by reviewers as the most appropriate will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Language Resources and Evaluation Journal published by Springer (a SCI-indexed journal).

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari ? CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale ?Antonio Zampolli?, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Frédéric Béchet ? LIS-CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille- France
Philippe Blache ? CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, Marseille- France
Christopher Cieri ? Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia - USA
Khalid Choukri ? ELRA, Paris - France
Thierry Declerck ? DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
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

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

Top

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS


REPROLANG 2020
Shared Task on the Reproduction of Research Results in Science and Technology of Language
(part of LREC 2020 conference)
Marseille, France
May 13-15, 2020
http://wordpress.let.vupr.nl/lrec-reproduction


We are very pleased to announce REPROLANG 2020, the Shared Task on the Reproduction of
Research Results in Science and Technology of Language, organized by ELRA - European
Language Resources Association with the technical support of CLARIN - European Research
Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology, as part of the LREC 2020 conference.

BACKGROUND

Scientific knowledge is grounded on falsifiable predictions and thus its credibility and
raison d?être relies on the possibility of repeating experiments and getting similar
results as originally
obtained and reported. In many young scientific areas, including ours, acknowledgement
and promotion of the reproduction of research results need very much to be increased.

For this reason, a special track on reproducibility is included into the LREC 2020
conference regular program (side by side with other sessions on other topics) for papers
on reproduction of research results, and the present specific community-wide shared task
is launched to elicit and motivate the spread of scientific work on reproduction. This
initiative builds on the previous pioneer LREC workshops on reproducibility 4REAL 2016
and 4REAL 2018.


SHARED TASK

The shared task is of a new type: it is partly similar to the usual competitive shared
tasks --- in the sense that all participants share a common goal; but it is partly
different to previous shared tasks --- in the sense that its primary focus is on seeking
support and confirmation of previous results, rather than on overcoming those previous
results with superior ones. Thus instead of a competitive shared task, with each
participant struggling for an individual top system that scores as far as possible from a
rough baseline, this will be a cooperative shared task, with participants struggling for
systems that reproduce as close as possible an original complex research experiment and
thus eventually reinforcing the level of reliability on its results by means of their
eventually convergent outcomes. Concomitantly, like with competitive shared tasks, in the
process of participating in the collaborative shared task, new ideas for improvement and
new advances beyond the reproduced results find here an excellent ground to be ignited.

We invite researchers to reproduce the results of a selected set of articles, which have
been offered by the respective authors with their consent to be used for this shared
task. Papers submitted for this task are expected to report on reproduction findings, to
document how the results of the original paper were reproduced, to discuss
reproducibility challenges, to inform on time, space or data requirements found
concerning training and testing, to ponder on lessons learned, to elaborate on
recommendations for best practices, etc.
Submissions that in addition to the reproduction exercise, report also on results of the
replication of the selected tasks with other languages, domains, data sets, models,
methods, algorithms, downstream tasks, etc. are also encouraged. These should permit to
gain insight also into the robustness of the replicated approaches, their learning curves
and potential of incremental performance, their capacity of generalization, their
transferability across experimental circumstances and into eventual real-life usage
scenarios, their suitability to support further progress, etc.


PUBLICATION

LREC conferences have one of the top h5-index scores of research impact among the world
class venues for research on Human Language Technology.

Accepted papers for the shared task will be published in the Proceedings of the LREC 2020
main conference. LREC Proceedings are freely available from ELRA and ACL Anthology. They
are indexed in Scopus (Elsevier) and in DBLP. LREC 2010, LREC 2012 and LREC 2014
Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index
(the other editions are being processed).

Substantially extended versions of papers selected by reviewers as the most appropriate
will be considered for publication in special issues of the Language Resources and
Evaluation Journal published by Springer (a SCI-indexed journal).


IMPORTANT DATES

November 25, 2019: deadline for paper submission (aligned with LREC 2020)
November 27: deadline for projects in gitlab.com to go public
February 14, 2020: notification of acceptance
May 11-16: LREC conference takes place


SELECTED TASKS

The Selection Committee has selected a broad range of papers and tasks.

Chapter A: Lexical processing

Task A.1: Cross-lingual word embeddings

Artetxe, Mikel, Gorka Labaka, and Eneko Agirre. 2018. ?A robust self-learning method for
fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings?. In Proceedings of the 56th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 789?798.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1073
Major reproduction comparables: Accuracy scores (tables 1 to 4).

Task A.2: Named entity embeddings

Newman-Griffis, Denis, Albert M Lai, and Eric Fosler-Lussier. 2018. ?Jointly Embedding
Entities and Text with Distant Supervision?. In Proceedings of The Third Workshop on
Representation Learning for NLP, pp. 195?206.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/W18-3026
Major reproduction comparables: Spearman?s ? scores for semantic similarity predictions
(tables 3 and 4), and accuracy scores (table 6).

Chapter B: Sentence processing

Task B.1: POS tagging

Bohnet, Bernd, Ryan McDonald, Gonçalo Simões, Daniel Andor, Emily Pitler, and Joshua
Maynez. 2018. ?Morphosyntactic Tagging with a Meta-BiLSTM Model over Context Sensitive
Token Encodings?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 2642?2652.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1246
Major reproduction comparables: f-score values (tables 2 to 8).

Task B.2: Sentence semantic relatedness

Gupta, Amulya, and Zhu Zhang. 2018. ?To Attend or not to Attend: A Case Study on
Syntactic Structures for Semantic Relatedness?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 2116?2125.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1197
Major reproduction comparables: Pearson?s r and Spearman?s ? scores for the semantic
relatedness
(table 1), and f-score values for paraphrase detection (table 2).

Chapter C: Text processing

Task C.1: Relation extraction and classification

Rotsztejn, Jonathan, Nora Hollenstein, and Ce Zhang. 2018. ?ETH-DS3Lab at SemEval-2018
Task 7: Effectively Combining Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks for Relation
Classification and Extraction?. In Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on
Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2018), pp. 689?696.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/S18-1112
Major reproduction comparables: precision, recall and f-score values (tables 3 and 4).

Task C.2: Privacy preserving representation

Li, Yitong, Timothy Baldwin, and Trevor Cohn. 2018. ?Towards Robust and
Privacy-preserving Text Representations?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of
the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 25-30.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-2005
Major reproduction comparables: POS accuracy scores (tables 1 and 2), and sentiment
analysis
f-score scores (table 3).

Task C.3: Language modelling

Howard, Jeremy, and Sebastian Ruder. 2018. ?Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text
Classification?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 328?339.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1031
Major reproduction comparables: Error rate (%) scores in sentiment analysis and question
classification tasks (tables 2 and 3).

Chapter D: Applications

Task D.1: Text simplification

Nisioi, Sergiu, Sanja Stajner, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, and Liviu P. Dinu. 2017.
?Exploring Neural Text Simplification Models?. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017), pp. 85-91.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P17/P17-2014.pdf
Major reproduction comparables: Averaged human evaluation scores, by 3 evaluators,
in 1 to 5 and -2 to +2 scales (table 2).

Task D.2: Language proficiency scoring

Vajjala, Sowmya, and Taraka Rama. 2018. ?Experiments with Universal CEFR classifications?.
In Proceedings of Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational
Applications, pp. 147?153.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/W18-0515
Major reproduction comparables: f-score values (tables 2, 3 and 4).

Task D.3: Neural machine translation

Vanmassenhove, Eva, and Andy Way. 2018. ?SuperNMT: Neural Machine Translation with
Semantic Supersenses and Syntactic Supertags?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), pp. 67?73.
http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-3010
Major reproduction comparables: BLEU scores (tables 1 and 2; plots in figures 2, 3 and 4).

Chapter E: Language resources

Task E.1: Parallel corpus construction

Brunato, Dominique, Andrea Cimino, Felice Dell'Orletta, and Giulia Venturi. 2016.
?PaCCSS-IT: A Parallel Corpus of Complex-Simple Sentences for Automatic Text
Simplification?. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP 2016), pp. 351-361.
https://aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1034
Major reproduction comparables: data set.

Participants are expected to obtain the data and tools for the reproduction from the
information provided in the paper. Using the description of the experiment is part of the
reproduction exercise.
SUBMISSION
The START platform of LREC 2020 will be used for the submission of the following required
elements: A paper describing the reproduction effort, and a link to the software and data
used to obtain the results reported in the paper (more details below). The submitted
materials and results will be checked by a CLARIN panel. Papers will be peer-reviewed.


PAPER PREPARATION
REPROLANG 2020 invites the submission of full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more
pages for references if needed). These submissions must strictly follow the LREC 2020
conference stylesheet which will be available on the conference website.


MATERIALS PREPARATION
To be checked by a CLARIN panel and the submission to be complete, the software used to
obtain the results reported in the paper must be made available as a docker container
through a project in gitlab. Detailed instructions are available at
https://gitlab.com/CLARIN-ERIC/reprolang/ For technical support, the CLARIN team can be
contacted at reprolang-tc@clarin.eu or an issue can be created under
https://gitlab.com/CLARIN-ERIC/reprolang/issues.

Submissions are done via the START conference management system used by LREC 2020 and
include the following elements:
- url address of your gitlab.com project
- url of the tar.gz with the datasets - the md5 checksum of the above tar.gz
- .pdf with the paper, which must include the above url of your gitlab.com project, and
the above commit hash and tag

The project in gitlab.com should be made public within 2 days after the submission
deadline.

PRESENTATION Papers accepted for publication will be presented in a specific session of
the LREC main conference. There is 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 format of the
presentations will be decided by the Program Committee. The proceedings will include both
oral and poster papers in the same format.

REGISTRATION
For a selected paper to be included in the programme and to be published in the
proceedings, at least one of its authors must register for the LREC 2020 conference by
the early bird registration deadline. A single registration only covers one paper,
following the general LREC policy on registration. Registration service is to be found at
the LREC 2020 website.


CONTACTS
About the shared task:
Piek Vossen
p.t.j.m.vossen@vu.nl

About the preparation and submission of materials:
reprolang-tc@clarin.eu
REPROLANG 2020 website: http://wordpress.let.vupr.nl/lrec-reproduction


ORGANIZATION

Steering Committee

António Branco, University of Lisbon (chair of Steering Committee)
Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC, Pisa (co-chair of Steering Committee)
Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen (chair of Task Selection Committee)
Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam (chair of Program Committee)


Task Selection Committee

Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen (chair)
Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne
António Branco, University of Lisbon
Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC, Pisa
Ça?r? Çöltekin, University of Tuebingen
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, New York
Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen
Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo
Barbara Plank, University of Copenhagen
Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam
Dan Zeman, Prague University

Program Committee

several invitations awaiting an answer marked with [!]

Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam (chair)
  [!]Gilles Adda, LIMSI-CNRS, Paris
  [!]Eneko Agirre Basque University
Francis Bond, NanyangTechnical University, Singapore
António Branco, University of Lisbon

Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC, Pisa
Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado Boulder
 [!]Thierry Declerck declerck@dfki.de, DFKI Saarbruecken
  [!]John McCrae, Galway University
Nancy Ide , Vassar College, New York
  [!]Antske Fokkens VU University Amsterdam
Karën Fort, University of Paris-Sorbonne
  [!] Cyril Grouin, LIMSI-CNRS, Paris
Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania
  [!] Margo Mieskis
  [!] Aurélie Névéol, LIMSI-CNRS, Paris
Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen
Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo
  [!]Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota
Senja Pollak, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana
  [!]Paul Rayson, Lancaster University
Martijn Wieling, University of Groningen



Technical Committee
reprolang-tc@clarin.eu
Dieter Van Uytvanck, CLARIN (chair)
André Moreira, CLARIN
Twan Goosen, CLARIN
João Ricardo Silva, CLARIN and University of Lisbon
Luís Gomes, CLARIN and University of Lisbon
Willem Elbers, CLARIN

Top

LREC Workshop on Cross-Language Search and Summarization of Text and Speech

May 16, 2020

Palais du Pharo, Marseilles, France



Call for Papers (http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/clssts)

 

In today?s global world, people may need  Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) enables end users to issue queries in their own language, but provides results from multiple languages around the world, often using translation so that the end user can quickly understand whether the retrieved results are relevant. Cross-language summarization can make it easier for an end user to determine if a document is relevant by providing a summary in the user?s language of the foreign language document, highlighting the evidence for relevance.  When the foreign language is a low-resource language, cross-language search and summarization are more difficult; translation capabilities may be poor and the lack of resources makes it difficult to train CLIR and summarization systems.  To complicate matters even more, when the collection contains speech as well as text, producing accurate search results and generating comprehensible summaries is even more difficult.

 

This workshop aims to stimulate the collection and provision of resources that can improve systems that perform cross-language search and summarization.  To facilitate dissemination of information about existing resources, the workshop will feature keynote speeches and panels by people who have worked in this area, have cross-language resources to share, or can describe ongoing research programs and shared tasks. Papers are also solicited that describe recent and current research in these areas, that describe relevant resources, or that stake out positions on the directions in which the authors think the field should move.

 

To set the stage, the organizers will provide two small spoken language test collections that include waveforms, transcriptions and possibly queries with relevance judgments. These are conversational genres, one in Somali (a very-low resource language) and the other in Bulgarian (a moderate-resource language) both of which include approximately 80 hours of speech. We will welcome papers that provide results on these test collections as well as results on any datasets that are available from by ELDA, LDC, or other repositories. Participants are also encouraged to describe other datasets that they have access to and to report results on these.

 

We solicit papers on research that broadly relates to supporting information access to lower-resource languages addressing topics such as the following:

 

Test collections for evaluating CLIR

Development of new cross-lingual resources

Datasets for cross-lingual summarization

Methods for CLIR

CLIR over speech

Evidence generation for CLIR

Methods for cross-lingual summarization

Methods for cross-lingual query-focused summarization

Snippet generation

Speech summarization

Multilingual language generation

Zero-shot learning and domain adaptation

Explainable methods for cross-lingual NLP

 

 

Paper length: Both long papers (8 pages plus references) and short papers (4 pages plus references) are welcome. Papers must  follow the LREC stylesheet available here. Papers must be submitted through START at this link: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/CLSSTS2020/

 

 

Important dates:

Submissions due: February 15th, 11:59pm AOE

Acceptance notifications: March 12th

Camera ready copy due: April 1st

Workshop date: May 16th



Contact person: Kathy McKeown, Kathy@cs.columbia.edu

 

Organizing Committee:

James Allan, UMass Amherst (USA)

Lu Wang, Northeastern University (USA)

Kathy McKeown, Columbia University (USA)

Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland (USA)

Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh (UK)

Richard Schwartz, BBN (USA)

 

Identify, describe and share your Lexical Resource (LR):

Authors will have the opportunity, 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 contributes 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 2020 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 Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers  will be offered at submission time.



--
The University of Edinburgh

Top

CALL for Workshops and Special Sessions for IWSDS 2020

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SPOKEN DIALOG SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY (IWSDS) 2020 invites proposals for Workshops and Special Sessions in any topic related to the main conference theme: Conversational Dialogue Systems for the Next Decade.

Authors are requested to submit PDF files (maximum three pages) of their proposal to iwsds2020@gmail.com

The proposal must indicate:

1. Whether the proposal is for a workshop or for a special session:Workshop / Special Session title
   • Workshops are half day events collocated either before or after the IWSDS 2020 main program. Registration to workshops is not included with IWSDS registration. Participants only interested in attending the workshops do not need to register for IWSDS.
   • Special sessions are 90-minute sessions that are part of the IWSDS main program. Registration to special sessions is included with IWSDS registration.
3. Name, affiliation, e-mail and phone number of the organizers
4. A description of the workshop / Special Session title including:Tentative program committee members (only for workshop proposals)
   • objectives
   • topics of interest
   • justification
   • expected number of submissions
   • tentative program
6. Special audio-visual, internet, computer or equipment requirements
7. Whether the workshop / special session have been run before:Any additional information that might be relevant for the proposal evaluation
   • where and when
   • number of participants

Proposal submission deadline: September 13, 2019

Proposal acceptance notification: September 17, 2019

1. Based on the volume of submissions and other logistic constraints accepted workshops can be converted into special sessions or vice versa
2. IWSDS 2020 organization cannot provide any kind of financial support to workshop and special session organizers. IWSDS 2020 organization will only cover expenses related to venue, audio-visual equipment and coffee breaks for workshops and special sessions.

Top

The Information Processing and Telecommunications Center at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (IPTC-UPM) in collaboration with Universidad de Granada are organizing the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology (IWSDS2020) to be held in Madrid, Spain from May 18-20, 2020. We are now inviting paper submissions especially on the following topics:

List of Topics

• Engagement and emotion in human-robot interactions
• Digital resources for interactive applications
• Multi-modal and machine learning methods
• Companions, personal assistants and dialogue systems
• Proactive and anticipatory interactions
• Educational and healthcare robot applications
• Dialogue systems and reasoning
• Big data and large scale spoken dialogue systems
• Multi-lingual dialogue systems
• Spoken dialog systems for low-resource languages
• Domain Transfer and adaptation techniques for spoken dialog systems

However, submissions are not limited to these topics, therefore we are encouraging to submit papers in all areas of spoken dialogue systems. We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a demonstration, and will organize the conference in order to best accommodate these papers, whatever their category. 

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.We distinguish between the following categories of regular submissions:

• Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range of 8-14 pages, including references.
• Short Research Papers should be in the range of 4-8 pages, including references. Authors may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case studies or ongoing but interesting and original research efforts.
• Position Papers deal with novel research ideas or view-points which describe trends or fruitful starting points for future research and elicit discussion and are not much researched. They should be 2 pages long, excluding references.
• Demo Submissions ? System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system may choose this category and provide a description of their system and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.

Authors are requested to submit PDF files of their manuscripts using the paper submission system (EasyChair).

IWSDS 2020 requires that all authors wishing to present a paper take into account:

• The paper is substantially original and will not be submitted to any other conference or journal during the IWSDS 2020 review period.
• The paper does not contain any plagiarism.
• The paper will be presented by one of the authors in-person at the conference site according to the schedule published. Any paper accepted in the technical program, but not presented on-site will be withdrawn from the official conference proceedings.

NOTE: All submitted papers are subject to a single-blind review. The change in page limits is to accommodate responses to reviewer comments only.

As usual, a selection of accepted papers will be published in a book by Springer following the conference (Springer LNEE series, SCOPUS and other important indexes).

Special Sessions and Workshops

In addition, IWSDS will host three special sessions and one workshop. Authors can submit specific papers to any of these using the same procedure as the regular papers but selecting the specific session during the submission process. For additional information about these special sessions and workshop please check the Special Session link:

• Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agents and Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge (WOCHAT+DBDC)
• Dialogue systems for mental e-health
• HUMIC-DIAL: Designing humor in human computer interaction with focus on dialogue technology
• Speech Language and Conversation Technologies for Iberian Languages

Templates for formatting are available below:

• Latex Style and Template
• Word Template
• Requirements for submitting figures that are acceptable

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline:  January 10, 2020 (23:59 Pacific Standard Time, GMT -8)
• Paper notification deadline: February 7, 2020
• Camera ready papers due: February 21, 2020
• Early bird registration ends: February 28, 2020
• Website: https://www.iwsds.tech 
• Twitter: @iwsds2020 

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to iwsds2020@gmail.com

Sponsors

IWSDS2020 is sponsored by Universidd Politécnica de Madrid, SigDial, and Colips.

Committees

Organizing Committee

• General Chair: Luis Fernando D'Haro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
• General Chair: Zoraida Callejas, Universidad de Granada, Spain
• Local Organiser: David Griol, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Publicity: Marta Ruiz Costa-Jussà, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Sponsorship Chair: José Quesada, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
• Special Sessions Chair: María Inés Torres (UPV/EHU), Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
• Student Organizer: Manuel Gil Martín, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
• Social Activities: Ricardo Kleinlein, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
• Webmaster: Kheng Hui Yeoh, Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore)

Steering Committee

• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sorbonne 4, France
• Rafael E. Banchs, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore
• Sabato Marco Siniscalchi, Kore University of Enna, Italy

Senior Steering Committee

• Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Kristiina Jokinen, AIST Tokyo Waterfront, Japan
• Haizhou Li, national University of Singapore, Singapore
• David Traum, University of Southern California, USA
• Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Top

The 10th Speech Prosody Conference will be held from May
24 to 28, 2020 at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

http://sp2020.jpn.org

The conference theme is 'Communicative and Interactive Prosody', but we invite papers
addressing any aspect of the science and technology of speech prosody.

Speech Prosody, the biennial meeting of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG)
of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), is the only recurring
international conference covering all aspects of prosody in spoken language: social,
psychological, linguistic, and technological and so on. Past conferences have been
attended by 300-400 international experts representing a range of disciplines including
linguistics, acoustics, speech synthesis and recognition, cognitive psychology, neuroscience,
speech therapy, language teaching, computer science, electrical engineering, speech and
hearing science and psychology.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Sep. 15 Deadline for proposals for workshops, tutorials, and special sessions
Oct. 01 Opening of online paper submission
Oct. 15 Notification of acceptance/rejection for proposals for workshops, tutorials, and special sessions
Dec. 20 Full paper submission deadline
Feb. 21 Notification of paper acceptance/rejection
Mar. 06 Deadline to upload camera-ready papers
Mar. 20 Early bird registration deadline
Apr. 30 Standard registration deadline

TOPICS INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:
Phonology and phonetics of prosody
Rhythm and timing
Tone and intonation
Cognitive processing and modeling of prosody
Interaction between segmental and suprasegmental features
Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
Prosody in language and music
Acquisition of first, second and third language prosody
Prosody in Computer Language Learning systems
Speaking style and personality
Speaking style and communication settings
Prosody in speech recognition and understanding
Prosody in speaker characterization and recognition
Identification & description of prosody for multilingual dialogue systems
Measurements of prosodic parameters
Prosody in audiology and phoniatrics
Forensic voice and language investigation
Prosody of sign language

FOR MORE DETAILS:
Please visit SP10 conference website: http://sp2020.jpn.org
We are seeking proposals for workshops, tutorials, and special sessions.

Top

Associated with Speech Prosody 2020 in Tokyo there will be:

Workshops,  all May 23rd:

- Prosodic Variation: the role of past and present contact in multilingual societies, abstracts due Jan 31

- Word Order and Prosody, papers due Dec 20

- Representations in Intonational Phonology: How different is Intonational Phonology, and from what?, papers due Dec 20

Special Sessions:

- Temporal Articulation as it relates to communicative prosody, papers due Dec 20

- Acquisition of Interactive Emotional/Social Affective Prosody, papers due Dec 20

- The Third Prosody Visualization Challenge, How well does your system visualize communicative and/or interactive prosody?, submissions due April 25

Tutorials, all May 24th:

- Streamlining the Processing of F0 data using the R package ‘intonation’

- Prosodic Analysis of Speech Corpora Using Praaline and R

- Guide to Annotation with PoLaR

Details for all are at https://sp2020.jpn.org/events/

And, as a reminder, papers for the Speech Prosody conference itself

are also due December 20th.

I'm also pleased to announce that the proceedings of Speech

Prosody 2014 are now, at last, available in the ISCA Archive,

https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/online-archive , thanks

to the hard work of Rachida Ganga, Aoju Chen, and Martin Cooke.

Nigel Ward,  ISCA Speech Prosody Special Interest Group Chair

Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

CCSB 3.0408,  +1-915-747-6827

nigel@utep.edu    http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/   

Top

*Appel Démos JEP-TALN'20  (JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2020)*
Conférence JEP 2020 | TALN 2020 | RÉCITAL 2020
8 au 12 juin 2020
Nancy, France
https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/

La sixième édition conjointe de la conférence JEP-TALN-RECITAL sera organisée à Nancy du
8 au 12 juin 2020 (https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/) .

La conférence inclut des démonstrations dans la cadre du TAL et du traitement automatique
de la parole, ou de son étude. Ce présent message est un appel à démonstration, et ne
doit pas être confondu avec les appels à communications indépendants pour les trois
conférences JEP, TALN et RECITAL.


*Thématiques des démonstrations*

Nous sollicitons des communications pouvant porter sur tous les thèmes habituels du TAL
et du traitement automatique de la parole, ou de son étude. Plus précisément, nous
reprenons les intitulés des thèmes listés dans les appels à soumissions,
en TAL :
- Phonétique, phonologie, morphologie, étiquetage morphosyntaxique,
- Syntaxe, grammaires, analyse syntaxique, chunking,
- Sémantique, pragmatique, discours,
- Sémantique lexicale et distributionnelle,
- Aspects linguistiques et psycholinguistiques du TAL,
- Ressources pour le TAL ou la parole,
- Méthodes d?évaluation pour le TAL,
- Applications du TAL (recherche et extraction d?information, question-réponse,
traduction,génération, résumé, dialogue, analyse d?opinions, etc.),
- TAL et multi-modalité (parole, vision, etc.),
- TAL et multilinguisme,
- TAL pour le Web et les réseaux sociaux,
- TAL et langues peu dotées,
- TAL et langue des signes,
- implications sociales et éthiques du TAL,
- TAL et linguistique de corpus,
- TAL et Humanités numériques.
et en parole :
- traitement automatique de la parole,
- reconnaissance, synthèse, traduction, dialogue,
- compréhension, codage,
- acquisition et apprentissage,
- production, perception et cognition,
- santé, troubles et handicap,
- phonétique, phonologie, prosodie,
- géolinguistique et sociolinguistique,
- ressources et évaluation.


*Types de communication - Démonstrations*

Les organisateurs de ces conférences ont le plaisir d'inviter les participants,
industriels et académiques, à présenter des démonstrations de logiciels et/ou de
prototypes qui s'appuient sur des méthodes de Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel
pour le texte, la parole ou la langue des signes.

Dans ce cadre, les professionnels de l'industrie peuvent faire acte de candidature pour
présenter leur logiciel au cours d?une session dédiée. L'objet de cette dernière est
d'offrir un cadre d'interaction entre les milieux industriel et académique.

La session Démonstration académique et industrielle, accueillera des présentations sous
les formes suivantes (selon les besoins et disponibilités) :
- stand d'exposant ;
- poster de présentation ;
- démonstration de produits logiciels.

Pour participer, les candidats devront soumettre un résumé (2 pages) au format de la
conférence, en suivant les modalités indiquées ci-après. Le titre de l?article devra
commencer par : [JEP-TALN DEMO].


*Critères de sélection*

Les participants seront choisis par le comité d'organisation, indépendamment du processus
de sélection scientifique habituel. Les critères de sélection s'appuient sur la
pertinence des outils au regard des thématiques affichées par les conférences TALN et JEP.


*Modalités de soumission*

Les soumissions, au format PDF, doivent être conformes aux instructions de mise en page
qui seront disponibles dans les fichiers de
style:http://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/soumissions/

Site web de soumission des articles
:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jeptalnrecital2020

Les soumissions en anglais sont acceptées dès lors qu'un co-auteur n?est pas francophone.

Le processus de relecture étant en double aveugle, les contributions ne doivent inclure
ni les noms ni les affiliations des auteurs, académiques ou industrielles. Les
auto-références et les noms de projets qui révèlent l'identité des auteurs, comme par
exemple, « Nous avons déjà démontré (Martin, 1991) » sont à proscrire. Les auteurs
doivent ainsi privilégier les citations telles que « Martin a précédemment démontré
(Martin, 1991) ». Les remerciements seront omis dans la première soumission, et pourront
être ajoutés dans la version définitive de l'article en cas d'acceptation.


*Dates importantes*

Date limite de soumission : 13 mars 2020
Notification aux auteurs : 27 mars 2020
Date limite de soumission des versions définitives : 24 avril 2020


*Comité de Programme*

Le comité de programme est présidé par Chloé Braud et David Langlois.

Contact :jep-taln-recital-2020@loria.fr

Top

*Appel Tutoriels JEP-TALN'20  (JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2020)*
Conférence JEP 2020 | TALN 2020 | RÉCITAL 2020
8 au 12 juin 2020
Nancy, France
https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/

Dans le cadre des conférences conjointes JEP-TALN-RECITAL organisées à Nancy
(https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/), nous sollicitons des propositions de tutoriels. Les
tutoriels doivent porter sur une thématique particulière du TAL et du traitement
automatique ou l'étude de la parole. Les tutoriels sont l'occasion de former les
participants à des modèles, méthodes, techniques ou outils, nouveaux ou non, mais
présentant un intérêt pour la communauté.
Les organisateurs de JEP-TALN-RECITAL s?occuperont de la logistique (e.g. gestion des
salles, vidéo-projecteur, pauses café). Le responsable d'un tutoriel se chargera de la
communication sur celui-ci en partenariat avec les organisateurs des conférences.


*Dates importantes*

Les tutoriels auront lieu en parallèle le lundi 8 et mardi 9 juin 2020 sur le lieu de
conférence à Nancy. Ils pourront durer une demi-journée ou une journée.
  - Date limite de soumission de proposition de tutoriels : vendredi 10 janvier 2020
  - Notification aux candidats de la réponse aux propositions de tutoriels : vendredi 17
janvier 2020
  - Remise du programme des tutoriels (pour la publication dans le livret) : vendredi 24
avril 2020
  - Date des tutoriels : lundi 8 et mardi 9  juin 2020


*Modalités de proposition*

Les propositions comprendront :
- le nom du tutoriel,
- une description synthétique (max. 1 page A4 en format PDF) du thème du tutoriel (y
compris une justification de son affluence espérée), de son contenu, et du fonctionnement
attendu (présentations, TP, etc.)
- une brève présentation du ou des intervenants,
- la durée souhaitée du tutoriel (1 journée ou 1/2 journée).

Les propositions devront être envoyées sous forme électronique à l?adresse
:jep-taln-tutoriels-2020@loria.fr  avec pour entête de courriel :[Tutoriel JEP-TALN 2020
: <titre du tutoriel>].


*Modalités de sélection*

Les propositions seront examinées par des membres des comités de programme de JEP, TALN,
le bureau de l?AFCP et le CPERM de l'ATALA.

Les critères suivants seront considérés pour acceptation :
- l?adéquation aux thèmes de l'une ou l'autre des conférences,
- l?originalité de la proposition,
- l'affluence pouvant être espérée.


*Format*
Les tutoriels auront lieu en français (ou en anglais pour les non-francophones). Nous
invitons les intervenants à mettre le matériel utilisé lors du tutoriel (présentations,
codes, données, etc.) à disposition sur un site web.

Contacts :jep-taln-tutoriels-2020@loria.fr

Top

*Appel à ateliers (JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2020)*
Conférence JEP 2020 | TALN 2020 | RECITAL 2020
8?12 juin 2020
Nancy, France
https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/

Le LORIA, l'ATILF et l'INIST, travaillant dans les domaines de la parole
et du traitement automatique des langues écrites, parlées et signées,
organisent

  du 8 au 12 juin 2020,

  sur le campus Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l?université de
  Lorraine,

la sixième édition conjointe de la conférence JEP-TALN-RECITAL. Elle
regroupera :

- les 33es Journées d'Etudes sur la Parole (JEP),
- la 27e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues
  Naturelles (TALN),
- la 22e Rencontre des Étudiants Chercheurs en Informatique pour le
  Traitement Automatique des Langues (RÉCITAL).

Dans le cadre de la conférence jointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2020 qui sera
organisée à Nancy du 8 au 12 juin 2020 (https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/),
nous sollicitons des*propositions d'ateliers*. Les ateliers doivent
porter sur des thématiques propres aux JEP, à TALN, ou communes à
JEP-TALN.

Chaque atelier a sa propre présidence et son propre comité de
programme. Le responsable de l?atelier est chargé de la communication
sur celui-ci, de l?appel à soumissions et de sa diffusion, et de la
coordination de son comité de programme. Pour les aspects
organisationnels, le responsable d'atelier sera en liaison avec les
organisateurs de JEP-TALN-RECITAL, et ces derniers auront en charge la
partie logistique (gestion des salles, pauses café et diffusion des
articles).

*Dates importantes*

Les ateliers auront lieu en parallèle le lundi 8 et le mardi 9 juin 2020
sur le lieu de conférence à Nancy. Ils pourront durer une demi-journée
ou une journée.

  * Date limite de soumission de proposition d'atelier : vendredi 10 janvier 2020
  * Notification aux candidats de la réponse aux propositions
    d'atelier : vendredi 17 janvier 2020
  * Remise des versions finales des articles acceptés dans les
    ateliers (pour la publication dans les actes) : vendredi 15 mai 2020
  * Date des ateliers : lundi 8 et mardi 9 juin 2020

*Modalités de soumission des propositions*

Les propositions d?ateliers devront être déposées sur le site web de
soumission (track ateliers) :
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jeptalnrecital2020

Elles comprendront :
- le nom et l?acronyme de l?atelier,
- une description synthétique (au plus 1 page A4 en format PDF) du
  thème de l'atelier,
- le comité de programme (2 à 3 personnes chargées de la sélection
  finale des articles)
- la durée souhaitée pour la réalisation de l?atelier (1/2 ou 1
  journée).


*Modalités de sélection*

Les propositions d'atelier seront examinées par les membres des comités
de programme de JEP et TALN. Les critères suivants seront considérés
pour l'acceptation :

- l?adéquation aux thèmes de la conférence,
- l?originalité de la proposition.

On veillera à ce que les membres du comité de programme (lors de la
soumission) puis du comité de lecture soient équilibrés en terme de
genre et d'affiliations.

*Format*

Les conférences auront lieu en français ou en anglais pour les non
francophones.

Les articles soumis dans les ateliers devront suivre le format de TALN
2020 (nombre de pages à la discrétion du comité de programme de
l'atelier) :http://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/soumissions/

*Contacts*

Le comité de programme est présidé par Chloé Braud, David Langlois, Slim
Ouni et Sylvain Pogodalla.

Contact :jep-taln-ateliers-2020@loria.fr

Top

*JEP'20 call for papers (JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2020)*
JEP 2020 Conference | TALN 2020 | RECITAL 2020
June 8-12, 2020
Nancy, France
https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/

LORIA, ATILF and INIST are french laboratories and institutes located in Nancy and
working in the fields of speech and automatic processing of written, spoken and signed
languages. With the scientific support of the AFCP (Association Francophone pour la
Communication Parlée) and ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues),
they are organizing the sixth joint edition of the JEP-TALN-RECITAL conference. It will
take place:

from 8 to 12 June 2020

on the Lettres et Sciences Humaines campus of the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France

This edition will therefore include:

- the 33rd Study Days on Speech (Journées d'Etudes sur la Parole - JEP),
- the 27th Conference on Natural Language Processing (Traitement Automatique des Langues
Naturelles - TALN),
- the 22nd Meeting of Student Researchers in Computer Science for Automatic Language
Processing (Rencontre des Étudiants Chercheurs en Informatique pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues - RÉCITAL).

The JEP'2020 will include oral and poster presentations and invited lectures.

The official language of the conference is French.

*Types of contributions*

Authors are invited to submit two types of contributions:

- articles presenting original research work
- position papers presenting a point of view about spoken communication

Articles must present original works, with a substantial contribution compared to other
works that may already have been published. In the case of works already partially or
totally published in another language, the article should refer to the original
publication in a footnote.

Articles will be presented in the form of an oral presentation or a poster.

*JEP topics*

Contributions may cover all topics related to spoken communication and speech processing
in their various aspects, as well as their applications.

The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to:

- automatic speech processing
- transcription, synthesis, translation, dialogue,
- understanding, coding
- acquisition and learning
- production, perception and cognition
- health, disorders and disability
- phonetics, phonology, prosody
- geolinguistics and sociolinguistics
- resources and evaluation

*Selection criteria*

Submissions will be reviewed by at least two specialists of the field. For research work,
particular consideration will be given to:

- relevance to the conference topics
- importance and originality of the contribution
- correction of scientific and technical content
- critical analysis of the results, particularly in relation to other works in the field
- status of the work in the context of international research
- organization and clarity of the presentation

For position papers, preference will be given to:

- taking into account the state of the art and positioning in relation to it
- providing an original point of view
- demonstrating the potential impact of the position

The selected articles will be published in the conference proceedings.

*Submission instructions*

The articles will be written in French.

The size of the articles should not exceed 8 pages, plus one page dedicated to
bibliographic references.
A LaTeX style sheet, a Word template and a LibreOffice template are available on the
conference website: http://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/soumissions/

Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jeptalnrecital2020

*Dates*

- Submissions due: 31 January 2020 (23:59 Paris time),
- Notification to authors: 03 April 2020
- Camera-ready due: 08 May 2020


*Scholarships*

The AFCP offers a number of scholarships for doctoral students and young researchers
wishing to attend the conference, see the AFCP website (http://www.afcp-parole.org/).

The ISCA also provides financial support to young researchers participating in scientific
events on speech and language, see the ISCA website
(https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/).


*Contacts*

The JEP Program Committee is chaired by David Langlois and Slim Ouni.

Contact: jep-taln-ateliers-2020@loria.fr

Le 15/11/2019 à 15:38, David Langlois a écrit :

Top

Call for Papers,

Workshop on Laughter and Non-Verbal Vocalisations, Bielefeld,

15-16 June

the previous meetings held in Dublin (2012), Enschede
(2015), and Paris (2018), we have the pleasure to announce a
forthcoming workshop in Bielefeld.
Non-verbal vocalisations such as laughs, sighs, filled pauses, and
short utterances can communicate emotions and behavioural intentions.
Often, they also play an important role in regulating interactions.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together scientists from diverse
research areas and to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary
discussions in order to gain a better understanding of laughter and
other non-verbal vocalisations in multimodal human-human and
human-machine interactions. The workshop will consist of invited
talks, oral, and poster presentations of ongoing research.
We invite contributions from all relevant fields, including phonetics,
linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis, social signal
processing, and human-machine/robot interaction.

Submission procedure
???????
Researchers are invited to submit short papers or abstracts (max. 4
pages, including references) describing their work, including work in
progress. The submissions will be made available online.

Important dates
?????
* Submission portal opens: 15 December 2020
* Abstract submission deadline:  14 February 2020
* Notification acceptance/rejection:  31 March 2020
* Registration deadline by email: 01 June 2020
* Workshop dates: 15-16 June 2020

Venue
??
CITEC, Bielefeld University
https://cit-ec.de/en

Website
??-
Please check the website
http://bit.ly/laughterWorkshop
for updated information about the workshop


Programme Committee
???-

Nick Campbell - School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication
Sciences, Trinity College Dublin
Kevin El Haddad - University of Mons
Jonathan Ginzburg - University Paris Diderot
Dirk Heylen - Human Media Interaction, University of Twente
Bogdan Ludusan - Bielefeld University
Gary McKeown - Queen's University Belfast
Catherine Pelachaud - CNRS ? ISIR, Sorbonne University
Magdalena Rychlowska - Queen's University Belfast
Jürgen Trouvain - Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University
Khiet Truong - Human Media Interaction, University of Twente
Petra Wagner - Bielefeld University


--

Top

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2020 CONFERENCE

July 1-3, 2020

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference21/

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and  Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held on July 1-3, 2020 at the Jack’s Urban Meeting Place (JUMP)  in Boise, Idaho, USA.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will  be held on July 5-10 in Seattle, Washington, USA (https://acl2020.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.

IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS CONFERENCES

Multiple Submission Policy: SIGDIAL no longer accepts papers  that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications.

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

- Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

IMPORTANT DATES

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Submission: March 6, 2020

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification:  April 26,  2020 

• Final Paper Submission: May 11, 2020

• Conference: 1-3 July, 2020

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 paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers must be no longer than 8 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 paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made  in a few pages, such as a small, focused contribution; a negative results; or an interesting application nugget. Short papers should be no longer than 4 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

SIGDIAL 2020 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that  will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications. 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 2020 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.

ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2020 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 2020 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.

SIGDIAL 2020 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Olivier Pietquin, Google AI

Program Chairs:

Smaranda Muresan, Data Science Institute, Columbia University

Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, National Taiwan University

Local Chair:

Casey Kennington, Boise State University

Sponsorship Chair:

David Vandyke, University of Cambridge

Top

SIGDIAL 2020

1‐3 July,  USA

2nd Call for Special Sessions

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and  Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held on July 1-3, 2020 at the Jack’s Urban Meeting Place (JUMP)  in Boise, Idaho, USA (http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference21/). Note the revised conference dates from previous announcement to avoid overlap with ICML 2020 and IJCAI 2020.  SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will  be held on July 5-10 in Seattle, Washington, USA (https://acl2020.org/). 

IMPORTANT DATES

           Special Session Submission Deadline: January 15, 2020

            Special Session Notification: January 31, 2020

To accommodate the conference date change, we moved the submission deadline slightly by 2 days. So please note the deadline of January 15, 2020. 

The Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals. 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 Role of Discourse in  NLP Applications, Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End‐to‐end systems. 

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.

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@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.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/

https://robodial.github.io/

https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference18/sessions.htm

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

SIGDIAL 2020 Organizing Committee

General chair: Olivier Pietquin (Google Brain, France)

Co-program chairs: Smaranda Muresan (Columbia University, USA)

                                Yun-Nung Vivian Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)

Local chair: Casey Kennington (Boise State University, USA)

Sponsorship chair: David Vandyke (Apple, UK)

Mentoring chair: Nina Dethlefs (University of Hull, UK)

Publication chair: Stefan Ultes (Mercedes-Benz Research & Development, Germany)

Top

The French Research Network on Second Language Acquisition (RéAL2) helds its 3rd conference is held in Toulouse July 6/8 2020. We invite oral and poster presentations addressing all aspects of crosslinguistic influence in SLA and bilingualism. Please see attached document or consult our website: https://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/real2-2020.

We are looking forward to your submission

Cecilia Gunnarsson
for the organisation committee of RéAL2 2020
Laboratoire Octogone-Lordat
Université de Toulouse ? Jean Jaurès

Top

Special Interest Group : Prosodic and phonetic features of speaking styles

at the PALA conference 2020 (Poetics and Linguistics Association), 15-18 July 2020, Aix-en-Provence, France

Call for Papers 

The PALA 2020 conference (https://pala.sciencesconf.org/) invites special interest groups (SIGs) this year, among which a session on prosodic and phonetic features of speaking styles (SIG 8). This special interest group will gather specialists in the oral language. The different styles of the written language clearly have several lexical and syntactic particularities. The styles of the spoken language are yet to be defined. We would like to investigate phonetic and prosodic phenomena from a stylistic point of view. Segmental aspects can be relevant in the characterisation of style. Phonetic variation will therefore be considered. Rhythm is also a crucial element: tempo, the degree of assimilation, elision and reduction. Intonation is another significant feature: are certain intonation patterns associated with certain speaking styles?

The special session will allow us to question the definition that can be given to phonostyle(s).

Papers from a wide range of theoretical perspectives addressing the above issues will be welcome. We invite studies based on ecological corpora as well as experimental studies.

Submission guidelines 

Please upload your abstracts (no more than 300 words, references included, no more than 5 references) on the web site of the conference before February 15 2020. Here is how to proceed: 

·       Go to  https://pala.sciencesconf.org/

·       Go to login, in the drop-down menu, select 'create an account? and create a login and password.

·       You?ll receive an activation email that will direct you to an authentication page. Enter your newly created username and password

·       On the website, click on MY SPACE and then on MY SUBMISSION (in the menu)

·       Fill in the title and abstract, select ?ABSTRACT?, and add keywords.

·       Make sure you indicate clearly that you wish your paper to be considered for a Special Interest Group (SIGs).

All abstracts for SIGs need to be sent via the website and copied to the SIG organizer (please send a doc file or a doc and pdf file if you have special fonts): sophie.herment@univ-amu.fr

Top

International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM)

July 20-23, 2020; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

https://ece.iisc.ac.in/~spcom/2020/

Call for Papers

SPCOM provides a leading forum for researchers from academia, research laboratories, and industries to come together to share and learn about the current developments and emerging trends in the broad areas of signal processing and communications. SPCOM 2020 will be the thirteenth in the series of conferences and will feature several high-profile plenary talks, tutorials, talks by distinguished researchers from academia and the industry on topics of current interest.

Prospective authors are invited to submit original, high-quality research contributions (up to five pages long). The style files for preparing the manuscript are available on the conference website: https://ece.iisc.ac.in/~spcom/2020/index.html

Submitted manuscripts will go through double-blind peer-review. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, which will also be indexed on IEEE Xplore. Each accepted paper must be accompanied by a full registration and presented by one of the contributing authors. Each full registration can cover up to three accepted papers.

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

Wireless Communications

Cooperative and D2D Communications

MIMO and Space-Time Signal Processing

Cognitive Radio

Network Coding

Information Theory

Coding for Data Communications and Storage

Sensor Networks

Optical Communications and Networks

Next-Generation Networking and QoS

Cyber-Physical Systems

Multihop and Heterogeneous Networks

Vehicular Networks

THz and RF Systems for Communications

Green Communications

Energy and Smart Grid

Physical Layer Security

Detection and Estimation

Adaptive and Array Signal Processing

Compressive Sensing and Sparse Signal Processing

Signal Processing for Communications

Machine Learning for Signal Processing and Communications

Audio and Speech Signal Processing

Spoken Language Processing

Image and Video Signal Processing

Computational Imaging/Photography and Inverse Problems

Source Coding and Data Compression

Forensics and Security

Signal Processing Algorithms and Architectures

Underwater Communications and Signal Processing

VLSI for Communication and Signal Processing

Systems, Standards, and Implementations

Biological signal Processing

Biological Network and Data Analysis/Modeling

Deep Learning

Computer Vision

Natural Language Processing

Big Data

Autonomous Navigation and Robotics

Neuromorphic Systems 

Important dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 12, 2020

Acceptance notification: April 12, 2020

Camera-ready submission: May 10, 2020

Proposals for tutorials and special sessions will be by invitation only.

Team SPCOM 2020

Top

4^th INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON DEEP LEARNING
 
DeepLearn 2020
 
León, Guanajuato, Mexico
 
July 27-31, 2020
 
Co-organized by:
 
Center for Research in Mathematics, A.C. (CIMAT-CONACyT)
Guanajuato
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA)
Brussels/London
 
https://deeplearn2020.irdta.eu/
 
***************************************************************
 
--- Early registration deadline: December 27, 2019 ---
 
***************************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
DeepLearn 2020 will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants on the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning. Previous events were held in Bilbao, Genova and Warsaw.
 
Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence covering a spectrum of current exciting research and industrial innovation that provides more efficient algorithms to deal with large-scale data in neurosciences, computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, human-computer interaction, drug discovery, biomedical informatics, healthcare, recommender systems, learning theory, robotics, games, etc. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.
 
Most deep learning subareas will be displayed, and main challenges identified through 2 keynote lectures and 24 four-hour and a half courses, 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. Moreover, there will be two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
Master's 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, DeepLearn 2020 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:
 
DeepLearn 2020 will take place in León, the most populous city in the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, and a major economic pole in the country with specialization in leather industry. The venue will be:
 
Poliforum León
Blvd. Adolfo López Mateos esq. Blvd. Francisco Villa
Col. Oriental, León, Gto., Mexico, C.P. 37510
 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: (to be completed)
 
Maja Pantic (Imperial College London), Artificial Emotional Intelligence, Faces, Deep Fakes and Other Topics
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES: (to be completed)
 
Georgios Giannakis (University of Minnesota), [advanced] Ensembles for Interactive and Deep Learning Machines with Scalability, Expressivity, and Adaptivity
 
Jose Principe (University of Florida), [intermediate/advanced] Cognitive Architectures for Object Recognition in Video
 
Fedor Ratnikov (National Research University Higher School of Economics), [introductory] Specifics of Applying Machine Learning to Problems in Natural Science
 
Björn Schuller (Imperial College London), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Signal Processing
 
Alex Smola (Amazon), [introductory/advanced] Dive into Deep Learning
 
Kunal Talwar (Google Brain), tba
 
René Vidal (Johns Hopkins University), [intermediate/advanced] Mathematics of Deep Learning
 
Ming-Hsuan Yang (University of California, Merced), [intermediate/advanced] Learning to Track Objects
 
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 the title, authors, and summary of the research to david@irdta.eu by July 19, 2020.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A session will be devoted to 10-minute demonstrations of practical applications of deep learning in industry. Companies interested in contributing are welcome to submit a 1-page abstract containing the program of the demonstration and the logistics needed. People participating in the demonstration must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by July 19, 2020.
 
EMPLOYER SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in deep learning will have a space reserved for one-to-one contacts. It is recommended to produce a 1-page .pdf leaflet with a brief description of the company and the profiles looked for, to be circulated among the participants prior to the event. People in charge of the search must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david@irdta.eu by July 19, 2020.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Teresa Efigenia Alarcón Martínez (Guadalajara)
Oscar Dalmau Cedeño (Guanajuato, co-chair)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel J. Parra-Royón (Granada)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
https://deeplearn2020.irdta.eu/registration/
 
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 estimation 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 tool disabled when 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:
 
A certificate of successful participation in the event will be delivered indicating the number of hours of lectures.
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david@irdta.eu
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas, A.C. (CIMAT-CONACyT) ? Guanajuato
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA) ? Brussels/London

Top

 EVALUATING MULTIMODAL DOCUMENTS
EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF AUDIO-VISUAL TEXTS

Ielka van der Sluis
Gisela Redeker
Janina Wildfeuer

AILA 2020 CONGRESS

09-14 August 2020 • Groningen • The Netherlands

S051

EVALUATING MULTIMODAL DOCUMENTS

EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF AUDIO-VISUAL TEXTS

Symposium | Call for Papers

Organisers

Ielka van der Sluis

Gisela Redeker

Janina Wildfeuer

multimodality • evaluation • reception • cognition

he symposium addresses how

multimodal analyses can be used for

and applied to the evaluation of

multimodal communication. It aims at

reviewing evaluation methods and

providing practical implications for the

design of accessible audio-visual texts.

While the use of multimodal resources

such as pictures, texts, sound and

moving images has become normal in

our communication, it is not self-evident

how these resources should effectively

be combined to guarantee the

envisioned understanding. Insights in

human processing principles and

empirical reception studies are needed

to evaluate multimodal design and to

inform the variety of theories and

methods in our broad multimodal

context.

The symposium concentrates on the

principles that underlie successful

communication by explicitly asking for

results from empirical reception studies

conducted with readers/users of

multimodal texts. We seek contributions

reporting empirical and corpus-based

studies of multimodal artefacts that

provide insights into how people

navigate an understand them.

Featured talks by Jana Holsanova, Lund

University, and James Pustejovsky,

Brandeis University, will provide

excellent starting points for our

discussions.

The symposium aims at gaining empirical and

theoretical insights into how readers and usersystematic empirical and corpus-based analyses and

that can provide practical implications for the design of

accessible audio-visual texts.

AILA 2020 CONGRESS

09-14 August 2020 • Groningen • The Netherlands

TYPES OF PRESENTATIONS

• Standard presentations

12-20-minute presentations with a ppt.

The exact amount of time for each of these

presentations is up to the symposium

organizers and depends on the number of

abstracts accepted.

• Focused presentations

In pitches of 2-5 minutes, speakers advertise

the presentations that take place in the

dedicated focused presentation space where

the symposia attendants meet during lunch

or drinks.

All the focused multimodal presentations

include a poster. Additionally, these

presenters will have the opportunity to

upload a full 12-minute version of their paper

(video/audio, ppt) to the AILA website for

exposure for a full year after presenting at

AILA 2020.

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

Your submission will need to include the following:

• Author(s) and affiliation(s)

• Title: max. 20 words

• Abstract: max. 300 words

• Summary for program: max. 50 words

• Submit your paper proposal via the 'submit your paper'-link on

https://www.aila2020.nl/call-for-papers .

DATES

Submission deadline 16 September 2019

Notification by 18 November 2019

Top

Call for Papers

The 13th edition of the Nordic Prosody (NP) conference series is proudly hosted by Centre of Industrial Electronics (CIE) at the University of Southern Denmark on science campus Alsion, Sonderborg, Denmark (https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/institutter_centre/centre+for+industrial+elektronics). The conference will be held as a satellite event to the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 16-20 August 2020. Note that there will be a discount for NP participants who sign up for both conferences!

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is both the third-largest and the third-oldest Danish university. Since the introduction of the ranking systems in 2012, the University of Southern Denmark has consistently been ranked as one of the top 50 young universities in the world by both the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings. The SDU is also among the top 20 universities in Scandinavia.

Nordic Prosody conferences take place every 4 years. The first one was in Lund in 1978, organized by Eva Gårding, Gösta Bruce and Robert Bannert. The 12th Nordic Prosody was in 2016 in Trondheim, Norway. The conference series focuses on the forms and functions of prosodic patterns in Nordic languages and in languages spoken around the Baltic Sea. Contributions on all the various aspects of phonetics, phonology, and speech typology are welcome. Papers presenting new corpora, methods, or devices can be submitted as well. We also encourage researchers from neighboring disciplines like (second-language) pedagogy, acoustics, human-machine interaction, and voice pathology to submit contributions to the conference.

Keynote Speakers

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

- David House (KTH Stockholm, Sweden) & Gilbert Ambrazaitis (Linnaeus University, Sweden): The multimodal nature of prominence

- Wim van Dommelen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway): Interactions of segmental and prosodic parameters

- Nicolai Pharao (Copenhagen University, Denmark): Processing prosody – recognizing speakers and recognizing words

Important dates:

**************
31 May 2020 Abstract submission deadline
21 June 2020 Early bird registration deadline
13-15 August 2020 13th Nordic Prosody Conference, Sonderborg, Denmark

01 November 2020 Full-paper submission deadline

Registrations are made through the conference website. Abstracts as well as full papers should be sent by email to np2020@sdu.dk. More detailed information about the formatting requirements will be available on the conference website.

http://www.prosody.dk

Conference proceedings will be published in a peer-reviewed volume of  a Peter Lang book series.

We wish all of you a good start into the new lecture term.

The NP13 organizing committee,

Oliver Niebuhr, Jana Neitsch, Jan Michalsky, Meg Zellers, Stephanie Berger, Kerstin Fischer

Oliver Niebuhr

Associate Professor of Communication & Innovation

SDU Electrical Engineering

CIE - Centre for Industrial Electronics

This mail was sent through the SProSIG mailing list, which is for announcements of interest to the speech prosody research community. To subscribe/unsubscribe, mail list@sprosig.org.

Top

  ************************************************************
        TSD 2020 - PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL for WORKSHOPS
       ************************************************************

Twenty-third International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2020)
              Brno, Czech Republic, 8-11 September 2020
                    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 2020 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
tsd2020@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



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Elmar Noeth, Germany (general chair)
    Rodrigo Agerri, Spain
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Vladimir Benko, Slovakia
    Archna Bhatia, United States
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia
    Kamil Ekstein, Czech Republic
    Karina Evgrafova, Russia
    Yevhen Fedorov, Ukraine
    Carlos Ferra, Cuba
    Volker Fischer, Germany
    Darja Fiser, Slovenia
    Eleni Galiotou, Greece
    Bjorn Gamback, 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
    Denis Jouvet, France
    Maria Khokhlova, Russia
    Aidar Khusainov, Russia
    Daniil Kocharov, Russia
    Miloslav Konopik, Czech Republic
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Valia Kordoni, Germany
    Evgeny Kotelnikov, Russia
    Pavel Kral, Czech Republic
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Nikola Ljubesic, Croatia
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Bernardo Magnini, Italy
    Oleksandr Marchenko, Ukraine
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    France Mihelic, Slovenia
    Roman Moucek, Czech Republic
    Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Poland
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave, Colombia
    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 Rychly, Czechia
    Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine
    Odette Scharenborg, The Netherlands
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Marko Robnik Sikonja, Slovenia
    Vitomir Struc, Slovenia
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Jan Trmal, Czechia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Aleksander Wawer, Poland
    Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands
    Yorick Wilks, United Kingdom
    Marcin Wolinski, Poland
    Alina Wroblewska, Poland
    Victor Zakharov, Russia
    Jerneja Zganec Gros, Slovenia


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

April 10 2020 ............ Submission of abstracts
April 17 2020 ............ Submission of full papers
June 5 2020 .............. Notification of acceptance
June 15 2020 ............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
August 8 2020 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 15 2020 ........... Notification of acceptance for
                           demonstrations sent to the authors
September 8-11 2020 ...... 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 2020
    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: tsd2020@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2020 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2020


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, Berlin and
Milano, and by trains or buses from Vienna (150 km) or Prague (230 km).

Top

Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

Workshop co-located with COLING
(28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics),
Barcelona, Spain, September 13, 2020

1 Background

Supporting us in many tasks (thinking, searching, memorizing and communicating) words are important. Hence, one may wonder how to build tools supporting their learning and usage (access/navigation). Alas the answer is not quite as straightforward as it may seem. It depends on various factors: the questioner's background (lexicography, psychology, computer science), the task (production/reception), and the material support (hardware). Words in books, computers and the human brain are not the same. Obviously, being aware of this, different communities have focused on different issues ?(dictionary building; creation of navigational tools; representation and organization of words; time course for accessing a word, etc.)? yet,  their views and  respective goals have changed considerably over time.  

Rather than considering the lexicon as a static entity, where discrete units (words) are organized alphabetically (database view), dictionaries are now viewed dynamically, i.e., as lexical graphs, whose entities are linked in various ways (topical relations; associations) and whose weight links may vary over time. While lexicographers view words as products (holistic entities), psychologists and neuroscientists view them as processes (decomposition), involving various steps or layers (representations) between an input and an output.

Computational linguists have their own ways to look at words, and their proposals have also changed quite a bit during the last decade. Discrete count-based vector representations have successively been replaced by continuous vectors (i.e., word embeddings) and then by language-model-based contextualized representations. These latter are more powerful than any of the other forms, as they are able to account for context ambiguity, outperforming the static models (including word-embeddings) in a broad range of tasks.

As one can see, different communities look at words from different angles, which can be an asset, as complementary views may help us to broaden and deepen our understanding of this fundamental cognitive resource. Yet, this diversity of perspectives can also a problem, in particular if the field is rapidly moving on, as in our case. Hence it becomes harder and harder for everyone, including experts, to remain fully informed about the latest changes (state of the art). This is one of the reasons why we organize this workshop. More precisely, our goal is not only to keep people informed without getting them crushed by the information glut, but also to help them to perceive clearly what is new, relevant, hence important. Last, but not least, we would like to connect people from different communities in the hope that this may help them to gain new insights or inspirations.

2   Scope and Topics

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources (representation, organization of the data, etc.). To allow for this we invite researchers to submit their contributions. The idea is to discuss the limitations of existing resources and to explore possible enhancements that take into account the users? and the engineers' needs (computational aspects).

Also, just like in the past we propose again a 'shared task'. This time the goal is to provide a common benchmark for testing lexical representations for the automatic identification of lexical semantic relations (synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, part-whole meronymy) in various languages (English, Chinese, and so on).

For this workshop we solicit papers including but not limited to the following topics, each of which can be considered from various points of view: linguistics (lexicography, computational- or corpus linguistics), neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip-of-the-tongue problem, word associations), network-related sciences (vector-based approaches, graph theory, small-world problem), and so on.

1    Organization, i.e. structure of the lexicon
?     Micro- and macrostructure of the lexicon;
?     Indexical categories (taxonomies, thesaurus-like topical structures, etc.);
?     Map of the lexicon (topology) and relations between words (word associations).

2    The meaning of words and how to reveal it
?    Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed);
?    Meaning representation (concept based, primitives);
?    Distributional semantics (count models, neural embeddings, etc. )

3    Analysis of the conceptual input given by a dictionary user
?    What information do language producers typically provide when looking for a word (terms, relations)?
?    What kind of relational information do they give: typed or untyped relations?
?    Which relations are typically used?

4    Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes
?    Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and indexes (crowdsourcing, serious games, etc.);
?    Extraction of associations from corpora to build semantic networks supporting navigation;
?    (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g., synonym, hypernym, meronym, ...).

5    Creation of new types of dictionaries
?    Concept dictionary;
?    Dictionary of larger segments than words (clauses, phrasal elements);
?    Dictionary of patterns or concept-patterns;
?    Dictionary of syllables.

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

?    Search based on sound (rhymes), meaning or contextually related words (associations);
?    Determination of appropriate search space based on the user?s cognitive state (information available at the onset: query) and meta-knowledge (knowledge concerning the relationship between the input and the target word), ...
?    Identification of typical word access strategies (navigational patterns) used by people;
?    Interface problems, data visualization.

3  Workshop Submissions

The workshop features two tracks: 

• A regular research track, where the submissions must be substantially original.
• A shared task track, with submissions consisting of system description papers.

The regular research track submissions should follow one of the 2 formats:

• Long papers (9 content pages + references) should report on solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques.
• Short papers (4 content pages + references) should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

Submissions must be anonymized, conform to the style sheet of COLING (https://coling2020.org/pages/call_for_papers), and be submitted via their website (https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/CogALex/). While some papers may be accepted only as posters, in the proceedings no distinction will be made between them and full papers.

4 Important Dates

       Workshop papers

• Paper submission deadline: May 14, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: June 24, 2020
•  Camera-ready papers due: July 11, 2020
• Workshop date: September 13, 2020

      
    Shared task

• Release of development data : March 1, 2020
• Release of test data April: 20-24, 2020 
• Announcement of winners May 1, 2020
• Shared task papers due: May 20, 2020

5 Invited Speaker

       Alex Arenas (http://deim.urv.cat/~alexandre.arenas/)

              Alephsys Lab, Computer Science & Mathematics,

              Universidad Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain

6 Workshop Organizers

• Michael Zock (LIS, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France)
• Alessandro Lenci (Comput. Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pisa, Italy)
• Enrico Santus (MIT Computer Science& AI Lab, Boston, USA)
• Emmanuele Chersoni (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China)

7 Program Committee

see : https://sites.google.com/view/cogalex-2020/home/programme-committee

8 Contacts

For general questions, please get in touch with Michael Zock

e-mail:          michael.zock@lis-lab.fr

Homepage:   http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/

Concerning the shared task, please contact

Enrico Santus                 (esantus@gmail.com), or

Emmanuele Chersoni     (emmanuelechersoni@gmail.com)

Top

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

SPECOM-2020 – FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

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

22nd International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2020)

Venue: St. Petersburg, Russia, October 06-10, 2020

Web: http://www.specom.nw.ru/2020

ORGANIZERS

The conference is organized by the St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia) in cooperation with Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU, Moscow, Russia).

GENERAL CHAIRS

Alexey Karpov - SPIIRAS, Russia

Rodmonga Potapova - MSLU, Russia

CONFERENCE TOPICS

SPECOM attracts researchers, linguists and engineers working in the following areas of speech science, speech technology, natural language processing, human-computer interaction:

Affective computing

Audio-visual speech processing

Corpus linguistics

Computational paralinguistics

Deep learning for audio processing

Feature extraction

Forensic speech investigations

Human-machine interaction

Language identification

Multichannel signal processing

Multimedia processing

Multimodal analysis and synthesis

Sign language processing

Speaker recognition

Speech and language resources

Speech analytics and audio mining

Speech and voice disorders

Speech-based applications

Speech driving systems in robotics

Speech enhancement

Speech perception

Speech recognition and understanding

Speech synthesis

Speech translation systems

Spoken dialogue systems

Spoken language processing

Text mining and sentiment analysis

Virtual and augmented reality

Voice assistants

SATELLITE EVENT

5th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2020: http://www.specom.nw.ru/icr2020

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event is English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited talks, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit full papers of 6-10 pages formatted in the Springer LNCS style. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers (single-blind), and accepted papers will be presented either orally or as posters. Papers submitted to SPECOM 2020 must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specom2020

PROCEEDINGS

SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS) series listed in all major international citation databases. SPECOM Proceedings are included in the list of forthcoming proceedings for October 2020.

IMPORTANT DATES

May 26, 2020 ............ Submission of full papers

July 03, 2020 ............ Notification of acceptance

July 17, 2020 ............ Camera-ready papers and early registration

October 06-10, 2020 ......... Conference dates

CONTACTS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

SPECOM-2020 Secretariat:

E-mails: specom@iias.spb.su

SPECOM-2020 web-site: www.specom.nw.ru/2020

Top

Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges

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

ICMI 2020: Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges

https://icmi.acm.org/2020/index.php?id=CfC

25-29 Oct 2020, Utrecht, The Netherlands

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

We are calling for teams to propose one or more ICMI 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 main 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 weaknesses.

- 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.

- Policy challenge: Legal, ethical, and privacy issues of Multimodal Interaction systems in the age of AI. The challenge could revolve around opinion papers, panels, discussions, etc.

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

1.Title

2.Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion of the Challenge

3.Distinctive topics to be addressed and specific goals

4.Detailed description of the Challenge and its relevance to multimodal interaction

5.Length (full day or half day)

6.Plan for soliciting participation

7.Description of how submissions (challenge?s submissions and papers) will be evaluated, and a list of proposed reviewers

8.Proposed schedule for releasing datasets (if applicable) and/or systems (if applicable) and receiving submissions

9.Short biography of the organizers (preferably from multiple institutions)

10.Funding source (if any) that supports or could support the challenge organization

11.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 2019 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 (if any) will be made from the previous year.

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

Important Dates and Contact Details

Proposals due: January 13, 2020

Proposal notification: February 3, 2020

Paper camera-ready: August 17, 2020

Proposals should be emailed to both ICMI 2020 Multimodal Grand Challenge Chairs, Dr. Hayley Hung and Dr. Laura Cabrera-Quiros via grandchallenge.ICMI20@gmail.com. Prospective organizers are also encouraged to contact the co-chairs if they have any questions. Proposals are due by January 13, 2020. Notifications will be sent on February 3, 2020.

Top