M.Sc. Program in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Science
Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France)


The Institute of Digital Sciences, Management and Cognition
is opening a Masters Program in NLP - ??
Computer Science, Speech, Language and Knowledge Representation

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

http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/idmc-master-degree-in-natural-language-processing/
**************

So you want to be a specialist in Neural Networks, Logic, Speech
Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation... all
for Natural Language? Well, now's your chance!

Natural Language Processing (NLP) lies at the crossroads of
linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence. This
Masters Program offers a modern curriculum which combines the
different approaches, and covers both theoretical and applied
perspectives.


In each semester, the program includes a hands-on project.
It ends with a 6-month paid internship in a company or a research
lab. You can find the course description below.


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You can apply to directly enter at either the first year (M1) or second year (M2) level.
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Language
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All courses are taught in English
(except the 'French for non-native speakers' class).


Fees
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The University of Lorraine is publicly funded and thus offers
tuition-free education for many students including students
from the EU (243 ? cost per year). The tuition fee for students
from other nations arriving in France at the beginning of
the 2019 academic year will be 3.770 ? per year.

Find more information here:
https://www.campusfrance.org/en/tuition-fees-France

Nancy?s high quality of life goes hand-in-hand with a low cost
of living.


Why Nancy?
---------------
Nancy is a center of excellence for NLP. It can boast of:

1/Two important research units:
- LORIA, the computer science research laboratory http://www.loria.fr/en/
- ATILF the linguistic research laboratory http://www.atilf.fr/

Both research units participate in many national and
international research projects. Their members are highly
visible in the international community and regularly publish
in the most prestigious conferences and journals of the field.

2/ Two Erasmus Mundus Masters funded by the European Union :
- Erasmus Mundus Master Language and Communication
Technology (LCT) http://lct-master.org/
- Erasmus Mundus Master EMLex.
        https://www.emlex.phil.fau.eu/


Why NLP?
--------------
Natural Language Processing is a rapidly expanding field.

With the proliferation of digital data, there is a massive need
for well-trained engineers and researchers able to exploit this
data for commercial (for example: e-commerce, recommender
systems and translation) and socio-political (for example:
e-learning, opinion mining, and behavioural predictions) purposes.

Start-ups, small firms with strong R&D profiles and large companies
(in France this includes Airbus, Thales, EDF, Orange, etc.) are
looking for scientists and engineers who can contribute to the
development of systems capable of managing and exploiting textual
data.

The GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) also recruit
intensively in both the NLP and the Speech processing domain.

There is also a strong need for Ph.D. candidates in the field, as
demonstrated by the many Ph.D. proposals in both the public and
the industrial domain.



Contacts
------------
Head of the Master program: Maxime Amblard
        maxime.amblard@univ-lorraine.fr
Secretary: Karine Weisse
        karine.weisse@univ-lorraine.fr

Location of the courses:
        École des Mines (Artem Campus, Tram stop 'Blandan')
        http://www.alliance-artem.fr/


Application
---------------
Non-European students
---------------
Students from most non-UE countries shall apply on
https://pastel.diplomatie.gouv.fr/etudesenfrance/dyn/public/authentification/login.html?_csrf=a530f0a6-e1d3-4052-ba91-f2cb8029fcd8&codeLangue=EN
(search Traitement Automatique des Langues Nancy)

Students from other non-EU countries can directly apply with the following file:
http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/applicationfilem-sc_-nlp19-20/


European students
---------------
The application file for EU students is available here:
https://ecandidat.univ-lorraine.fr

Create an account then follow:
        - Offre de formation
        - Institut des sciences du digital, management et cognition
        - Master
        - M1-Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) (NANCY) (FI)
           or
        - M2-Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) PT Informatique, langue, parole et
connaissances (NANCY) (FI)

More information:
http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/application-process-nlp-master-degree/#application


Academic Year 2019-2020
-----------------------------------
From 3rd to 13th September 2019: Refresher courses in
mathematics (probability theory and statistics) and computer
science (algorithms and programming).

M1:
        1st semester from September 2nd to January 10th
        2nd semester from January 13th to June 5th
M2:
        1st semester from September 2nd to March 27th
        Internship from February to August


In brief
----------
? A program with strong national and international visibility
? Taught entirely in English
? A high quality research environment with two research centers
covering a wide range of disciplines (linguistics, computer
science, speech and language processing) and applications
(human-machine interfaces, speech processing, knowledge
extraction, statistical machine translation, etc.)
? Studies in a vibrant, human-size city


Course Description
---------------------------
M1 Semester 1
---------------------------
PROBABILITIES, STATISTICS AND ALGORITHMS FOR AI
        ? Elementary mathematical tools, statistics, algorithms
        to define and solve artificial intelligence problems
        ? Case study approach towards mastering both theoretical
        and practical aspects of a topic

DESIGN AND ACQUISITION OF CORPORA
        ? Written corpora
        ? Speech corpora

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        ? Collecting, analysing and formalizing customers' needs
        ? Software design and development
        ? Functional analysis and specifications
        ? Project management

LINGUISTICS FOR NLP (1)
        ? Methods for Natural Language Processing
        ? Phonology
        ? Morphology

PROJECT AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Hands-on project
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M1 Semester 2
---------------------------
MACHINE LEARNING AND SEMANTIC WEB
        ? Machine learning theory
        ? Data mining
        ? Knowledge extraction

FORMAL TOOLS
        ? Logic
        ? Formal languages
        ? Calculability and complexity

DATA PROCESSING
        ? Storage and retrieval
        ? Data analysis

LINGUISTICS FOR NLP (2)
        ? Lexicology : lexical units and phraseology
        ? Syntax
        ? Semantics

PROJECT AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Hands-on project
        ? Scientific communication
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M2 Semester 1
---------------------------
DEEP LEARNING AND DATA MINING
        ? Neural Networks, Deep Neural Networks
        ? Data mining (structured data and text)
        ? Collaborative filtering

TEXT AND SPEECH PROCESSING
        ? Processing Textual Data
        ? Speech processing
        ? Terminology and ontology

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND DISCOURSE
        ? Application to text
        ? Computational semantics
        ? Discourse and Dialog modeling

LEXICONS AND GRAMMARS FOR NLP
        ? Diachronic and synchronic lexicology
        ? Lexical resources
        ? Syntactic framework

PROJECTS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Software project
        ? Law and ethics
        ? Research methods
        ? Professional integration
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M2 Semester 2
---------------------------
Paid internship (company or research lab)

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The deadline for participating in the first round of this survey has been postponed to the 15th of September, so as to allow those who are not available during the summer holidays to participate.

The information notice and invitation letter (in English and in French), which also contain the survey link, have been updated and are available here: https://cloud.irit.fr/index.php/s/NPuKydZ89KYx8vU

Please, feel free to contact me at any time for further information.

Thanking you for your consideration and for your help,
Kind regards,

Timothy Pommée
SLP and PhD student in computer science and telecommunications
timothy.pommee@irit.fr

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am a speech & language pathologist and PhD student (IRIT, UT3, Toulouse, France), currently conducting a thesis on the clinical relevance of intelligibility measures. In this context, I am interested in collecting the opinions of a large international panel of speech and voice professionals (both clinicians and researchers in the fields of speech pathology, phoniatrics, phonetics, prosody, speech-related computer sciences…), in order to reach a consensus on what criteria have to be taken into account when creating a standard reading passage specifically designed for speech and voice assessment. 

For this purpose, I will be using the Delphi methodology, an extensively used group survey methodology that is conducted over several (usually three) consecutive rounds and is quasi-anonymous (the identity of each participant is only known to the main investigator/moderator, participants remain anonymous to each other, which allows for freedom of expression without any social or professional pressure from peers). 

This consensus survey, which will be carried out online on LimeSurvey, will be structured as follows: 

    1) Definitions of speech-related concepts*

    2) Perceptual and objective speech measures*

    3) Criteria for creating standard reading passages

*questions in these sections will only be presented to participants with activities in speech and fluency disorders

Attached to this email, you will find a notice containing more information about the project as well as the invitation letter which contains the link to the online survey.

In order for me to collect as many answers as possible, could I ask you kindly to distribute my request to your affiliates? Or to suggest other contact persons?

The deadline to complete the first questionnaire is currently set to 31 August 2020  September 15th, 2020

Here is a link to the updated information notice and invitation letter (in English and in French) which contain the survey link, as well as to the Ethics Committee Approval: https://cloud.irit.fr/index.php/s/NPuKydZ89KYx8vU 

I thank you very much for your consideration and for your help. 

Please, feel free to contact me at any time for further information.

Kind regards,

Timothy Pommée

SLP and PhD student in computer science and telecommunications

timothy.pommee@irit.fr

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ACM ICMI CALL FOR BIDS 2023

The Steering Board of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) invites proposals to host 25th Annual Conference, to be held between the end of September and mid-November 2023. Priority will be given for proposals hosted in Europe or Africa continents.

Strong proposals from other regions are also welcome. ICMI 2018 was in Boulder, Colorado, USA, ICMI 2019 was in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China, and ICMI 2020 was recently held as a virtual conference (but originally planned to be in Utrecht, the Netherlands). The bidding process is done in two stages. During the first stage, the initial proposals will be reviewed by the steering committee to identify promising bids and request additional information if necessary. During the second stage, the revised proposals will be reviewed and the final selection.

Evaluation

Proposals will be evaluated according to the following criteria (unordered):

• Experience and reputation of General Chairs and Program Chairs

• Local multimodal interaction community support

• (Local) government and industry support

• Support and opportunities for students

• Accessibility and attractiveness of proposed site

• Suitability of proposed dates (with list of specific conflicts to avoid)

• Adequacy of conference facilities for the anticipated number of attendees

• Adequacy of accommodations and food services in a range of price categories and close to the conference facilities

• Overall balance of budget projections

• Geographical balance with regard to previous ICMI meetings

All communications, including request for information and bid submission, should be sent to the ICMI Steering Board Chair (Yukiko Nakano, y.nakano@st.seikei.ac.jp).

Important Dates

For ICMI 2023 bids:

• January 25, 2021 - Notify intention to submit proposal via email

• February 11, 2021 - Draft proposals due

• March 1, 2021 - Feedback to bidders

• April 5, 2021 - Final bids due

• April 26, 2021 - Bid selected

Bid Content

After the notification of intent, the steering board chair will share with you more details, including successful bids from previous years. The following questions have to be answered for the official bid (both draft and final proposals). Text in square brackets [] contains considerations to be taken into account.

1. Describe briefly the conference, including side events

2. Describe briefly the conference site.

3. What date do you consider?

4. What is the nearest (international) airport?

5. Please give price quotes for the cheapest roundtrip to the conference location from Frankfurt, London, New York, San Francisco, Beijing and Tokyo (assume one week of travel with a Saturday overnight stay)

6. What transportation should participants use from the airport to the conference site?

7. Does the conference site both have a large room for a maximum of 300 people and about 5 smaller rooms for a maximum of 30-70 people? Is there wireless connection available for attendees? What about audio-visual facilities?

8. What is the approximate room rate (single and double occupancy)? Is breakfast included? [Often all the attendees of ICMI stay at the same hotel. If this is your case, the conference chair should find a hotel that allows accommodation for the expected number of people. Booking rooms and meals in the same hotel as the conference rooms often helps reducing the overall costs.]

9. Catering, including breaks, receptions, banquet and entertainment. We encourage organizers to provide coffee breaks and lunches in order to promote community building and discussion

10. Which support can your department give for the organization of the conference (e.g., free secretarial assistance, facilities for on-line payment?

11. Which support can your department give during the conference (e.g., free secretarial assistance, PCs / Macs at the conference site)?

12. What are your plans for sponsorship? To which associations / companies / institutions do you plan to apply for financial assistance? What do you realistically expect to receive from them? What are your plans concerning student travel stipend program [A minimum of $5,000 should be reserved from each year's conference budget to support student travel from each of the three major geographic regions (Americas, Europe-Africa, Asia-Pacific), or $15,000 total. For example, if a grant for $15,000 is obtained from NSF to support U.S. student travel but there is no external funding for students from other continents, then an additional $10,000 of you budget should be set aside for students from the other two continents]

13. What actions will you take to make the conference cheaper for students? (e.g., seek financial support from other organizations, provide cheaper rooms)? What reduction do you realistically expect?

14. Provide the names of people who are foreseen or confirmed for the major Conference Committees: General Chairs, Program Chairs, Sponsorship Chair; volunteer labor, registration handling. One of the General Chairs and one of the Program Chairs should be identified as the lead, who will be the main point of contact for the ICMI steering committee. Describe any experience the team has had in organizing previous conferences and the number of participants at those conferences.

15. Local Multimodal Interaction community

16. How do you propose to run the paper reviewing process? Do you see any possible improvements?

17. How will you organize the content of the conference to ensure a high-quality and energetic exchange of information that includes timely topics and stimulating external speakers? Please be specific in your suggestions for how you would organize the main program and workshops/tutorials

18. Any other aspects that you may find relevant for the evaluation of your proposal

Preparing a budget proposal

Based on estimates from previous attendance, one might expect 250 participants to ICMI. Please, provide three budgets, one for 150 participants, a second for 200 participants and the last one for 250. Costs that will have to be covered include:

• Rental of conference space and meeting rooms

• AV equipment

• Coffee breaks and possibly lunch

• Registration desk/technical helpers (e.g., student volunteers)

• Tutorials

• Producing and printing the proceedings

• 10% ACM fee

• 15% contingency fund

• Conference poster and advertising

• Social banquet

• Welcome reception

• Lunch for ICMI board meeting

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The Paris Graduate School of Linguistics (PGSL) is a newly-formed Paris-area graduate program covering all areas of language science.

It offers a comprehensive Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research, in close connection with PhD programs as well as with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics consortium. 

Research plays a central part in the program, and students also take elective courses to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Prior knowledge of French is not required.

For more details, please see https://paris-gsl.org/index.html

New funding opportunity: https://u-paris.fr/en/call-for-applications-international-students-miem-scholarship-program/

 Application deadline : February 1st 2021 (program starting September 1st 2021)

PGSL is funded by Smarts-UP (Student-centered iMproved, Active Research-based Training Strategy at Université de Paris) through the ANR SFRI grant « Grandes universités de recherche » (PIA3) 2020-2029.

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The ICMR Steering Committee invites interested parties to submit proposals to
organize the 13th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval,
ICMR2023 (sponsored by the ACM SIGMM). ACM ICMR is the premier
scientific conference for multimedia retrieval.  Its mission is
to provide a forum to discuss,  promote and advance the
state-of-the-arts in multimedia retrieval by bringing together
researchers and practitioners in its related field. It is thus essential
to ensure that the conference includes sessions for presenting high-quality
research papers and for sharing practitioner experience.  The list of
previous ICMRs is at http://www.acmicmr.org/.
We expect ICMR2023 to be held in Europe.

Parties interested in hosting ICMR2023 are invited to submit  their
proposals (20 pages or less) by Friday, 26 February 2021 by email with
the subject line: ICMR2023 to the steering committee chair.
The details of CFP is at http://acmicmr.org/icmr2023.cfo.final.pdf.

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===============================================
ACMMM 2021: Call for Grand Challenge Proposals
===============================================


ACMMM 2021 is calling for Multimedia Grand Challenge (MGC) Proposals. The purpose of MGC is to engage the multimedia research community by establishing well-defined and objectively judged challenge problems intended to exercise the state-of-the-art methods and inspire future research directions. The key criteria for Grand Challenges are that they should be useful, interesting, and their solution should involve a series of research tasks over a long period of time, with pointers towards longer-term research. First presented in ACMMM 2009, MGC has established itself as a prestigious competition in the multimedia community. This year we emphasize the continuity of the grand challenges, which is important in order to support sustained and substantial progress in the state of the art. Therefore, We ask proposers to express a commitment to run their challenges multiple years in a row.

For MGC proposal guidelines, please see https://2021.acmmm.org/multimedia-grand-challenges.html


Submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ACMMM2021 (under the track 'Multimedia Grand Challenge Proposal')

*** Important Dates ****

Submission of Grand Challenge Proposals: 24 January, 2021
Notification of Acceptance: 14 February, 2021
Web Site and Call for Participation Ready: 1 March, 2021
Submission of Grand Challenge Solution Papers: 11 July, 2021


*** Contact ***

For questions regarding the Grand Challenges, please email the MGC Chairs:

Xirong Li (xirong@ruc.edu.cn), Renmin University of China, China
Lixin Duan (lxduan@uestc.edu.cn), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China
Lu Fang (fanglu@tsinghua.edu.cn), Tsinghua University, China
David Brady (djbrady@email.arizona.edu), University of Arizona, USA

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Dans le cadre du projet européen ELE (European Language Equality), qui vise à créer une
feuille de route pour atteindre une égalité linguistique numérique totale en Europe d'ici
2030,  une enquête détaillée concernant le support technologique pour plus de 70 langues
européennes est en cours de réalisation.

Notre contribution porte spécifiquement sur la langue française, et les autres langues
d'Europe, officielles ou non, seront traitées par d'autres groupes, avec un recensement
distinct des ressources.

Si vous fournissez des outils, services ou collections de données linguistiques liés à la
langue française, nous vous serions donc extrêmement reconnaissants de consacrer quelques
minutes à nous aider à identifier un maximum de ressources linguistiques pour le
français. Notez qu'un certain nombre d'enquêtes similaires sont actuellement en cours
pour les autres langues européennes.

Pour ce faire, le plus simple sera de nous signaler par retour de courrier les ressources
produites dans vos équipes que vous souhaitez voir figurer dans cet inventaire, en nous
fournissant par exemple un lien vers une page Web documentant la ou les ressources. Merci
de prendre soin de vérifier au préalable que la ressource n'est pas déjà connue
(https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French).

Nous sommes intéressés par toutes les ressources et technologies linguistiques qui
existent actuellement et sont opérationnelles, quelle que soit la politique d'accès,
telles que:
- les corpus : collections de segments de texte ou de documents bruts ou annotés,
monolingues ou bi-/multilingues, mono- ou multimodaux, transcriptions audio, scripts,
enregistrements audio et vidéo, etc. ainsi que les corpus d'apprenants et les corpus de
langue des signes.
- des descriptions linguistiques, comprenant des modèles de langage et des grammaires
computationnelles
- ressources lexicales/conceptuelles, comprenant des lexiques informatiques, des bases de
données terminologiques, des répertoires, des ontologies, des listes de termes, des
thésaurus, etc.
- des outils et services : services offerts via le web, d'autres réseaux ou fonctionnant
dans le cloud, mais aussi outils téléchargeables, code source, etc. Il s'agit notamment
d'outils de base pour le français (analyseurs morphologiques, tagueurs POS, lemmatiseurs,
analyseurs syntaxiques, etc.), d'outils d'aide à la rédaction (par exemple, correcteurs
d'orthographe, de grammaire et de style), d'outils/services pour la
recherche/extraction/fouille d'informations, l'analyse de texte et de parole, la
traduction automatique, la compréhension et la génération de langue naturelle, les
technologies vocales, les systèmes conversationnels, etc.

Notez que dans le cadre de cette collecte, un certain nombre de ressources répertoriées
dans des catalogues publiquement accessibles ont déja été répertoriées et peuvent être
retrouvées dans le catalogue ELG:
https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French

*Il n'est donc pas nécessaire de les documenter à nouveau.*

Vous trouverez de plus amples informations sur le projet à l'adresse suivante :
https://european-language-equality.eu/.

Si vous avez des questions concernant cette enquête, merci de nous contacter directement.

Merci beaucoup

Gilles Adda, Ioana Vasilescu et François Yvon
LISN, CNRS

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-------
 The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021 enhanced at NeurIPS 2021'
-------
 

 Dear colleagues,
 
We are pleased to officially announce the second round of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, on spoken language modelling, which will take the form of a competition at NeurIPS. While the benchmark remains the same, this enhanced edition of the challenge introduces some twists, including a new, optional, TRACK 2 on visually grounded spoken language modelling.
 
We invite:
 
- New approaches to spoken language models, particularly, but not limited to, larger ('higher-budget') language models
- Systems exploring the utility of weak supervision with images or videos (Track 2)
- Further, substantive development of existing systems doing spoken language modelling, including major modifications to or improvements upon systems submitted in the first, Interspeech round of the challenge
 
For more detailed information, please see the ZeroSpeech 2021 website:
 
https://zerospeech.com/2021/
 
We are also in the planning stages of a NeurIPS workshop on the general theme of unsupervised and semi-supervised speech, which will be an excellent venue to submit detailed reports on your systems. While the workshop submission deadline has yet to be announced, we expect that it will be in mid-October.
 
For groups wishing a little extra time to improve their systems after the workshop deadline, the *final* competition submission deadline to be considered for inclusion in the presentation of the results at NeurIPS has been set for November 19th.
 
Please get in touch with us if you have questions or comments about this continuation of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, and we look forward to seeing the results!
 
Best,
The Zero Resource Speech Challenge Organizers
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Call for participation for the 'European Performing Science Night', a project for the European Research Night

Led by the Fundació Èpica-La Fura dels Baus and with the participation of the LPL (AMU-CNRS-ILCB) and four other partners, a research team will organize several events during the prestigious European Research Night on 24 September 2021, in Badalone (Catalonia). The project - co-financed under the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie actions - aims to bring scientists closer to the general public through an innovative language based on the performing arts and new language tools for researchers.

Call for participation open from June 7 to July 15: Open Call September ? EPSN (epicalab.com)

Contact at the LPL: Clément François clement.francois@univ-amu.fr

European Performing Science Night project website: EPSN ? European Performing Science Night (epicalab.com)

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