ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2022  »  ISCApad #286  »  ISCA News

ISCApad #286

Sunday, April 10, 2022 by Chris Wellekens

2 ISCA News
2-1Message from ISCA president Prof. Sebastian Möller

 


 

 

 

Dear friends of ISCA,

 

 

 

This month, I am happy to start with some positive news: We are proud to have six new ISCA Fellows, who will be honored for significant contributions to speech science and technology. You can find pictures and indications of their contributions below. They will receive the award during the opening ceremony of Interspeech 2022 in Incheon. Please join me in congratulating them already now!

 

 

 

The organizers of Interspeech 2022 had some busy times, and especially the Technical Program Committee will be even busier in the upcoming weeks, as this year Interspeech has attracted a record number of submissions. Reviewing all these submissions in a limited time frame, and ensuring the high review standard which you are used to at Interspeech conferences, will be a new challenge, and will only be possible with the support of many of you, serving as reviewers, Area Chairs, and TPC members.

 

 

 

As mentioned earlier, ISCA would like to support the administration of the Technical Program of Interspeech conferences by hiring a new conference coordinator. We are currently in the interview and selection process, and hope to be able to present a new face to you soon; this would only be the second “ISCA employee”, the first one being Emmanuelle Foxonet (Manu), the long-standing face of ISCA. All our work will also benefit from new electronic tools and at the same time these tools will give a facelift to ISCA appearance and communication and, importantly, they will help all ISCA members to make best use of their precious time. Updates to come in one of the next ISCApads.

 

 

 

Have a good read of the present ISCApad, prepared – as always in a nice and timely manner – by Chris Wellekens.

 

 

 

Sebastian Möller

 

ISCA President

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top

2-22022 ISCA FELLOWS Announced

 

 

Over the past few months, ISCA has been seeking nominations and endorsements for this year’s ISCA Fellowship awards. The ISCA Fellows Selection Committee maintains a rigorous process of evaluating all nominations (more details are found on the ISCA webpage at: https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/fellows). After extensive evaluations and reviews, the following six distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA Fellow for 2022. Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join me in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communication and technology! All will be recognized at INTERSPEECH 2022 in Incheon, Korea, this fall.

 

  • Prof. David HOUSE (Sweden) For outstanding multidisciplinary work at the crossroads of speech science and technology.”

 

  • Prof. Hideki KAWAHARA (Japan) For contributions to speech signal processing and speech science by introducing flexible speech analysis, modification and synthesis systems.”  

 

  • Prof. Hema MURTHY (India) “For contributions to signal processing for speech technology applications and for leadership in speech processing for Indian languages.”                         

 

 

  • Dr. Tara SAINATH (USA) “For contributions to deep learning for automatic speech recognition.”

 

  • Prof. Alex WAIBEL (USAFor pioneering contributions in multilingual and multimodal spoken language processing and translation.


 
  • Dr. Heiga ZEN (Japan) “For pioneering contributions to model-based speech synthesis.”

 

As always, we welcome feedback and input from the ISCA community – if you have suggestions for our society or want to be involved, please let us know!

 

Phil Green (ISCA Fellows Board Member)

Sebastian Möller (ISCA President)

 

 

Top

2-3ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL)



ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL)

Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer:

Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)

Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

 

SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH.

The 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) will be held as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022, Marseille (FR), 24-25 June 2022.

The SIGUL venue will provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers, and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • general research on under-resourced languages.

  • transfer-learning techniques for under-resourced languages (zero-shot, few-shot training);

  • unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to build applications for under-resourced languages;

  • use of multilingual pre-trained language models to under-resourced languages;

  • speech technologies for under-resourced languages.

We also invite position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues.

Important Dates:

  • Paper submission deadline: 11 April 2022

  • Notification of acceptance: 3 May 2022

  • Camera-ready paper: 23 May 2022

  • Workshop date: 24-25 June 2022

 

More details can be found on the workshop web page: https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/

 

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero

Top

2-4ISCA Language SIGS

ISCA supports speech communication research activities in various languages. The individual languages have equal interest, but they may involve have different technical or scientific problems. For example, some languages are tonal, while others are not; Some languages have only one writing system, while others have several. In the ISCA community, we have 6 language Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for Chinese, French, Italian, Iberian, Indian, and Russian. Each SIG is organised by researchers who speak the language of interest as L1 and others who have a technical or scientific interest in the language. Each SIG sponsors domestic and international research activities, and representative members of the SIGs attend a Lang SIG meeting every year during the INTERSPEECH conference. In this meeting, recent activities of each SIG are reported, and new ideas are exchanged. We also review what ISCA can do for the SIGs and what the SIGs can do for ISCA. Each SIG has its own web page, and you can visit the pages here.
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/sigs

Do you want to start a new language SIG? If so, please visit the page above and check what you have to prepare for your SIG. Although it is not yet announced, we’re going to launch a new language SIG in the near future, perhaps for your native language. If so, please support it!.

Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU

The University of Tokyo

Japan



Top

2-5ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG) 'Spoken Language Translation'

 

ISCA SIG “Spoken Language Translation”

Aims. The SIG SLT covers all aspects of spoken language translation simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas SIG SLT will (a) provide members of ISCA with a special interest in spoken language translation and its related areas with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in spoken language translation; (b) organize challenges and evaluation campaigns; (c) sponsor and organize the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), meetings, satellites, and tutorial workshops in spoken language translation, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and (d) make available open-source code and data resources, best practices and tools, and evaluation metrics relevant to spoken language translation.

 

Motivation. Recent interest in speech translation and simultaneous translation by machine has been growing explosively, due to continued performance advances and a growing international need for simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas. The under-covered elements in the current research are, for instance, incremental simultaneous speech-to-speech translation, paralinguistic translation, speaking style translation across languages. The proposed SIG will be organized by the members who are interested in spoken language translation/interpretation from various related areas such as ASR, TTS, and MT.

SIG SLT emerged from over two decades of organizing the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) and its predecessor C-Star, scaling operations in response to significant growth in the field. The organizers of IWSLT and partners believe it is now time to join with ISCA by creating an ISCA SIG. IWSLT has a 15-year track record of profitability; it runs the premier benchmarking campaign on spoken language translation annually accompanied by an international scientific conference to present and discuss results.

 

  1. Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan (website)

  2. Secretary: Marco Turchi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento, Italy (website)

Top

2-6ISCA hires a Conference coordinator

The International Speech Communication (ISCA) [www.isca-speech.org)

seeks application for a :

 

Conference Coordinator (f/m/d)

 

For a limited-term contract with 18h/week, with the perspective of extension towards an unlimited-term contract.

 

The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a scientific non-profit organization according to the French law 1901. The purpose of the association is to promote, in an international world-wide context, activities and exchanges in all fields related to speech communication science and technology. The association is aimed at all persons and institutions interested in fundamental research and technological development that aims at describing, explaining and reproducing the various aspects of human communication by speech, e.g. phonetics, linguistics, computer speech recognition and synthesis, speech compression, speaker recognition, aids to medical diagnosis of voice pathologies.

 

One of the core activities of ISCA is to ensure the continuous organization of its flagship conference, Interspeech. The conference is organized each year in a different country by a different team; it typically attracts 1500 or more participants from all over the world. The role of this newly-created position of conference coordinator is to ensure a smooth organization of the conference over the years, according to well-established standards, and taking into account the aims ISCA has with the conference.

 

The role requires – amongst others – to take over the lead for the following activities:

  • Support in the organization and set-up of the Technical Program
  • Operation and maintenance of the central electronic review system
  • Maintenance of the reviewer database
  • Support in the organization of the Technical Program Committee meeting
  • Maintenance of paper templates and author/presenter instructions
  • Support for the production of proceedings
  • Communication with the organizing team and possible Professional Conference Organizers about all matters of the conference organization, such as planning of calls, committees, meeting space, technical equipment and tools, session planning, event planning, etc.
  • Communication with the ISCA board about all matters of the conference
  • Communication with the ISCA Administrative Manager about membership matters, meetings, etc.
  • Outbound communication via web, social media, etc.

 

Required competences:

 

We are looking for a self-motivated person who is enthusiastic about the organization of international scientific events, and has excellent organizational and communication skills (mostly in English). The person does not need to have a scientific background in speech communication and technology, but should be able to understand the scientific background, as well as the aims ISCA has with the organization of Interspeech conferences. A proven expertise in the organization of large-scale events is a must, and of scientific events is a plus.

 

The job can be carried out remotely from any location. A flexible allocation of time over the year is required, depending on the status of preparations (the conference is typically organized in September, and there is an expected increase in activity from March to September). The willingness to physically attend preparatory meetings and the conference is required.

 

Deadline : 15 March 2022.

 

 

 

Top

2-7ISCA needs your help!

ISCA needs your help!

 

For the smooth running of our organization and our flagship conference Interspeech, we’ve been relying on lots of different electronic tools. Unfortunately, many of these tools are outdated and/or did not scale up with the growth of our community. Moreover, our website and communication channels get do with a make-over.

 

In order to improve the services for the benefit of the entire community, we are looking for volunteers who would like to help with the task of planning a new IT infrastructure for ISCA. This infrastructure might include the review system, the reviewer database, membership administration, web site, communication tools, as well as other administrative IT infrastructures still to be defined. Requirements should be collected from members of the ISCA board, past and present Interspeech organisers, and our community, and they should be mapped to the possibilities ISCA has, considering also personal issues such as frequently-changing board members, absence of continuous IT support, etc.

 

Would you like to help in the planning of the new IT infrastructure? Please send an email to president@isca-speech.org indicating why you are interested, and a little bit of your personal background relevant to this activity.

 

 

Thanks!

Odette & Sebastian

Top

2-8ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA.

ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) is pleased to invite postdoc & early career researchers to participate in the 1st Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering @ Interspeech 2021 (online this year).

 

The Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering aims to provide an opportunity for postdoc & early career researchers to meet and communicate at INTERSPEECH. In the framework of ISCA-PECRAC, we would like:

  • to establish link and collaboration between postdocs in different institutions and early career researchers from all over the world,

  • to keep postdoc & early career researchers posted with current postdoc & tenure-track job offers,

  • to provide mentoring,

  • to give feedback to their major issues (in research),

  • to create an environment where postdoc & early career researchers can socialize with their peers.

 

1st Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering @ Interspeech 2021

Time : August 30 at 18:00 - Brno time (preliminary slot)

Location : Online

Program :

  • Introduction talk for for ISCA-PECRAC (15 mins)

  • Keynote / invited speaker (30 mins)

  • Q & A (30mins)

  • Recruitment and discussion

 

Contacts:

Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr)

Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)

Top

2-9ISCA social networks

We encourage all members tokeep contact with ISCA via our social nets. Also you will bde kept informed about all events on our website. 

This is particularly important in this time where due to the coronavirus, many modifications may be brought to the conference.

 

ISCA Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/iscaspeech/

ISCA Twitter : https://twitter.com/ISCAFOX

ISCA SAC Student Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/98794207409/

 website : www.isca-speech.org

Top

2-10Women in Speech Research


 ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
communication as an exciting and diverse field of research and discovery. Moreover, ISCA
is committed to gender equality.

We are therefore delighted to announce that the database with names, affiliations,
positions, and research topics of women in speech science and speech technology,
originally started by Maxine Eskenazi, is now a wonderful, searchable website, created by
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson.

The website can be found at http://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/diversity?id=264

The website can be used for, amongst others:
- Workshop and conference organisers to search for keynote and invited speakers,
panelists, and co-organisers
- Nominations for distinguished lecturers
- Norminations for awards, medals, fellowships, and prizes
- Prospective new faculty by faculty search committees

If you identify yourself as female and want to be added to this list, please follow the
instructions on the WomenNspeech website.

We hope this website will be useful to many!

Julia Hirschberg
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Odette Scharenborg

Top

2-11Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees

Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees

ISCA is committed to providing a pleasant conference experience
without harassment and discrimination for anyone, regardless of
gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability and physical
appearance.  We do not tolerate any verbal or non-verbal expressions
of harassment or discrimination.  Please note that it matters if a
person feels harassed or discriminated regardless of the original
intent of the expressions. In particular, sexual language and imagery
are not appropriate in any conference venue.  Conference participants
who engage in inappropriate behavior may be expelled from the
conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference
organizer. These persons may be included in a watchlist for future
ISCA-sponsored events.

If you are troubled by the behavior of another attendee at the
conference, or notice someone is in trouble, please speak immediately
to a member of conference staff or send a message to <ethics@isca-speech.org>.

Your concern will be heard in confidence and taken seriously to solve
the problem.

* Short version: (to be posted in a limited space)

ISCA is committed to a pleasant conference experience without
harassment and discrimination. Our code-of-conduct can be found at:
    http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/about-isca?id=278

Top

2-12Code-of-Ethics for Authors (updated)

Code of Ethics for Authors

ISCA is committed to publishing high-quality journals and conference
proceedings.  To this end, all authors are requested to ensure they
adhere to ethical standards. Authors should meet the following
standards:

(1) The work does not include fabrication, falsification, or any kind
of data breach.  Authors should retain their code and maintain a log
of the data that produced the results in their paper.  Authors are
also encouraged to make their code and dataset freely available.

(2) The work does not include plagiarism or significant
self-plagiarism.  The work must be original, and any paper which
significantly overlaps with previous work is not allowed.  Proper
reference to previous work is also required.  Verbatim copying of work
that has been distributed but not refereed, such as technical reports
and arXiv articles, is permitted only if the authors are the
same.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors) may use
tools to detect (self-)plagiarism and reject papers without review.
The work may not be submitted to any other conference, workshop or
journal during the review process.

(3) The work does not use figures, photographs, or any other kind of
content whose copyright is not owned by or granted to the authors,
except for proper quotations allowed by the copyright law.  ISCA (and
conference organizers or journal editors) may request authors to
provide evidence of permission to use the content for their work.

(4) The work does not include inappropriate content in terms of human
rights.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors) may
request authors to provide evidence of approval from the host Ethics
Committee (Institutional Review Board or equivalent) that the work
meets their Institution's ethical requirements, and/or explicit
consent from the human subjects involved in the work.

(5) All (co-)authors must be responsible and accountable for the work,
and consent to its submission.

Ethical Standard checking is not limited to these 5 points.

If any concerns relating to this code are raised or reported, ISCA
(and conference organizers or journal editors) will convene their
Ethics Committee to investigate the matter and decide on appropriate
action, which may include rejection/removal of the paper (and other
papers in the same conference/workshop by the same authors) and
suspension of future submissions by the authors.

ISCA also enforces the No-show policy for conference papers.  Any
paper accepted into the technical program but not presented on-site
may be withdrawn from the official proceedings.  Please refer to
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/conferences point 2) and 8).






 

Top

2-13Reminder ISCA International virtual seminars

REMINDER: ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS

Now's the time of year to start organising your seminar programme for the coming academic year.

Don't forget that ISCA has recruited 17 leading researchers in Speech Communication prepared to give seminars on line.

For instance, Gustav Henter of KTH Stockholm comments:

As the person responsible for seminars at the Division of Speech, Music and Hearing (TMH) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden, I would like to thank you for the excellent initiative to set up ISCA international virtual seminars during the pandemic. Thus far our division has made use of this scheme on three occasions:  The idea to invite distinguished speakers virtually has been widely appreciated by the department. It is likely that we may schedule further virtual seminar from your pool for our autumn semester seminars as well.

For details, follow the entry Online Seminars in the left menu on the ISCA home page, https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb

 

 

-- 
************************
Professor Phil Green
SpandH
Computer Science
University of Sheffield
************************
Top

2-14Publications and Videos of Speech Prosody 2020

The papers are already publicly available, at https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/SpeechProsody_2020/ .  To also see the videos, you can register for the conference, for only 4000 Yen, at https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sp2020_registration/vp/ .

I encourage you to contact the authors with questions, or just to let them know that you liked their work.  Since we won't be meeting physically this year, let's make the extra effort to stay connected as a community.

Many thanks to Professor Minematsu and the Organizing Committee for putting together an excellent set of papers and talks, in a time of adversity.

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair

Top

2-15Call for reviewers Interspeech 2022

Nominations to be a reviewer for Interspeech 2022 are now open.  If you would like to review for Interspeech, or if you have a colleague or former student who would be qualified, please nominate yourself, your colleague, or your former student at https://isca-speech.org/iscareviewers/reviewer.php.  

 

Interspeech reviewers must have a Ph.D. in an area of research related to speech science and/or speech technology.  Nominations must include a link to an online CV; nominations will be reviewed by the ISCA Technical Committee.
 
Thank you for your support.


ISCA Board and INTERSPEECH 2022 Organizing Committee

 

Top

2-16Videos at Interspeech 2021

The video recordings of Interspeech 2021 were processed and are currently being uploaded online. You can find all the videos at
https://www.superlectures.com/interspeech2021/  categorized into sections, full text search, abstracts and links to the ISCA Archive. All the videos are also being uploaded on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2-z0HD4WpSbJONj73BgfwQ It will take some time so be patient please.

Regarding the video publication, we got 608 accepted agreements and 43 refused of over 1033 papers published in total at INTERSPEECH 2021. Only videos for which the authors agreed on publication are published. If you have any concern or you want to remove your video from Superlectures and Youtube platforms, please contact us on video@interspeech2021.org email.

There are over 138 hours of videos in 112 categories. The main portion of the videos are oral talks (222) and the 3-minute papers introductory videos.

Igor Szoke
BUT Speech@FIT
and
Superlectures.com


Top



 Organisation  Events   Membership   Help 
 > Board  > Interspeech  > Join - renew  > Sitemap
 > Legal documents  > Workshops  > Membership directory  > Contact
 > Logos      > FAQ
       > Privacy policy

© Copyright 2024 - ISCA International Speech Communication Association - All right reserved.

Powered by ISCA