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ISCApad #294 |
| Saturday, December 10, 2022 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message from ISCA president Prof. Sebastian Möller Dear friends of ISCA,
This time around the turn of the year is usually a busy period where many of us are dealing with housekeeping activities. This is similar for ISCA: We recently had a workshop for the installation of a new association management software, which will hopefully provide new and long-wished services for all of our community. Along the same lines, we are targeting for INTERSPEECH a new conference management system which requires us to update our reviewer database. In the future, we hope that this system will be able to assign more accurately submitted papers to reviewers with the support of algorithms learning from prior publications of the reviewers, and to better support session building and program set-up.
A number of INTERSPEECH 2022 participants pointed out their dissatisfaction concerning the overemphasis of (special) sessions focussing on end-to-end deep-learning approaches. Whereas the impact and importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) in our field is acknowledged, it is felt that a too much focus on such approaches would impede new and fresh ideas. It was advocated that there should be more sessions in which the scientific question comes first. In fact, in some areas it was observed that reviewers propose to reject papers if they do not provide quantitative results which go beyond the current state-of-the-art. Whereas challenges have their merit in comparing different approaches to the same task, they seem to dominate the program at times. A stronger balance which emphasizes the importance of speech and language sciences would help balance future programs and will likely lead to greater leaps forward in speech technology and our understanding of the human speech production and perception systems.
The ISCA board takes these concerns serious, and we have started a discussion about the impact of ML-based challenges on our program. The opinions are widespread, ranging from a complete ban of such sessions from the main INTERSPEECH program (thereby encouraging the activities to be organized in terms of more focussed workshops, perhaps run as satellites to INTERSPEECH), through modifying the review process, criteria or paper templates, to collecting and distributing data for such challenges as part of our ISCA services, but outside the conference program. If you have pronounced opinions in this respect, the board would be happy to hear and consider them during the planning of future INTERSPEECH events.
I hope that you will have a good finish of the year 2022, and some quiet days of rest and recovery before starting into a healthy and successful year 2023. I wish you a good read of this informative ISCApad, as usual kindly compiled by Chris Wellekens.
Sebastian Möller ISCA President
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| 2-2 | ISCA Medals and Fellows Nominations 2023ISCA Medals and Fellows Nominations 2023Nominations are open for the following ISCA Awards: The ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement recognizes and honors an individual each year who has made extraordinary contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Any ISCA member can make a nomination. All nominations for ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement should be submitted to the ISCA Secretary at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 6 January 2023 using the nomination form. The ISCA Board will select the winner by 1 February and announce the winner in the March 2023 ISCApad. Unsuccessful candidates from previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy. The ISCA Service Medal recognizes an ISCA member who has provided extraordinary service to ISCA and/or the Speech Communication community. Any ISCA Board or Advisory Council member can make a nomination. All nominations for an ISCA Service Medal should be submitted to the ISCA Secretary at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 6 January 20223 using the nomination form. Unsuccessful candidates from previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy. The ISCA Fellows Program recognises and honours outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the science and technology of speech communication. To qualify for this distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field. Nominations may be made by any ISCA member except for those on the Felows Selection Committee.. Fellows may be recognised by their outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. The supporting case for the candidate's nomination should include up to 3 major contributions which have had impact on the speech community and/or society in general. A nomination should be supported by 3 references from senior scientists/technologists in the Speech Communication community, for instance ISCA Fellows and ISCA Board members. Current ISCA Board members are not eligible for nomination. Members of the Fellows Selection Committee may not nominate candidates or provide references. All nominations for ISCA Fellow should be sent to fellows_nomination AT isca-speech.org by 10 February 2023using the nomination form. Those who plan to nominate are strongly advised to send brief information on candidates (candidate's name and affiliation) to the above email address before January 10 with your name and contact email address.
Sebastian Möller
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| 2-3 | Professor Dr Hermann Künzel obituary
Prof. Dr. Hermann Jozef Künzel 10 April 1950 – 18 October 2022 Dear members of IAFPA, dear phoneticians, dear colleagues, It is with great sadness, that we have to inform you that Professor Hermann Künzel passed away last week on the 18th of October 2022. He was one of IAFPA`s founding members and the association‘s second President. Many of us in IAFPA remember him as a forensic colleague at the BKA, an academic colleague at the University, as a participant at IAFPA conferences, as a mentor, a lecturer or as a good friend. His enthusiasm for the field has inspired many of us. His time and energy contributed to forensic analysis seemed endless. Künzel`s many research projects played a key role in the improvement of analysis methods and a deeper understanding of the complexity of forensic investigations, and his work was essential in the development of the acoustic-phonetic method of forensic speaker recognition. His book called “Sprechererkennung”, published in 1987, offered the first detailed description of this method; it was used as a reference work in many developing forensic laboratories at the time and its content was studied and cited by academics and students worldwide. In 1977 he obtained his PhD from the University of Kiel. In May of 1980 Hermann Künzel became the very first linguist appointed by the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden. Under his guidance and over a period of 10 years the “Fachbereich Sprecher-Identifizierung; Tonband auswertung und linguistische Textanalyse” was established with several linguists and phoneticians carrying out between 200-350 cases per year. In addition, research projects were conducted in order to provide the theoretical background data necessary for the improvement of identification methods and for the interpretation of case findings. Few forensic laboratories at the time were able to conduct research; the international community profited greatly from the efforts of the Wiesbadener BKA scientists. Between 1994 and 1999 he was an Honorary Professor of Phonetics at University of Trier. Between 2000 and 2015 he was a professor and head of the Institute of Phonetics at the University of Marburg. Many forensic phoneticians who are currently working at the BKA or LKA, or who were employed there, were trained by him and developed their enthusiasm for forensic phonetics at that time. From 2000 onwards he was involved in the further development and testing of the BATVOX ID-system from the Agnitio Voice ID company and his work formed the basis for the integration of automatic speaker recognition into existing auditory-acoustic speaker identification methods. For many colleagues and students, Hermann Künzel was an inspirational pioneer, valuable advisor and mentor. In grateful remembrance, we take leave of our highly esteemed colleague and companion. Our deepest sympathy goes to his wife, Ute, and his family.
Gea de Jong-Lendle on behalf of the IAFPA
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| 2-4 | Call for DL nominations for 2023-2024 Call for DL nominations for 2023-2024
Please note that the nominator must ensure the candidate is willing to serve if elected. Also, nominations from previous years will be only considered if updated. Finally, self-nominations are permitted, but must include a letter of support from an ISCA Fellow or Board Member.
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| 2-5 | Obituary for Anne Cutler (1945-2022) Obituary for Anne Cutler (1945-2022)
In early June, Professor Anne Cutler suddenly passed away shortly after having fallen ill on a trip to the Netherlands. As many of you know, Anne Cutler was a highly valued member of ISCA, and received ISCA's highest honour, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 'for charting the variation of speech perception across languages, and for her leadership in the field of speech perception research', in 2014.
Since June, a number of written testimonials and events focused on Anne Cutler and the impact she had on our scientific community, but also on science in general. Some of the more prominent ones are:
I hope that these testimonials cover some of the multiple facets Anne has brought into our community; thanks to Isabel Trancoso, Cathy Best and many of our Australian colleagues for having shared them.
Sebastian Möller ISCA President
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| 2-6 | ELRA/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:
We also invite position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues. Important Dates:
More details can be found on the workshop web page: https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/
SIGUL Board Sakriani Sakti Claudia Soria Maite Melero
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| 2-7 | ISCA 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. Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU The University of Tokyo Japan
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| 2-8 | ISCA 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.
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| 2-9 | ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA. ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) 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:
Contacts: Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)
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| 2-10 | ISCA 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
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| 2-11 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-12 | SProSIG Officers Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,
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| 2-13 | Prosody slides and lecture videos @ ACL 2021 Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,
We are pleased to announce the open-source release of our tutorial on prosody, originally presented at ACL 2021. This includes about 400 powerpoint slides, with notes, downloadable from https://nigelward.com/prosody/ , and 29 video lectures based on this content, totaling about 4 hours, hosted at Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCFybA0SDVTjbQQRxJ1p2NnirCw_tk_z7 .
These we hope will be useful for - professors seeking slides to use for general-audiences talks - graduate students wanting to learn about aspects of prosody not taught at their institutions - engineers, clinicians and others seeking an overview of the field or some specific knowledge
Comments are welcome!
Gina-Anne Levow, Nigel G. Ward
Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/
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| 2-14 | Appel à candidatures Prix de thèse AFCP 2022 Appel à candidatures Prix de thèse AFCP 2022 Depuis 2004, l'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP) décerne un prix scientifique récompensant la grande qualité d'un travail de thèse francophone du domaine (ou anglophone issue d’un laboratoire francophone), afin de promouvoir les recherches en communication parlée, fondamentales ou appliquées, dans le domaine des technologies de la communication, des sciences humaines et de la vie. Ce prix permet de soutenir et diffuser les travaux de jeunes chercheurs du domaine. Le prix est décerné par un jury composé des chercheurs élus du conseil d'administration de l’AFCP. Il sera officiellement remis lors des prochaines Journées d’Etudes sur la Parole, en 2024. Le ou la lauréat(e) se verra remettre la somme de 500 euros et sera invité(e) à présenter ses travaux à la communauté de la communication parlée lors des prochaines JEP (inscription offerte à la conférence). Il/elle se verra également offrir l’opportunité de publier sa thèse sous la forme d’un livre dans la collection « Recherches en PArole » (éditions CIPA). CALENDRIER Date limite de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2023 Décision du jury AFCP : avril-mai 2023 Remise officielle du prix : JEP 2024 CONDITIONS DE CANDIDATURE À CET APPEL Peut candidater au présent appel : tout docteur dont la thèse, préparée dans un laboratoire francophone, et rédigée en français ou en anglais, a été soutenue entre le 1 er janvier et le 31 décembre 2022. Toute candidature est limitée à une seule édition du prix. Seuls les dossiers complets de candidature seront examinés.
CANDIDATURE Pour candidater, il suffit de : (1) Envoyer un e-mail déclarant votre intention de candidater, avec vos nom, prénom, titre de la thèse, directeur de thèse, et date de la soutenance à : camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. Vous recevrez un accusé de réception. (2) Déposer votre manuscrit de thèse en PDF sur le serveur du site web de l’AFCP : http://www.afcpparole.org/soumettre-une-these/ (3) Envoyer votre dossier complet via un courrier électronique à l’adresse camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. La pièce jointe sera constituée d’un fichier unique (nommé VOTRENOM.pdf), contenant dans l’ordre : (i) le résumé de la thèse (2 pages) ; (ii) la liste des publications ; (iii) les rapports des rapporteurs autorisant la soutenance et le rapport de soutenance de thèse ; (iv) une lettre de recommandation scannée du directeur de thèse ; (v) un CV (avec coordonnées complètes dont e-mail). ___________Date de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2023___________
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