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Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2023  »  ISCApad #300  »  ISCA News

ISCApad #300

Saturday, June 10, 2023 by Chris Wellekens

2 ISCA News
2-1Message of Professor Sebastian Möller, ISCA president

 

  

Dear friends of ISCA,

 

this president’s message reaches you from Israel, where we are currently checking the conference site for Interspeech 2024 in Jerusalem. In fact, Emmanuelle Foxonet, Jean-Francois Bonastre and myself had a visit of the conference center and discussed with the organizers, in order to ensure that your conference experience in 2024 will be as perfect as you expect it – perhaps with a slightly more oriental flavor.

 

 

 

More urgently, Interspeech 2023 in Dublin is approaching at a fast pace. The TPC did a tremendous job in deciding upon a near-record number of submissions at its TPC meeting on May 10-11, thanks to the excellent preparation and technical innovations introduced by the TPC Chairs Simon King, Kate Knill and Petra Wagner – some of them will have a longer-lasting impact on ISCA’s processes. Thanks a lot to the Dublin team led by Naomi Harte for hosting us in this beautiful city – most of you will hopefully experience soon!

 

On the association side, ISCA members elected new board members for the period starting at this Interspeech. As you will read further down in this ISCApad, three new board members were elected, and three others (former president John Hansen, current secretary Torbjørn Svendsen and myself) will leave the board after having served for two periods. You will be able to meet old and new board members at Interspeech 2023, especially at the General Assembly on August 26. Besides that, we are still working on new software tools; these include, amongst others, a new membership management system and a new website. Although we expect the new system to be only up and running after Interspeech, we hope to overcome several of the technical problems we have experienced recently.

 

I wish you a good read of the ISCApad, as always nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens.

 

Sebastian Möller

ISCA president

 

 

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2-22023 ISCA FELLOWS

2023 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:

 

Is it is common practice since several years, the ISCA Fellows Selection Committee has worked over the last months to seek out nominations and endorsements for this year’s ISCA Fellows selection. The ISCA Fellows Selection Committee maintains a rigorous process of collecting and 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 eight distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA Fellow for 2023.  Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join us in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communication and technology!  All will be recognized at INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin, Ireland, in August.

 

 

  • Prof. Gerard Bailly (GIPSA-Lab, CNRS & Grenoble Alps Univ., France) For contributions to multimodal speech generation and bridging the gaps between speech research and social robotics

 

  • Prof. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (University of Illinois, USA) For contributions to knowledge-constrained signal generation”  

 

  • Prof. Kate Knill (University of Cambridge, UK) “For technical contributions in multi-language/accent, low-resource speech processing and long-standing service to the speech community                         

 

 

  • Prof. Hanseok Ko (Korea University, Korea) For sustained innovation in Korean and English spoken language technologies

 

  • Prof. Kikuo Maekawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan) For contributions to the development of language resources for the study of Japanese as a spoken language

 

  • Prof. Elmar Nöth (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) For innovative and extensive contributions to the analysis of pathological speech signals

 

  • Prof. Alexandros Potamianos (Amazon Alexa and University of Southern California, USA) For contributions to human-centered speech and multimodal signal analysis and conversational technologies

 

  • Prof. Shinji Watenabe (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) For wide ranging, fundamental contributions to research and leadership in speech recognition technologies

 

 

 

Phil Green (ISCA Fellows Board Member)

Sebastian Möller (ISCA President)

 

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2-3Call for ISCA conferences Reviewers
Dear speech researcher,

In preparation for INTERSPEECH 2023, we are currently searching for reviewers to evaluate submitted manuscripts. The reviewing period will be between 8th March and 19th April 2023.

If you are not already a reviewer for ISCA conferences, we encourage you to sign up at https://isca-speech.org/iscareviewers/reviewer.php, using the same email address as your CMT account. If you do not have a CMT account, you will need to create one, as reviewing will take place fully within CMT (https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/). To be eligible as a reviewer for ISCA you should have previously published at INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, ICPhS or related conferences and satisfy two or more of the following conditions:
- Hold a Ph.D.
- Published at least one journal article as first author in a speech-related journal (e.g., IEEE/ACM T-ASLP; Speech Communication; Computer, Speech & Language; JASA; Phonetica; - Journal of Phonetics; or other comparable journals)
- Published at least 3 INTERSPEECH/ICASSP/ASRU/SLT or major NLP conference (ACL/EMNLP/NAACL) papers as first author
- Received at least 100 citations on first authored papers
- Have an h-index of at least 7 and i10-index of at least 10
- Be recommended by an ISCA Fellow, ACL Fellow, IEEE Fellow, IEEE Senior Member, or current/past INTERSPEECH Area Chair

To help conference organisers match the papers allocated to you, please also register with the Toronto Paper Matching System at http://torontopapermatching.org using the same email address as CMT. This should result in you being assigned papers that better match your interests and expertise.

Kind regards,

Simon, Kate, Petra

--
Simon King, Kate Knill, Petra Wagner
Technical Programme Committee chairs
INTERSPEECH 2023
Dublin, Ireland - 20-24th August 2023
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2-4ELRA/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

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2-5ISCA 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



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2-6ISCA 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)

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2-7ISCA-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:

  • 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.

 

 

Contacts:

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

Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)

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2-8ISCA 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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2-9Women 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

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2-10Prosody 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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2-11ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024

We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:

Dr. Visar Berisha, School of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, USA

Congratulations.

Nobuaki Minematsu @ The University of Tokyo

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2-12ISCA Board Election 2023-2027 (Results)

ISCA Board Election 2023-2027

 

The ISCA Board Election has completed and the following have been elected to the ISCA Board for 2023-2027 (in alphabetical order):

 

Beena Ahmed,  Australia

Tom Bäckström, Finland

Esther Klabbers, USA 

Nobuaki Minematsu, Japan 

Jianhua Tao, China 

Meg Zellers, Germany 

 

Thanks to all the candidates for standing and the 544 members who voted. The new Board will take over after this year's General Assembly which will be held during INTERSPEECH 2023.

 

Torbjørn Svendsen

ISCA Secretary on behalf of the ISCA Board

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