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ISCApad #304 |
| Tuesday, October 10, 2023 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, ISCA president
Dear ISCA members,
Interspeech 2024 It is with a sad heart that I am writing this message. Interspeech 2024, which is scheduled to take place in Jerusalem, is impacted by the tragic events that are currently happening in that part of the world. We are thinking about all the people in the region and elsewhere who are impacted by these events, and we wish them all strength. I hope we can stand together and support those in need with compassion. For now, the most important thing is that everyone who is impacted by the current events focuses on their family and their lives, including the Interspeech 2024 organisers and their families.
ISCA’s role is to bring together researchers from speech science and technology, and therefore we will work to ensure that Interspeech 2024 will take place. We are in close contact with the Interspeech 2024 organisers, and together we are monitoring the situation. Over the next few weeks all possibilities of the form and location of Interspeech 2024 will be explored. The most important point is the safety of the Interspeech 2024 participants. We will keep you informed about Interspeech 2024 through the ISCAPad and our social media channels. In the meantime, you can expect the calls for papers, special sessions, and workshops for Interspeech 2024 to come in the next few weeks, with similar deadlines as Interspeech 2023.
ISCA activities in 2024 I am delighted to announce that the ISCA Speech Prosody conference will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands from 02-05 July, 2024. The conference aims to showcase all facets of prosodic variation and their role in the production, comprehension, and acquisition of speech in order to obtain a better understanding of the structure and function of prosody. More information can be found at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/sp2024. Important dates: Abstract submission: opens on 20 November 2023. Full paper submission: deadline is on 7 January 2024.
Call for Interspeech 2027 bids We also need to think about the future. In order to prepare for this future I encourage the community to propose bids for Interspeech 2027. Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur on the same continent in two consecutive years. After this year’s Interspeech conference in Dublin, the conferences in 2025 and 2026 will be held in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Sydney (Australia), respectively. In order to prepare the bid, please contact the ISCA conference coordinators at conferences@isca-speech.org well in advance of the deadline in order to prepare a high-quality bid. Information about the bid and the guidelines can be found at https://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/conferences/guidelines. Note that the deadline for the bid submission is December 1, 2023.
Award nomination season is coming up The deadlines for the nominations for ISCA Fellow and the ISCA Scientific Medal will be in early 2024. I would therefore like to invite you to think about who of your esteemed colleagues you want to (be) nominate(d) for ISCA Fellow or the ISCA Scientific Medal. More information on the nomination procedure can be found at https://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors.
I hope to see many of our community in Leiden next year!
Odette Scharenborg ISCA President
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| 2-2 | 2023 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.
Phil Green (ISCA Fellows Board Member) Sebastian Möller (ISCA President)
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| 2-3 | 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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| 2-4 | 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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| 2-5 | 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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| 2-6 | 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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| 2-7 | 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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| 2-8 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-9 | 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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| 2-10 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:
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| 2-11 | ISCA 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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| 2-12 | Bids for Interspeech 2027 Bids for Interspeech 2027
ISCA now invites bids for hosting Interspeech 2027. Interspeech conferences include papers on all the scientific and technological aspects of Speech. More than 1,500 participants from all over the world attend the conference annually to present their work in oral and poster sessions. Several satellite workshops and a Scientific and Industrial Exhibition highly enrich the conference content.
Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur on the same continent in two consecutive years. After this year’s Interspeech conference in Dublin, the next conferences will be held in Jerusalem (Israel) in 2024, Rotterdam (The Netherlands) in 2025, and Sydney (Australia) in 2026.
In order to prepare the bid, please contact the ISCA conference coordinators at conferences@isca-speech.org well in advance of the deadline in order to prepare a high-quality bid. Each bid needs to include: - a detailed description of the bid - other material which might be necessary for evaluating the bid
Guidelines on how to prepare an Interspeech conference can be found here.
Deadline for bid submission: December 1, 2023
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