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ISCApad #314 |
| Friday, August 09, 2024 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, President of ISCA
Dear ISCA members,
Speech Prosody Early in July the Speech Prosody conference took place in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was a great success and I want to thank the organisers for organising this event!
General Assembly at Interspeech Interspeech 2024 is almost here! On Sunday September 1, Interspeech 2024 will start in Kos, followed by 4 days of the most up to date speech communication science and technology and plenty of time to network and socialise. I hope to see many of you there!
Our research field has grown tremendously as shown by the ever increasing number of paper submissions to Interspeech. Similarly, our association ISCA has seen a large growth in membership over recent years. For the past 3 years, ISCA has been working hard to professionalise its organisation, update our website and databases and so on. More recently we have started working on improving our internal processes and our external communication. More changes are on their way, including a competition! Do you want to learn more? Read on!
ISCA is an association for everyone. So, we also want to hear FROM YOU what you would like to see happen, improve, or change to make ISCA even better.
Therefore I would like to invite you all to the General Assembly: Monday September 2 Interspeech conference center Hall: Panacea Amphitheater Time: 17.30-19.00
The general assembly will take place after the final technical session and right before the welcome reception at the same location.
Hope to see you all there and I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas!
See you in Kos, Greece
Odette Scharenborg ISCA President
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| 2-2 | 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. Annual Meetings of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) were held successively: SIGUL2022 in Marseille (FR) on 24-25 June 2022 as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022, SIGUL 2023 in with ISCA as INTERSPEECH satellite workshop (https://sigul-2023.ilc.cnr.it/), SIGUL 2024 with ELRA as LREC-COLING workshop (https://sigul-2024.ilc.cnr.it/). The SIGUL venue 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:
Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
SIGUL Board Sakriani Sakti Claudia Soria Maite Melero
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| 2-3 | 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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| 2-4 | 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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| 2-5 | 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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| 2-6 | 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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| 2-7 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-8 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:
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| 2-9 | Nominations for the next SProSIG officers Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,
The constitution of the Speech Prosody SIG calls for election of officers once every two years. Accordingly, acting on behalf of the Permanent Advisory Council (PAC) of SProSIG, I welcome nominations for officers for the 2024 - 2026 term. The PAC has approved the following schedule and procedure:
June 6 - July 26: Nominations for SProSIG officers may be sent to me, Past President of SProSIG, at hirose@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp (also cc to hirokeikichi@yahoo.co.jp to prevent mail delivering errors). Please use the nomination form at http://sprosig.org/assets/nomination-form.doc . Nominations must be submitted by a SProSIG member (self-nominations are accepted), and must include a 50-200 words statement of qualifications and vision. The person being nominated must be a SProSIG member, and must agree to hold the position if elected.
July 26 – July 30: The current officers were first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020 and 2022. They are eligible to be re-elected, and since they have all expressed the willingness to serve another term, if there are no other nominations, the Permanent Advisory Committee will approve the current officers to serve a fourth term. The current officers are Plinio Barbosa, Aoju Chen, Hongwei Ding, Martine Grice, and Nigel Ward (Chair). Otherwise,
July 30- August 20. The Permanent Advisory Committee will post the candidates' statements at sprosig.org and an election will be held. The new officers will then be announced, and decide among themselves their roles.
August 27. The role of the new officers will be decided after election.
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I have received the following 7 nominations. Nigel Ward Plinio Barbosa Martine Grice Aoju Chen Xiaoming Jiang Jürgen Trouvain Katalin Mády
Voting requests will follow after we set up the voting page.
If I miss anyone else, let me know.
Sincerely, Keikichi Hirose Past President of SProSIG
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| 2-10 | SProSIG News Dear SProSIG Members,
I’m pleased to share two conference announcements: - Tone and Intonation 2025 - Prosody of Uralic Languages 2025
Details follow.
Prosody of Uralic languages
Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso
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| 2-11 | [Speech Prosody SIG] asking the SprSIG community to support free and fair open access
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