INTERSPEECH 2025
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 17-22 August 2025
Chairs: Odette Scharenborg, Khiet Truong and Catha Oertel
26th INTERSPEECH event

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The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association is honoured to have been selected to host INTERSPEECH 2026. Our theme of Diversity & Equity ? Speaking Together strongly reflects Sydney and our broader region. Sydney is Oceania?s largest city and is also its most linguistically diverse: more than 300 different languages are spoken and 40% of Sydneysiders speak a language other than English at home. Consistent with the goals of ISCA ?to promote, in an international world-wide context, activities and exchanges in all fields related to speech communication science and technology?, INTERSPEECH Sydney will highlight the diversity of research in our field with a firm focus on equity and inclusivity. Recognizing the importance of multi-dimensional approaches to speech, INTERSPEECH 2026 will foster greater interdisciplinarity to better inform current and future work on speech science and technology. We look forward to welcoming all to Sydney!

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Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,

I'm pleased to announce that Speech Prosody 2026 will be in Philadelphia, organized by Jianjing Kuang and Mark Liberman.  (There were 80 votes for Shanghai, 128 for Philadelphia, and 15 had no preference.)

I’m also pleased to announce the resumption of our lecture series with a talk by Simon Roessig:

Syntagmatic prominence relations in prosodic focus marking

Lecturer: Simon Roessig (University of York, UK)

Host: Plinio A. Barbosa (Unicamp, Brazil)

Sept 24th at 1 pm (Brasilia time = UTC - 3)

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUE9pRbq9w0

Abstract: This talk is about the role of prenuclear prominences and their relation to nuclear accents in German and English. The production results (German) that I will present show that the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on whether it is focal or prefocal. The prenuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima, and longer durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on the following focus type: The prenuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains with an inverse relationship in the syntagmatic dimension. In addition, the study contributes further evidence that continuous phonetic detail is used to encode information structural categories. An important question that arises from the production data is whether this phonetic detail can be used by listeners in perception. I will present first results from a series of perception experiments (German and English) to investigate this question.

Plan: 1. I will begin by outlining what we know about focus prosody in the nuclear and prenuclear domains. 2. I will then present findings from a production study that examines the prosody of the prenuclear domain in different types of focus. 3. These results show that there are interesting strength relations between prenuclear and nuclear prosody in the encoding of focus types. 4. I will present preliminary findings from perception experiments investigating the question whether listeners use prenuclear prominence modulations in identifying focus types. 5. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the results and future directions.

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair

nigel@utep.edu    https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/  

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The ISCA Board has decided to award the organisation of Interspeech 2027 to Sao Paolo, Brazil. We are very excited to introduce researchers from all over the world to the South American continent for the first time.

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Dear member of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group.

We have received two excellent bids to host Speech Prosody 2026, from Shanghai and from Philadelphia.  Please review the bids at sprosig.org, and then vote your preference via the link below. If you have questions you can reach me at  nigelward@acm.org .

Nigel Ward, for the SProSIG Officers

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Now's the time of year that seminar programmes get fixed up.. please direct the attention of whoever organises your seminars to the ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS scheme (introduction below). There is now a good choice of speakers:  see

https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers/online-seminars

ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS

A seminar programme is an important part of the life of a research lab, especially for its research students, but it's difficult for scientists to travel to give talks at the moment. However,  presentations may be given on line and, paradoxically, it is thus possible for labs to engage international speakers who they wouldn't normally be able to afford.

ISCA has set up a pool of speakers prepared to give on-line talks. In this way we can enhance the experience of students working in our field, often in difficult conditions. To find details of the speakers,

• visit isca-speech.org
• Click Distinguished Lecturers in the left panel
• Online Seminars then appears beneath Distinguished Lecturers: click that.

Speakers may pre-record their talks if they wish, but they don't have to. It is up to the host lab to contact speakers and make the arrangements. Talks can be state-of-the-art, or tutorials.

If you make use of this scheme and arrange a seminar, please send brief details (lab, speaker, date) to education@isca-speech.org

If you wish to join the scheme as a speaker, we need is a title, a short abstract, a 1 paragraph biopic and contact details. Please send them to education@isca-speech.org

PS. The online seminar scheme  is now up and running, with 7 speakers so far:

Jean-Luc Schwartz, Roger Moore, Martin Cooke, Sakriani Sakti, Thomas Hueber, John Hansen and Karen Livescu.

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Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,

We would like to draw your attention to three upcoming short courses from the Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences:

- Prosody & Rhythm: applications to teaching rhythm,
  Donna Erickson (Haskins), March 16, 19, 23 and 26

- Prosody, variation and contact,
  Barbara Gili Fivela (University of Salento, Italy), April 19, 21, 23, 26 and 28

- Rhythmic analysis of languages: main challenges,
  Marisa Cruz (University of Lisbon), June 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10

For details:
  http://www.letras.ufmg.br/padrao_cms/index.php?web=lbass&lang=2&page=3670&menu=&tipo=1
 
 
 
Plinio Barbosa and Nigel Ward

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Dear colleagues,

Following the success of the 2nd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2023) <www.tai2023.org> held in Singapore 18-20 November 2023, the TAI Standing Committee is now inviting bids to host the 3rd TAI conference in 2025.

As the merger of the TAL (Tonal Aspects of Languages) and TIE (Tone and Intonation in Europe) conference series (2004–2018), the TAI series inherits features from its predecessors. The conference accepts 2-page abstracts, avoids parallel sessions, and typically hosts 3 to 5 invited keynote speakers. Following the conference, participants may choose to submit their optional 5-page full papers for publication in the ISCA online archives. With a focus on linguistic rather than technological aspects of prosody, TAI is affiliated with both the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the International Phonetic Association (IPA), thereby receiving grants/awards from both organizations. TAI may also feature workshops at the same venue outside the conference program, before, after or during the conference. Given that all previous TIE conferences were held in Europe, the aim for the new TAI series is to rotate between Europe and other locations. Consequently, it is preferable for TAI 2025 to take place in Europe. While the initial two TAIs were held in November/December, the scheduling of future TAI conferences remains flexible, with spring or summer generally preferred, contingent on the preferences of local organizers.

The responsibility of the TAI Standing Committee is to promote the continuation of the series, select the venue for the next conference, and evaluate conferences and any proposals for format changes. The committee is composed of former TAL/TIE and TAI organizers. Its current members are Amalia Arvaniti, Yiya Chen, Christian DiCanio, Minghui Dong, Wentao Gu, Carlos Gussenhoven, Yanfeng Lu, Hansjörg Mixdorff, and Oliver Niebuhr. All bids will be discussed and voted on by the committee.

Bids should minimally provide the following information:

- Host institution
- General chair (and any co-organizers)
- Proposed conference dates
- Proposed conference theme
- Venue or general location of the venue
- Transportation and accommodation
- Estimated full and student registration fees
- Financial plan (including existing or potential funding sources)

Any additional information that may support the bid is welcome.

Bids should be submitted to the current chair of the TAI Standing Committee, Prof. Wentao Gu (wtgu@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp) by 30 April 2024. He is also available for additional information. Please feel free to distribute this announcement to any researchers in the speech prosody community who may be interested. Thank you very much!!

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Call for Demonstrations for the 21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI)

September 18 – 20, 2024 in Reykjavík, Iceland

Conference website: https://cbmi2024.org/

(Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this call)

The 21st International Conference on Content-based Call for Demonstrations for the 21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI)

September 18 – 20, 2024 in Reykjavík, Iceland Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) welcomes the submission of demonstration papers. We invite authors to report on and showcase novel and compelling demonstrations (software, methods and experiences) in all topic areas relevant to CBMI. 

Submission Guidelines

The length of the papers should be up to 4 pages, in IEEE conference format, plus 1 page for references. One or two additional page(s) should be appended to illustrate what the demo involves and how it will be conducted on-site. This additional content will not be published in the conference proceedings, should the submission be accepted!  If possible, we also invite you to include a URL linking to a short video (max. 3 min) that shows the demonstration in action. 

Demonstration papers are subject to peer review in a single-blind process according to criteria such as novelty, interestingness, applications of or enhancements to state-of-the-art, and potential impact.

Submission Deadline

The extended submission deadline is May 6th, 2024 (AoIE). To submit your paper, follow the instructions in the submission guidelines. 

Infrastructure on Site

The conference will provide a table, power outlet, screen, wireless (shared) internet and a poster board. Presenters are expected to bring the necessary equipment (computers, etc.) themselves. If you have special needs (e.g., more space), please include a related note in the appendix of your submission (“Special Needs” section).

Should you have any questions regarding submissions, please contact the chairs at demo-chairs@cbmi2024.org. 

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Call for Papers: Special Session on 'Multimedia Indexing for eXtended Reality' at CBMI 2024

https://cbmi2024.org/?page_id=100#MmIXR

21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 2024).
18-20 September 2024, Reykjavik, Iceland - https://cbmi2024.org/

DESCRIPTION:
Extended Reality (XR) applications rely not only on computer vision for navigation and object placement but also require a range of multimodal methods to understand the scene or assign semantics to objects being captured and reconstructed. Multimedia indexing for XR thus encompasses methods for processes during XR authoring, such as indexing content to be used for scene and object reconstruction, as well as during the immersive experience, such as object detection and scene segmentation.
The intrinsic multimodality of XR applications involves new challenges like the analysis of egocentric data (video, depth, gaze, head/hand motion) and their interplay. XR is also applied in diverse domains, e.g., manufacturing, medicine, education, and entertainment, each with distinct requirements and data. Thus, multimedia indexing methods must be capable of adapting to the relevant semantics of the particular application domain.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

• Multimedia analysis for media mining, adaptation (to scene requirements), and description for use in XR experiences (including but not limited to AI-based approaches)

• Processing of egocentric multimedia datasets and streams for XR (e.g., egocentric video and gaze analysis, active object detection, video diarization/summarization/captioning)

• Cross- and multi-modal integration of XR modalities (video, depth, audio, gaze, hand/head movements, etc.)

• Approaches for adapting multimedia analysis and indexing methods to new application domains (e.g., open-world/open-vocabulary recognition/detection/segmentation, few-shot learning)

• Large-scale analysis and retrieval of 3D asset collections (e.g., objects, scenes, avatars, motion capture recordings)

• Multimodal datasets for scene understanding for XR

• Generative AI and foundation models for multimedia indexing and/or synthetic data generation

• Combining synthetic and real data for improving scene understanding

• Optimized multimedia content processing for real-time and low-latency XR applications

• Privacy and security aspects and mitigations for XR multimedia content
  
   

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission of papers: 22 March 2024
Notification of acceptance: 3 June 2024
CBMI conference: 18-20 September 2024

SUBMISSION:
The session will be organized as an oral presentation session. The contributions to this session will be long papers describing novel methods or their adaptation to specific applications or short papers describing emerging work or open challenges.

SPECIAL SESSION ORGANISERS:
Fabio Carrara, Artificial Intelligence for Multimedia and Humanities Laboratory, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Werner Bailer, Intelligent Vision Applications Group, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz, Austria

Lyndon J. B. Nixon, MODUL Technology GmbH and Applied Data Science School at MODUL University, Vienna, Austria

Vasileios Mezaris, Information Technologies Institute / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece

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Call for Papers: Special Session on 'Multimodal Insights for Disaster Risk Management and Applications (MIDRA)' at CBMI 2024

https://cbmi2024.org/?page_id=100#MIDRA

21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 2024).
18-20 September 2024, Reykjavik, Iceland - https://cbmi2024.org/

Disaster management in all its phases from preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery is in abundance of multimedia data, including valuable assets like satellite images, videos from UAVs or static cameras, and social media streams. The value of such multimedia data for operational purposes in disaster management is not only useful for civil protection agencies but also for the private sector that quantifies risk. Indexing data from crisis events presents Big Data challenges due to its variety, velocity, volume and veracity for effective analysis and retrieval.

The advent of deep learning and multimodal data fusion offers an unprecedented opportunity to overcome these challenges and fully unlock the potential of disaster event multimedia data. Through the strategic utilization of different data modalities, researchers can significantly enhance the value of these datasets, uncovering insights that were previously beyond reach, giving actionable information and supporting real-life decision-making procedures.

This special session actively seeks research papers in the domain of multimodal analytics and their applications in the context of crisis event monitoring through knowledge extraction and multimedia understanding. Emphasis is placed on recognizing the intrinsic value of spatial information when integrated with other data modalities.

The special session serves as a collaborative platform for communities focused on specific crisis events, such as forest fires, volcano unrest or eruption, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and extreme weather events, which have increased significantly due to the climate crisis in our era. It fosters the exchange of ideas, methodologies, and software tailored to address challenges in these domains, aiming to encourage fruitful collaborations and the mutual enrichment of insights and expertise among diverse communities.

This special session includes presentation of novel research within the following domains:

• Lifelog computing
• Urban computing
• Satellite computing and earth observation
• Multimodal data fusion
• Social media

Within these domains, the topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

• Multimodal analytics and retrieval techniques for crisis event multimedia data.
• Deep learning and neural networks for interpretability, understanding, and explainability in artificial intelligence applied to natural disasters.
• Satellite image analysis and fusion with in-situ data for crisis management.
• Integration of multimodal data for comprehensive risk assessment.
• Application of deep learning techniques to derive insights for risk mitigation.
• Development of interpretative models for better understanding of risk factors.
• Utilization of diverse data modalities (text, images, sensors) for risk management.
• Implementation of multimodal analytics in predicting and managing natural disasters.
• Application of multimodal insights in insurance risk assessment.
• Enhanced decision-making through the fusion of geospatial and multimedia data.

Important Dates:
Submission of papers: 22 March 2024
Notification of acceptance: 3 June 2024
CBMI conference: 18-20 September 2024

Organisers:

• Maria Pegia, Information Technologies Institute / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece.
• Ilias Gialampoukidis, Information Technologies Institute / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece.
• Ioannis Papoutsis, National Observatory of Athens & National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
• Krishna Chandramouli, Venaka Treleaf GbR, Germany.
• Stefanos Vrochidis, Information Technologies Institute / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece.

Please direct correspondence to midra@cbmi2024.org

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The 21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 2024) will be held in Reykjavik, Iceland next September 18-20: https://cbmi2024.org/

The conference will bring together leading experts from academia and industry interested in the broad field of content-based multimedia indexing and applications.

The Special Session on 'Explainability in Multimedia Analysis' (ExMA), addresses the analysis of multimedia applications, such as person detection/tracking, face recognition or lifelog analysis, which may affect sensitive personal information. This raises both legal issues, e.g. concerning data protection and regulations in the ongoing European AI regulation, as well as ethical issues, related to potential bias in the system or misuse of these technologies. This special session focuses on AI-based explainability technologies in multimedia analysis.

The conference CBMI’2024 is supported by ACM SIGMM and the proceedings will be available at ACM Digital Library.

We would like to invite you to consider contributing a paper to this special session.

CBMI's important dates: https://cbmi2024.org/?page_id=211

Looking forward to see you at CBMI 2024.
With best regards,
Chiara Galdi

Special session organisers: Chiara Galdi, Martin Winter, Romain Giot, Romain Bourqui

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The 21st International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 2024) takes place September 18-20 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

We are delighted to have, as part of the conference, a Special Session on Audio entitled: Content based Indexing for audio and music: from analysis to synthesis 

Abstract: Audio has long been a key component of multimedia research. As far as indexing is concerned, the research and industrial context has changed drastically in the last 20 years or so. Today, applications of audio indexing range from karaoke applications to singing voice synthesis and creative audio design. This special session aims at bringing together researchers that aim at proposing new tools or paradigms to investigate audio and music processing in the context of indexation and corpus-based generation.

You are kindly encouraged to submit a paper related to the topic of the special session according to the CBMI guidelines : 

• Regular full papers: 6 pages, plus additional pages for the list of references

• Regular short papers: 4 pages, plus additional pages for the list of references

Important dates: 

• March 22: Regular and special session paper submissions

• June 3: Notification of acceptance 

• Early July: Camera ready version of accepted papers

As of now, we already have 3 invited talks addressing the following topics : 

• Cynthia C. S. Liem, Doğa Taşcılar, and Andrew M. Demetriou A quest through interconnected datasets: lessons from highly-cited ICASSP papers

• Rémi Mignot, Geoffroy Peeters Learning invariance to sound modifications for music indexing and alignment

• Cyrus Vahidi Large-scale music indexing for multimodal similarity search

Please join us in Reykjavik !!

Kindly yours,

François Pachet and Mathieu Lagrange

contact us: mathieu lagrange ls2n fr

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—————— 
Björn Þór Jónsson (bjorn@ru.is)
Professor
Department of Computer Science
Reykjavik University (http://www.ru.is/)
Iceland

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Sixth International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research

September 20–21, 2024, Budapest

After highly popular sessions at ICPhS in Prague this year and an exceptional workshop „Lacerda 120” in Porto last year, we are happy to announce that the next HSCR workshop will take place in Budapest next year on Sept 20 and 21, organised by Judit Bóna and Mária Gósy of the Department of Applied Linguistics and Phonetics of ELTE University. The manuscript submission deadline is May 15, 2024. All details can be found at the workshop website: https://hscr2024.elte.hu/

The aim of this workshop is to bring scholars together who study the history of speech science to learn more on the methods, findings and results of our predecessors and to better understand the speech research community’s present achievements.

Speech has been investigated from different perspectives, which necessitates a range of approaches and scientific methods. Previous contributions analyzed the contextual background of individual researchers, investigated how specific research practices developed over time, examined the various kinds of approach of researchers to their material and the link between the form and the meaning in speech communication research.

The special focus of the 6th HSCR workshop will be on the development of the specific fields of speech communication, such as emerging phonology, progression in analysis of both speech sounds and prosody, speech technology, growing body of psycholinguistics, sociophonetics and clinical phonetics, etc. Researchers are encouraged to mine deep into history to find the early steps and advancement of these specific fields of speech communication. The knowledge of our predecessors is frequently unknown, forgotten or ignored for several reasons, and thus the past attainments are not appropriately integrated in our common consciousness regarding speech science.

As always, contributions on other topics from the history of speech communication research will also be welcome. The unfolded facts of the phonetic endeavor in the history of speech science may heavily inspire the present research.

Manuscripts should be sent to the email address of the workshop: hscr2024@gmail.com. Please, use the templates for your paper.

The proceedings will be published in the book series Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation at TUDpress (Technical University Dresden). The HSCR proceedings will be published in print and also stored electronically in the ISCA archive.

For any inquiries, please use the workshop email address: hscr2024@gmail.com

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The second edition of the MultiModal Communication Symposium will take place September 25 - 27, 2024 at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.

The program of MMSYM is now available and features three keynote speakers, 30 talks and 33 posters!

We are happy to announce our keynote speakers:
- Dr. Julie Hunter (LinaGora Labs, Toulouse) “Situated Conversation and Conversational Cobots”

- Dr. Judith Holler (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Nijmegen) “Producing and comprehending multimodal utterances in face-to-face conversation”
- Prof. Dr. Petra Wagner (Bielefeld University) “The multimodal expression of (non-)understanding in dyadic explanations – some lessons learned”

Detailed information on the program can be found on the website: http://mmsym.org

Registration for MMSYM 2024 in Frankfurt is open - register until July 31st for an Early Bird registration.

Visit our website mmsym.org for more information and to register!

We are looking forward to welcome you in Frankfurt!

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Chers collègues, chères collègues, 

Nous organisons la 13e édition du Colloque des Jeunes Chercheurs de Praxiling (UMR 5267) qui aura lieu à Montpellier du 17 au 18 octobre 2024. La thématique du colloque est la suivante : « Vulnérabilité et langage : langues, locuteurs, discours ». 

Ce colloque s’adresse aux jeunes chercheurs s’intéressant à la thématique de la vulnérabilité sous des angles divers : langues vulnérables, locuteurs vulnérabilisés, discours sur la vulnérabilité émanant ou non des locuteurs en situation de vulnérabilité. 

Vous trouverez ci-joint l’appel à communication contenant l’argumentaire ainsi que toutes les conditions de rédaction et modalités de participation. La date de clôture de l’appel est fixée au 30 juin 2024 et la proposition est à envoyer à l’adresse suivante : cjc.praxiling.2024@gmail.com.

Vous retrouverez toutes les informations sur le site : https://cjc-praxiling2024.www.univ-montp3.fr

Bien cordialement, 

Le comité d’organisation : Lou BRUN, Myriam CASALONE, Elora DANJEAN, Ahamada KASSIME – Praxiling UMR 5267 Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

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7th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports (MMSports'24) @ ACM Multimedia, Oct 28 – Nov 1, 2024, Melbourne, Australia

We'd like to invite you to submit your paper proposals for the 7th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports to be held in Melbourne, Australia together with ACM Multimedia 2024. The ambition of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from many different disciplines to share ideas and methods on current multimedia/multimodal content analysis research in sports. We welcome multimodal-based research contributions as well as best-practice contributions focusing on the following (and similar, but not limited to) topics:

- annotation and indexing in sports 

- tracking people/ athlete and objects in sports

- activity recognition, classification, and evaluation in sports

- 3D scene and motion reconstruction in sports

- event detection and indexing in sports

- performance assessment in sports

- injury analysis and prevention in sports

- data driven analysis in sports

- graphical augmentation and visualization in sports

- automated training assistance in sports

- camera pose and motion tracking in sports

- brave new ideas / extraordinary multimodal solutions in sports

- personal virtual (home) trainers/coaches in sports

- datasets in sports

- graphical effects in sports

- alternative sensing in sports (beyond the visible spectrum)

- multimodal perception in sports

- exploiting physical knowledge in learning systems for sports

- sports knowledge discovery

- narrative generation and narrative analysis in sports

- mobile sports application

- multimedia in sports beyond video, including 3D data and sensor data

Submissions can be of varying length from 4 to 8 pages, plus additional pages for the reference pages. There is no distinction between long and short papers, but the authors may themselves decide on the appropriate length of their paper. All papers will undergo the same review process and review period.

Please refer to the workshop website for further information: 

http://mmsports.multimedia-computing.de/mmsports2024/index.html

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Due:                           19 July 2024 

Acceptance Notification:             5 August 2024

Camera Ready Submission:         19 August 2024 

Workshop Date:                            TBA; either Oct 28 or Nov 1, 2024

ACM MMSports’24 Chairs: Thomas Moeslund, Rainer Lienhart and Hideo Saito

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https://icmi.acm.org/2024/call-for-papers/

https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions/icmi24a

Important Dates

Novelty will be assessed along two dimensions: scientific novelty and technical novelty. Accepted papers at ICMI 2024 will need to be novel along one of the two dimensions:

• Scientific Novelty: Papers should bring new scientific knowledge about human social interactions, including human-computer interactions. For example, discovering new behavioral markers that are predictive of mental health or how new behavioral patterns relate to children’s interactions during learning. It is the responsibility of the authors to perform a proper literature review and clearly discuss the novelty in the scientific discoveries made in their paper.
• Technical Novelty: Papers should propose novelty in their computational approach for recognizing, generating or modeling multimodal data. Examples include: novelty in the learning and prediction algorithms, in the neural architecture, or in the data representation. Novelty can also be associated with new usages of an existing approach.

Commitment to ethical conduct is required and submissions must adhere to ethical standards in particular when human-derived data are employed. Authors are encouraged to read the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (https://ethics.acm.org/).

The theme of this year’s ICMI conference revolves around “Equitability and environmental sustainability in multimodal interaction technologies.” The focus is on exploring how multimodal systems and multimodal interactive applications can serve as tools to bridge the digital divide, particularly in underserved communities and countries, with a specific emphasis on those in Latin America and the Caribbean. The conference aims to delve into the design principles that can render multimodal systems more equitable and sustainable in applications such as health and education, thereby catalyzing positive transformations in development for historically marginalized groups, including racial/ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples. Moreover, there is a crucial exploration of the intersection between multimodal interaction technologies and environmental sustainability. This involves examining how these technologies can be crafted to comprehend, disseminate, and mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change, especially in the Latin America and Caribbean region. The conference endeavors to explore the potential of multimodal systems in fostering community resilience, raising awareness, and facilitating education related to climate change, thereby contributing to a holistic approach that encompasses both social and environmental dimensions.

Additional topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Affective computing and interaction
• Cognitive modeling and multimodal interaction
• Gesture, touch and haptics
• Healthcare, assistive technologies
• Human communication dynamics
• Human-robot/agent multimodal interaction
• Human-centered A.I. and ethics
• Interaction with smart environment
• Machine learning for multimodal interaction
• Mobile multimodal systems
• Multimodal behaviour generation
• Multimodal datasets and validation
• Multimodal dialogue modeling
• Multimodal fusion and representation
• Multimodal interactive applications
• Novel multimodal datasets
• Speech behaviours in social interaction
• System components and multimodal platforms
• Visual behaviours in social interaction
• Virtual/augmented reality and multimodal interaction

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We are glad to announce that the registration to the IberSPEECH'2024 ALBAYZÍN evaluations is open. This year, the ALBAYZÍN evaluations focus on evaluating five different speech technologies:

1. Speech to Text Challenge (S2TC), organized by RTVE and Universidad de Zaragoza, consists of automatically transcribe different types of TV shows. This year will be an optional subset with bilingual content of Spanish and any of the co-official languages (Catalan, Valencian, Galician and Basque).
2. Speaker Diarization and Identity Assignment (SDIAC), organized by RTVE and Universidad de Zaragoza, consists of segmenting broadcast audio documents according to different speakers, linking those segments which originate from the same speaker and, optionally, identify a closed set of speakers. 
3. Search on Speech Challenge (SoSC), organized by Universidad San Pablo-CEU and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, consists of finding a list of terms/queries in Spanish audio archives and is divided into two different tasks: Spoken Term Detection (STD) and Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE-STD). Data will cover conference/workshop domain, TV shows and a novel domain that consists of a corpus of interviews with people from rural areas covering different dialectal varieties in Spain.
4. Bilingual Basque-Spanish Speech to Text Challenge (BBS-S2TC), organized by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the proposed task consists of automatically transcribing short segments of speech (ranging from 3 to 10 seconds) extracted from Basque Parliament sessions. Segments may be monolingual (Basque or Spanish) or bilingual (Basque and Spanish, including a code switching event).
5. Wake-Up Word Detection Challenge (WUWDC), organized by Telefónica Innovación Digital, this challenge aims to assess the performance of State-of-The-Art Keyword Spotting systems in addressing various industrial needs such as accuracy, inference delay, computational load, and energy efficiency.

There are two ways to participate in the Albayzín evaluations according with the submission type:

• The first way relies on editing the system description paper following the IberSpeech 2024 paper submission template so that the submitted paper (describing the system/s and the results) will appear in the IberSpeech 2024 proceedings. Moreover, participants will also have the chance to submit an extended version of this paper to a journal. This submission way implies sending one or more representatives to the evaluation workshop, to be held in Aveiro, Portugal, as part of IberSpeech 2024 (November 2024).
• The second way demands a free-format document in which participants describe the submitted system/s along with the results, but this will not appear in the IberSpeech 2024 proceedings. In this case, participants are allowed to present on-line their system/s without physically attending the conference, or send a video to the evaluation organizers explaining their submitted system/s, which will be shown during the evaluation workshop.

More information about the different challenges, databases and online registration can be found at
https://iberspeech.tech/albayzin-evaluation-challenge

More information about IberSpeech 2024 at
https://iberspeech.tech/

The calendar for the Albayzín evaluations is:

    May 20th, 2024: Opening of registration for the evaluations
    June 3rd, 2024: Release of training and development data
    July 31st, 2024: Registration deadline for the evaluation
    September 2nd, 2024: Release of evaluation data
    October 18th, 2024: Deadline for the submission of system outputs
    October 31th, 2024: System results distributed to participants
    November 12th, 2024: Official results presented publicly and published
    November 12th, 2024: Iberspeech 2024 Albayzín Evaluations special session in Aveiro


For any additional information, please contact the organizers of the calls.

Thanks in advance for your time an interest in IBERSPEECH'2024 Conference and ALBAYZIN evaluations.

Best regards,
The ALBAYZIN 2024 Evaluations Organizing Committee

Eduardo Lleida Solano, lleida@unizar.es
ViVoLab, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Alfonso Ortega Giménez, ortega@unizar.es
ViVoLab, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Javier Tejedor Noguerales, javier.tejedornoguerales@ceu.es
BIOLAB, Universidad San Pablo CEU, Spain
Luis Javier Rodríguez Fuentes, luisjavier.rodriguez@ehu.es
GTTS, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
Doroteo Torre Toledano, doroteo.torre@uam.es
AUDIAS, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

________________________________________________________________

IberSPEECH 2024. Aveiro, 11-13 November 2024
XIII Jornadas en Tecnologías del Habla and the IX Iberian SLTech Workshop.
https://iberspeech.tech/

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2nd  Automatic Assessment of Parkinsonian Speech Workshop ( AAPS’24)

Nov 21-22, 2024

MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

We cordially invite you to contribute to AAPS’24, a Research Workshop on Automatic
Assessment of Parkinsonian Speech that will be held at the main campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Despite of the amount of research in the field, there is still room for developing new
knowledge, not only about the characteristics of the speech of people affected with
Parkinson’s disease, but also about its correlation with the extent of the disease. Automatic
systems to evaluate and assess the disease will take advantage of the new knowledge
generated in the field to make more accurate and robust systems. 
The aim of this workshop is to put together speech professionals with different backgrounds
to discuss and advance in the field of the automatic assessment of parkinsonian speech. The
long-term goal is to gain new knowledge about the influence of Parkinson’s disease on
speech, which could be used for diagnosis, assessment, and prognosis, especially in the early
stages.
Attenders will be asked to prepare a presentation about their current research to open
discussions about different aspects and to define the new trends in the field. The workshop is
expected to establish new synergies among the attenders, being an opportunity for future
collaborations.
Being conscious of this, the Speech Communication Group of the Massachussetts Institute
of Technology in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has the honor
and pleasure to invite the whole scientific community to the event to be held in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, on November 21 st -22 nd , 2024 and hosted by the Massachussetts
Institute of Technology.

Feature Tracks and Topics
The workshop provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of current scientific
research on speech of parkinsonian patients. Topics or interest include, but are not limited
to: automatic detection of Parkinson's Disease from the voice and speech; automatic
stratification of Parkinson's Disease from the speech; automatic assessment & rating of
voice and speech quality for parkinsonian patients; prognosis for Parkinson's Disease from
the speech; new strategies for parameterization and modeling parkinsonian speech; corpora
of parkinsonian speech; speech enhancement for parkinsonian voices; multi-modal analysis
of parkinsonian speech; diagnosis and evaluation protocols; automatic evaluation of clinical
treatments from the speech 

Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers written in English. Papers will be submitted
via the AAPS2024 web site at https://www.byo.upm.es/AAPS24. The document style,
templates, and submission form can be downloaded from the web site. The tentative
contributions will be reviewed about their suitability. At least one author of each paper is
required to register. The workshop proceedings will be published in a book a book in
the Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series with Springer. 

Schedule
Proposal due September 20 th , 2024
Notification of acceptance October 1 st , 2024
Final papers due October 25 th , 2024
Preliminary program October 30 th , 2024
Workshop November 21 st – 22 nd , 2024
Registration and Information
Registration will be handled via the AAPS2024 web site
(https://www.byo.upm.es/AAPS24). Please contact the organizers (gi.byo@upm.es)

Program Committee

Program Chairs
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,
Massachussets Institute of
Technology (MIT)
Juan Ignacio Godino-Llorente,
Universidad Politécnica de
Madrid (UPM)
Scientific Secretariat
Jeung-Yoon Choi, (MIT)
Julián D. Arias Londoño, (UPM)
Local Organizing Committee
Alejandro Guerrero-López, (UPM)
Carlos Hoyos-Barceló, (UPM)
Mateo Cámara Lago, (UPM)
Juan Camilo Puerta Acevedo, (UPM)
Scientific Committee
Alberto Abad
Ascensión Gallardo Antolín
Daryush Metha
Germán Castellanos-Domínguez
Jeung-Yoon Choi
Jiri Mekyska
Jorge A. Gómez-García
Jose L. Blanco Murillo
Juan I. Godino-Llorente
Julián David Arias Londoño
Laureano Moro-Velazquez
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Matías Zañartu
Nicholas Cummins
Philipp Aichinger
Saturnino Luz
Stefan Goetze
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

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SPECOM-2024 – LAST CALL FOR PAPERS

*******************************************************

26th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2024)

November 25-28, 2024

Crowne Plaza hotel, Belgrade, Serbia

Web: https://specom2024.ftn.uns.ac.rs/

ORGANIZERS

The conference SPECOM-2024 is organized by the Faculty of Technical Sciences University of Novi Sad and the School of Electrical Engineering University of Belgrade in cooperation with the Telecommunications Society of Serbia

FOUNDERS

SPECOM series was founded by St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS) of the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS)

CONFERENCE TOPICS

SPECOM attracts researchers, linguists and engineers working in the following areas of speech science, speech technology, natural language processing, human-computer interaction:

• Affective computing

• Audio-visual speech processing

• Corpus linguistics

• Computational paralinguistics

• Deep learning for audio processing

• Feature extraction

• Forensic speech investigations

• Human-machine interaction

• Language identification

• Large language models

• Multichannel signal processing

• Multilingual speech technology

• Multimedia processing

• Multimodal analysis and synthesis

• Natural language generation

• Natural language understanding

• Sign language processing

• Speaker diarization

• Speaker identification and verification

• Speech and language resources

• Speech analytics and audio mining

• Speech and voice disorders

• Speech-based applications

• Speech driving systems in robotics

• Speech enhancement

• Speech perception

• Speech recognition and understanding

• Speech synthesis

• Speech translation systems

• Spoken dialogue systems

• Spoken language processing

• Text mining and sentiment analysis

• Virtual and augmented reality

• Voice assistants

SATELLITE EVENTS

26th International Conference SPECOM will be organized together with the 32nd Telecommunications Forum TELFOR-2024: https://www.telfor.rs/en/

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event is English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited talks, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit full papers of 10-15 pages formatted in the Springer LNCS style. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers (single-blind), and accepted papers will be presented either orally or as posters. Papers submitted to SPECOM must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere. The authors are invited to submit their papers using the on-line submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specom2024

DEADLINES

July 15, 2024 (23:59 AoE) ... Submission of full papers (EXTENDED!)

September 03, 2024 ........... Notification of acceptance/rejection

September 15, 2024 ........... Camera-ready papers

October 01, 2024 ................ Early registration

PROCEEDINGS

SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS, Scopus Q2) series listed in all major international citation databases.

GENERAL CHAIRS

Vlado DELIĆ – Faculty of Technical Sciences University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

Alexey KARPOV – SPIIRAS, SPC RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia

CONTACTS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to SPECOM-2024 Secretariat

E-mail: specom2024@uns.ac.rs

Web: https://specom2024.ftn.uns.ac.rs

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The 2nd International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2024)

Hybrid Event

https://fllm2024.fllm-conference.org/index.php

26-29 November, 2024 | Dubai, UAE

Technically Co-Sponsored by IEEE UAE Section

FLLM 2024 CFP:

With the emergence of foundation models (FMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) that are trained on large amounts of data at scale and adaptable to a wide range of downstream applications, Artificial intelligence is experiencing a paradigm revolution. BERT, T5, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Falcon 180B, Codex, DALL-E, Whisper, and CLIP are now the foundation for new applications ranging from computer vision to protein sequence study and from speech recognition to coding. Earlier models had a reputation of starting from scratch with each new challenge. The capacity to experiment with, examine, and comprehend the capabilities and potentials of next-generation FMs is critical to undertaking this research and guiding its path. Nevertheless, these models are currently inaccessible as the resources required to train these models are highly concentrated in industry, and even the assets (data, code) required to replicate their training are frequently not released due to their demand in the real-time industry. At the moment, mostly large tech companies such as OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and Baidu can afford to construct FMs and LLMS. Despite the expected widely publicized use of FMs and LLMS, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge of how they operate, why they underperform, and what they are even capable of because of their emerging global qualities. To deal with these problems, we believe that much critical research on FMs and LLMS would necessitate extensive multidisciplinary collaboration, given their essentially social and technical structure.

The International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM) addresses the architectures, applications, challenges, approaches, and future directions. We invite the submission of original papers on all topics related to FLLMs, with special interest in but not limited to:

•     Architectures and Systems
• Transformers and Attention
• Bidirectional Encoding
• Autoregressive Models
• Massive GPU Systems
• Prompt Engineering
• Multimodal LLMs
• Fine-tuning
•     Challenges
• Hallucination
• Cost of Creation and Training
• Energy and Sustainability Issues
• Integration
• Safety and Trustworthiness
• Interpretability
• Fairness
• Social Impact
•     Future Directions
• Generative AI
• Explainability and EXplainable AI
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Federated Learning for FLLM
• Large Language Models Fine-Tuning on Graphs
• Data Augmentation
•     Natural Language Processing Applications
• Generation
• Summarization
• Rewrite
• Search
• Question Answering
• Language Comprehension and Complex Reasoning
• Clustering and Classification
•     Applications
• Natural Language Processing
• Communication Systems
• Security and Privacy
• Image Processing and Computer Vision
• Life Sciences
• Financial Systems

Submissions Guidelines and Proceedings

Manuscripts should be prepared in 10-point font using the IEEE 8.5' x 11' two-column format. All papers should be in PDF format, and submitted electronically at Paper Submission Link. A full paper can be up to 8 pages (including all figures, tables and references). Submitted papers must present original unpublished research that is not currently under review for any other conference or journal. Papers not following these guidelines may be rejected without review. Also submissions received after the due date, exceeding length limit, or not appropriately structured may also not be considered. Authors may contact the Program Chair for further information or clarification. All submissions are peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. Accepted papers will appear in the FLLM Proceeding, and be published by the IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services and be submitted to IEEE Xplore for inclusion. Submitted papers must include original work, and must not be under consideration for another conference or journal. Submission of regular papers up to 8 pages and must follow the IEEE paper format. Please include up to 7 keywords, complete postal and email address, and fax and phone numbers of the corresponding author. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their work at the conference. Submitted papers that are deemed of good quality but that could not be accepted as regular papers will be accepted as short papers.

Important Dates:

• Paper submission deadline: June 30, 2024
• Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2024
• Camera-ready Submission: October 10, 2024

Contact:

Please send any inquiry on FLLM to: info@fllm-conference.org

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- LT4All 2.0 - Advancing Humanism through Language Technologies

24-26 February 2025, r

❖ Language Technologies (LT), nurtured in research laboratories for half a century, are now spreading widely across numerous applications. However, the situation varies significantly among the more than 7,500 languages spoken worldwide.

❖ The first LT4All (LT4All 1.0) conference in 2019 highlighted the critical role of multilingualism in cutting-edge technology. This spurred significant initiatives by various research institutions and major technological companies toward developing language technologies for a wider range of languages.

❖ Despite significant progress, many communities are still being left behind.

The critical issue lies not just in creating language technologies for numerous languages but also in collaborating with communities to develop the solutions they need

Organized within the framework of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022-2032) and to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of International Mother Language Day 2025, the second edition of LT4All (LT4All 2.0) aims to further the agenda of language technologies with a focus on community empowerment. The goal is to harness technology not only to advance itself but also to support and enhance individuals' capabilities.

The conference is organized by the international Language Resources Association (ELRA) and its Special Interest Group on Under-resourced languages (SIGUL), a joint SIG of ELRA and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), in partnership with UNESCO.

Further details can be found at https: https://www.lt4all2025.eu/ Contact: lt4all2025-contact@lisn.upsaclay.fr

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FIRST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) 2025

March 30th - April 4th 2025

Aussois (French Alps)

We are pleased to announce the 5th edition of ALPS - the Advanced NLP School to be held in the French Alps from March 30th to April 4th 2025. 

This school targets advanced research students in Natural Language Processing and related fields and brings together world leading experts and motivated students. The programme comprises lectures, poster presentations, practical lab sessions and nature activities - the venue is located near a National Park.

Important Dates

• Oct 15th 2024: Application deadline

• Nov 15th 2024: acceptance notification

• Jan 15th 2025: registration deadline

• March 30th 2025: Start of School

Confirmed speakers so far:

• Kyunghyun Cho (New York University & Prescient Design)

• Titouan Parcollet (Cambridge University & Samsung AI Center)

• Barbara Plank (LMU Munich)

• François Yvon (ISIR CNRS)

Website and online application: https://alps.imag.fr/

Questions: alps@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

The registration fees for the event encompass accommodation and full board at the conference venue, the Centre Paul Langevin. We will announce the fee amounts later, and they will vary depending on the participant's background: students, academia, and industry. Student fees will be set at or below €600, including twin room accommodation. We will have a limited amount of scholarships for the registration: if you are interested please mark this in the application form. The rates for academia and industry will be higher, as is customary, and will include accommodation in a single room.

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Call for Papers

3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation - TAI 2025

Date: 16-May-2025 to 18-May-2025
Location: Herrsching (near Munich), Germany
Meeting Email: tai2025@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
Web Site: https://tai2025.org/

Call Deadline: 09-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

The TAI conference is the result of the merging the International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL) and the Conference on Tone and Intonation in Europe (TIE). The TAI 2025 conference aims to bring together distinguished researchers, experts, and practitioners from around the world to exchange ideas, insights, and the latest advancements in the field of tone and intonation. The TAI proceedings are archived by ISCA, the International Speech Communication Association.

Call for Papers:

We are delighted to announce that the Third International Conference on Tone and TAI 2025 will be held in Herrsching near Munich, Germany, from 16–18 May 2025. Jointly sponsored by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the International Phonetic Association (IPA), TAI 2025 will be hosted by the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing of the LMU Munich.

With the theme of 'Variation and change in tone and intonation systems across space and time', our aim at TAI 2025 is to foster a more diverse and comprehensive understanding of tone and intonation by exploring variation in geographical as well as physical space, along with the dynamic evolution of tone and intonation across various timescales. We invite submissions that explore phonetic and phonological aspects of tone and intonation, with a particular focus on the following topics:

1. Variation and Change in Space:
- Cross-linguistics comparison of tone and intonation in well- and under-studied languages.
- Documentation of tonal and intonational patterns in endangered languages.
- Analysis of geographic variation in tone and intonation.
- Tone and intonation in language contact.

2. Variation and Change in Time:
- Diachronic change of tone and intonation.
- Generational differences of tone and intonation.
- Sociolinguistic factors influencing tonal and intonational change.

3. Variation Beyond Space and Time:
- Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural correlates of tone and intonation.
- Physiological underpinnings of tone and intonation.
- Acquisition of tone and intonation in L1 and L2.
- Tone and intonation in neurodevelopmental disorders and impairments.
- Role of tone and intonation in multimodal communication.
- Computational modeling and applications of tone and intonation.

We welcome submissions on any aspect of tone and intonation in language, not limited to the aforementioned topics. We encourage contributions from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including experimental, descriptive, and computational approaches. Contributions by junior researchers and/or with interdisciplinary research methods are strongly encouraged.

Submission information:

Abstracts should be written in English and no more than 2 A4-sized pages (1 page of text and 1 page for tables, figures, and references), including up to 5 keywords that best describe the paper. All submissions should be in PDF format. Abstracts will be subject to double-blind peer review; please ensure that all identifying information is removed from the abstract.

Abstract submission opens: 15 October 2024
Abstract submission deadline: 9 December 2024
Notification of acceptance: 3 February 2025

Abstract submission will be via CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/TAI2025/

Sireemas Maspong

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