Dear ISCA members,

Membership fees

With the increasing number of members over the years, ISCA needed to professionalise. We have made great steps with our new website, databases, moving to WildApricot, the hiring of Antoine Serrurier to help the Interspeech organisers to name a few things. To ensure the sustainability of our services and a long-term, financially healthy future of ISCA, and after getting positive feedback from both the IAC and during the General Assembly in Kos, the ISCA board has decided to increase the membership fees, for the first time in around 20 years. This increase also takes into account the wider financial context, e.g., inflation.

The new membership fees are:

Full members: 120 euros/year

Student/retired members: 30 euros/year

The changes will be implemented on our website in December 2024 and will be effective from January 1, 2025.

Want to stay updated regarding Interspeech 2025 Rotterdam news? In the next few months, everything you need to know about Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, travelling to the Netherlands and more will be shared through social media and the Interspeech 2025 website and newsletter. If you want to stay up to date, follow the Interspeech 2025 organisation team via: X (formerly known as Twitter): @ISCAInterspeech LinkedIN: isca-interspeech Website and newsletter: https://interspeech2025.org/

Award nomination season is coming up. The deadlines for the nominations for ISCA Fellows, Distinguished Lecturers and the ISCA Service Medal are coming up! I would like to invite you to nominate one (or more) of your esteemed colleagues for one of the ISCA honours. More information on the nomination procedure can be found at https://isca-speech.org/Honours.

Deadlines:

ISCA Service Medal 2025: Closing date 5 January 2025

ISCA Distinguished Lecturer Closing Date February 10, 2025

ISCA Fellows 2025: Closing date 1 March 2025

News from ISCA:

Membership database is updated Over the past few weeks, the list of members has been updated in our WildApricot database.

If you want to access your account, you can do so via our website http://www.isca-speech.org.

If you need a new password, please use the “forget” option.

If you have any questions, please send an email via secretariat@isca-speech.org.

Volunteers

Are you interested in supporting our great association with your time or expertise? Are you interested in building your CV? Are you interested in learning more about how ISCA and the ISCA board work and would you like to help out? That is great! Now that ISCA has grown so large, we could use your support! Please sign up by filling in the form on the ISCA home page: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckba3R1XSxnHYoB8yKGNcM84siurQSOD3qY8oGgPN6naejDw/viewform

ISCA Board elections

Next year April, we will have new ISCA board elections. If you are interested in learning more about joining the ISCA board, please let us know! We are happy to talk to you.

Important dates ISCA Service Medal 2025: Closing date 5 January 2025

Distinguished Lecturer 2025: Closing Date 10 February 2025

Interspeech 2025 Paper deadline: 12 February 2025

ISCA Fellows 2025: Closing date 1 March 2025

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA president

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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:

• 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.   

• Also position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues are welcome.

 Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
will take place in February 2025. 

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero

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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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The aims of ISCA SIG 'Speech and Language Technologies in Education'
 (SLaTE) are to promote interest in the use of speech and natural
 language processing for education, and to provide a platform to
 exchange ideas, present and discuss research, etc.
 SLaTE Webinar Series: ISCA SIG SLaTE is organizing a series of
 Webinars.
 Everybody can attend, but you do have to register in advance (for
 free).
 Videos are made of the first - presentation part of the Zoom meetings
 (i.e. not of the second - Q&A part), and these videos are available
 online.
 For info. about (free) registration, future and (videos of) past
 Webinars see https://sites.google.com/view/sigslate

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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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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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 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 https://womennspeech.herokuapp.com/

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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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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The TAI Standing Committee is delighted to announce that the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany, has won the bid to host the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025). Dr. James Kirby and his team will host the conference in Munich (Herrsching), Germany, during May 16-18, 2025.

With the theme of 'Variation and Change in Tone and Intonation Systems across Space and Time,' TAI 2025 aims 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.

Please visit the conference website www.tai2025.org for preliminary information. Additionally, attendees of Speech Prosody 2024 will have the opportunity to hear a brief introduction to TAI 2025 at the closing ceremony of SP2024.

We eagerly look forward to meeting you at TAI 2025 in Herrsching!!

Kind regards,

Wentao Gu
On behalf of the TAI Standing Committee

Prosody of Uralic languages

Symposium at the Congressus XIV Internationalis
Fenno-Ugristarum, 18–23 August 2025 in Tartu, Estonia.

Following the three workshops on Uralic prosody in Tartu
2015, Budapest 2017 and Helsinki 2019 we would like to
invite you to yet another meeting on the prosody of Uralic
languages. The meeting will be organised as a symposium of
the Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum (CIFU14).
See the description of the symposium on the CIFU14
website: https://cifu14.ut.ee/symposium-b11/

The abstract submission to CIFU14 is open until 30
September 2024. Abstracts must be submitted as an
anonymised attachment (preferably word and pdf file) to
cifu14@ut.ee. Please also indicate in your email that your
abstract is being submitted to the symposium of the
Prosody of Uralic languages. Abstracts must be written in
English and may not exceed 2 pages, including references;
font size 12, line spacing 1.5, margins 2.5 cm everywhere,
A4 paper (see more details on abstract formatting and
submission here: https://cifu14.ut.ee/2nd-circular/).

Please forward this mail to anyone who might be interested.

Hope to see you in Tartu!

Pärtel Lippus (University of Tartu)
Eva Liina Asu (University of Tartu)
Katalin Mády (HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair,

Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

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Dear SProSIG members,

The election of officers is now complete.

Thank you for voting.

Based on the results, SProSIG PAC has elected 5 officers for the term 2024-2026.

The new officers are; 

Plinio Barbosa 

Aoju Chen

Martine Grice 

Jürgen Trouvain 

Nigel Ward 

(in alphabetical order)

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