Dear ISCA members,

It is almost time for Interspeech 2025. Only a few more weeks to go. This also means that the current ISCA board only has a few more weeks before it will step down. Over the past two years, during my presidency, we have made several changes to ISCA. In these final few weeks, we hope to finalise the things we are still working on, so that the new ISCA board is off to a good start. Are you interested in learning more about all the changes that have happened? We will explain them all in the ISCA General Assembly during Interspeech.

Invitation to the ISCA General Assembly – Monday 18 August, Rotterdam

I hereby invite you to attend the ISCA General Assembly, which will take place on Monday 18 August 2025, Ahoy, Rotterdam, prior to the Interspeech Welcome Reception. During this meeting we will present our financial and president’s report. Both reports need to be approved by the ISCA membership, so we hope that many of you will be there. Importantly, the ISCA General Assembly is the moment to ask your questions, make suggestions, or voice your concerns to the ISCA board. We wish to learn from you in order to further improve our association!

New ISCA Newsletter

The ISCA newsletter was established by prof. Isabel Trancoso in 1998. After 325 ISCApads we move to a new format, starting August 2025. We would like to sincerely thank prof. em. Christian Wellekens, who edited the last 282(!) issues (including this last one)! Prof. Wellekens already received the ISCA Service Medal for his work on the ISCApad in 2018, but continued to put together the newsletter every month for another 7 years. The ISCApad is a valuable and important source of information on new jobs, workshops, databases in speech science and technology, and its importance in distributing information within ISCA has been high. We hope that the new Newsletter will continue this important function. For now, a BIG thank you to Chris, and a very happy retirement! Please read his message elsewhere in this ISCApad for more background on the ISCApad.

Interspeech-related news

Registration is open

Registration for Interspeech 2025 is open: https://www.interspeech2025.org/registration

If you are an ISCA member, please have your ISCA e-mail address and ISCA membership ID ready because you will need both to verify your ISCA membership. The ISCA membership ID can be found on your personal page at http://www.isca-speech.org -> login. Please note that due to the change of ISCA database, your ID has now 8 digits and the old ISCA membership number is no longer valid.

If you have an accepted paper, please have the paper IDs ready.

Digital poster boards

For many years, the wish for digital poster boards at Interspeech was discussed within the ISCA board. This year, for the first time ever, Interspeech will use digital poster boards. No more hassle with travelling with poster tubes, or unsuccessful attempts at removing the folds in your poster, or stressing out trying to find a local print shop. Instructions on the preparation of your poster will follow from the A/V company associated with Interspeech 2025.

Preliminary programme

The preliminary programme is available online.

Tutorials

Interspeech 2025 offers 9 highly interesting tutorials including an invited tutorial on how to create speech sounds with Praat from the creator of Praat, prof. dr. Paul Boersma. If you have not done so yet, but are interested in following 1 or more tutorials, sign up with your Interspeech registration or change your registration and enjoy the fun at the tutorial(s).

Speech Science Festival

The organization of the Speech Science Festival is well on its way with more than 30 demonstrations and a hackathon. We invite you all to come visit the Speech Science Festival in the conference centre on Sunday August 17, as it has free entrance. It is suitable for a broad audience so bring your family if they are travelling with you.

See you all in Rotterdam, the Netherlands!

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA President

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Dear ISCA members,

Any association either has to evolve or has to die. ISCA is now renovating its numerical footstep and particularly wishes to improve its communication. As a monthly newsletter ISCApad achieved this aim for several decades. It has been created in 1998 by Isabel Trancoso who edited the first 42 numbers as a simple monthly email to the members. I then joined back in 2001 and released so far 282 numbers (until #325 July 2025). The current off line presentation has been imagined in August 2010 by Tse Min Lua from InCampus (Singapore) who then assisted me very efficiently for the editing job. Our past President J.F. Bonastre has chosen in 2011 to add a section “President's message” section which has been maintained all along from then and is highly appreciated by the readers. Many PhD researchers and also students found their first job or first internship by surfing ISCApad. Authors found readily enough conferences where to publish their most recent results. But the frame, the contents must evolve as well as speech research and now comes a new newsletter and will undoubtedly fill out many new needs. But I am perhaps a bit too old to get into this new boat: I retired in 2007. I wish to give all my thanks to all past and current board members and Interspeech organizers and also to all readers who actively assisted me and mainly with Manu Foxonet with whom I kept regular contacts to update the newsletter and the memberlist. I wish the current board the utmost success in its mission in order to improve the interlinks between the members of ISCA.

Emeritus Professor Christian J. Wellekens

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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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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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Dear Speech Prosody members,

 I’m pleased to announce two upcoming events:

• Speech Prosody and Social Meaning, in the SProSIG Virtual Lecture Series, by Robert Xu, December 18

   

• Workshop on Prosody in Languages of the Middle East, at PaPE, Jun 25, 2025, Mallorca, Spain

   

 Details for both are in the ' Other Events' section

Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

 CCSB 3.0408,  +1-915-747-6827

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

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