English in Singapore

Attending INTERSPEECH 2014 in Singapore you will probably be glad to know that English is spoken in any corner of the island. Indeed, it is one of the four national languages and the second language spoken in Singapore's homes. According to the last census, in 2010, 89% of the population is literate in English, making of Singapore a very convenient place for tourism, shopping, research or to hold a conference.

Historical context of English in Singapore

The history of Singapore started as the first settlements were established in the 13^th century AD [2]. Along the years, Singapore was part of different kingdoms and sultanas until the 19^th century, when modern Singapore was founded under the impulsion of the British Empire. In 1819, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles landed in Singapore and established a treaty with the local rulers to develop a new trading station. From this date, the importance of Singapore continuously grew under the influence of Sir Raffles who, despite not being very present on the island, was the real builder of modern Singapore. Singapore remained under British administration until the Second World War and became a Crown Colony after the end of the conflict. Followed a brief period during which Singapore was part of the Federation of Malaya before becoming independent in 1965 and part of the Commonwealth of Nations.

From this history, Singapore conserved English as one of its four official languages as well as many landmarks that deserve a visit beside of INTERSPEECH. Amongst them, Singapore Botanic Garden, founded in 1859, is internationally renowned [3]. This urban garden of 74 hectares was laid there by Sir Raffles to cultivate and preserve local plants in the tradition of the tropical colonial gardens. Including a Rain Forest, several lakes, an orchid garden and a performance stage, Singapore Botanic Garden is a very popular place to enjoy free concerts on week end afternoons.

Other green spot in the “City in a Garden”, the Padang (field in Malay) was created by Sir Raffles, always him, who planned to reserve the space for public purposes. The place is now famous for the two cricket clubs founded in 1870 and 1883 at both ends of the field and the games that can be watched on weekends.

Amongst the numerous landmarks inherited from the British colonization, the most famous include St Andrew's Anglican cathedral, the Victoria Theater, the Fullerton building, Singapore's City Hall, Old Parliament house, the Central Fire Station and many black and white bungalows built from the 19^th century for the rich expatriate families. Some of those bungalows, now transformed in restaurant, will offer you a peaceful atmosphere to enjoy a local diner.

The role of English in Singapore

English has a special place in Singapore as it is the only national language which is not a “mother-tongue”. Indeed, Alsagoff [6] framed English as “cultureless” in that it is “disassociated from Western culture” in the Singaporean context. This cultural voiding makes English an ethnically neutral language used as lingua franca between ethnic groups [5] after replacing the local Malay in this role [4]. Interestingly, English is the only compulsory language of education, and its status in school is that of First Language, as opposed to the Second Language status delegated to the other official languages. By promoting the use of English as working language, the will of the government is to not advantage or disadvantage any ethnic group.

Nevertheless, the theoretical equality stated in the constitution between the four national languages is not always present in practice. For instance, English is overwhelming parliamentary business and some governmental websites are only available in English. Additionally, all legislation is in English only [4].

Singapore English

The standard Singapore English is almost similar to the British English although very cosmopolitan, with 42% of the population born outside the country. Nevertheless, a new standard of pronunciation has been emerging recently [1]. Interestingly, this pronunciation is independent of any external standard and some aspects of it cannot be predicted by reference to British English or any other variety of external English.

The other form of English that you will hear in Singapore is known as Singlish. It is a colorful Creole including words from the many languages spoken in Singapore such as various Chinese dialects (Hokkien, TeoChew, and Cantonese), Malay or Tamil. Many things might be said about Singlish and another newsletter will be especially dedicated to this local variant. Don't miss it!

[1] Deterding, David (2003). 'Emergent patterns in the vowels of Singapore English' National Institute of Education, Singapore. Retrieved 7 June 2013.

[2] http://www.yoursingapore.com/content/traveller/en/browse/aboutsingapore/a-brief-history.html
(on line January 7^th, 2014)

[3] http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5786/ , (on line January 7^th, 2014)

[4] Leimgruber, J. R. (2013). The management of multilingualism in a city-state: Language policy in Singapore. In I. G. Peter Siemund, Multilingualism and Language Contact in Urban Areas: Acquisition development, teaching, communication (pp. 229-258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[5] Harada, Shinichi. 'The Roles of Singapore Standard English and Singlish.' 情報研究 40 (2009): 69-81.

[6] Alsagoff, L. (2007). Singlish: Negotiating culture, capital and identity. In Language, Capital, Culture: Critical studies of language and education in Singapore (pp. 25-46). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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At the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula...

…INTERSPEECH 2014 will be held in Singapore, between Malaysia and Indonesia. In the constitution, Malays are acknowledge as the “indigenous people of Singapore”. Indeed, Malays are the predominant ethnic group inhabiting the Malay Peninsula, Eastern Sumatra, Brunei, coastal Borneo, part of Thailand, the Southern Burmese coast and Singapore. You get now a better understanding of why Malay is one of the four official – and the only national – language of Singapore.

A Malay history of Singapore

It is said that the city of Singapore was founded in 1299 BCE by a Prince from Palembang (South Sumatra, Indonesia), descendant of Alexander the Great. According to the legend, the Prince named the city Singapura (“Lion City”) after sighting a beast on the island. If it is highly doubtful that any Lion ever lived in Singapore outside the zoo, another story tells that the last surviving tiger in Singapore was shot at the bar of the Raffles Hotel in 1902.

Despite this auspicious foundation, the population of Pulau Ujong (the “island at the end”) did not exceed a thousand inhabitants when, in 1819, Sir Thomas Raffles decided to establish a new port to reinforce the British trade between China and India. At this time, the population consisted of different Malay groups (Orang Kallang, Orang Seletar, Orang Gelam, Orang Lauts) and a few Chinese. Nowadays, Malay count for 13.3% of Singapore's population with origins as diverse as Johor, Riau islands (for the Malays Proper), Java (Javanese), Baewan island (Baewanese), Celebes islands (Bugis) or Sumatra (Batak and Minangkabaus).

Malay language

With almost 220 million of speakers, the Malay language in its various forms unites the fifth largest language community in the world [1]. Origins of Malay language can be traced amongst the very first Austronesian languages, back to 2000 BCE [2]. Through the centuries, the major Indian religions brought a number of Sanskrit and Persian words to the Malay vocabulary while islamization of the South East Asia added Arabic influences [3]. Later on, languages from the colonization powers (mainly Dutch and British) and migrants (Chinese and Tamil) contributed to the diversity of Malay influences [4, 5]. In return Malay words have been loaned in other languages, e.g. in English: rice paddy, Orangutan, babirussa, cockatoo, compound, durian, rambutan, etc.

During the golden age of Malay empires, Malay has gained its foothold in territories of modern Malaysia and Indonesia where it became a vector for trade and business. Today, Malay is official language in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Singapore and is spoken in southern Thailand, Philippines or Cocos and Christmas Islands in Australia [6].

Malay counts a total of 35 phonemes: 6 vowels, 3 diphthongs and 27 consonants [1,5]. As an agglutinative language, its vocabulary can be enriched by adding affixes to the root words [7]. Affixations in Malay consist of prefixation, infixation, suffixation or circumfixation¹. Malay languages also have two proclitics, four enclitics and three particles that may be attached to an affixed word [8].

In Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, Malay is officially written using the Latin alphabet (Rumi) but an Arabic alphabet called Jawi is co-official in Brunei and Malaysia.

Bahasa Melayu in Singapore

Bahasa Melayu (or Malay Language) is one of the four official languages of Singapore, the ceremonial national language and is used in the national anthem or for military commands. However, several creoles remain spoken across the island. Amongst them, Bahasa Melayu Pasar or Bazaar Malay is a creole of Malay and Chinese which used to be the lingua franca and the language for trade between communities [4, 5]. Baba Malay, another variety of Malay Creole influenced by Hokkien and Bazaar Malay is still spoken by around 10,000 people in Singapore.

Today, Bahasa Melayu is the lingua franca among Malay, Javanese, Boyanese, other Indonesian groups and some Arabs in Singapore. It is used as a mean for transmitting familial and religious values amongst the Malay community as well as in “Madrasahs”, mosques and religious schools. However, with 35% of Malay pupils predominantly speaking English at home and a majority of Singaporeans being bilingual in English, Malay is facing competition from English which is taught as first language [5].

Selemat datang ke Singapura / Welcome to Singapore

Opportunities of discovering the Malay culture in Singapore are everywhere. Depending on time and location you might want to taste the Malay's cuisine or one of the succulent Malay cookies while walking around the streets of Kampong Glam or visiting the Malay heritage center.

[1] Tan, Tien-Ping, et al. 'MASS: A Malay language LVCSR corpus resource.' Speech Database and Assessments, 2009 Oriental COCOSDA International Conference on. IEEE, 2009.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Malay_language#Modern_Malay_.2820th_century_CE.29

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_language

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Malaysian_and_Indonesian

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Malay

[6] http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/malaysia.html

[7] B. Ranaivo-Malacon, 'Computational Analysis of Affixed Words in Malay Language,' presented at International Symposium on Malay /Indonesian Linguistics, Penang, 2004 .

[8] http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsACliticGrammar.htm

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Tamil and Indian Languages in Singapore

Our fifth step to INTERSPEECH 2014 brings us to the fourth official language of Singapore: Tamil. Today, Indians constitute 9% of the population of Singaporean citizens and permanent residents. They are considered as the third ethnic group in Singapore, although origins of Singaporean-Indians are diverse. Usually locally born, they are second, third, fourth or even fifth generation descendants of Punjabi, Hindi, Sindhi and Gujarati-speaking migrants from the Northern India and Malayalees, Telugu, and Tamil-speaking migrants from the Southern India. This latter group is the core of Singaporean-Indian population with 58% of the Indian community [2, 5].

Before 1819 and Sir Raffles^*,

Indianised Kingdoms, such as Srivijaya and Majapahit, radiated over South-East Asia. Influenced by Hindu and Buddhist culture, a large area including Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, part of Indonesia and Singapore, formed the Greater India. From this period, Singapore kept some of its most important pre-colonial artifacts such as the Singapore Stone and it is also reported that the hill of Fort Canning was chosen for the first settlement as a reference to the Hindu concept of Mount Meru which was associated to kingship in Indian culture [1].

Under British colony,

Indian migrants arrived to Singapore from different parts of India to fulfill functions such as clerks, soldiers, traders or English teachers. By 1824, 7% of the population was Indian (756 residents). The part of Indian population in Singapore increased until 1860 when it overtook the Malay community and became the second larger ethnic group of 16%. Due to the nature of this migration, Indians in Singapore were predominantly adult men. A settled community, with a more balanced gender and age ratio, only emerged by the mid-20^th century [2]. Although the Indian community increased for the following century, its ratio within the Singaporean population decreased until the 1980's, especially when the British withdrew their troupes after Singapore's independence in 1963.

After 1980, the immigration policy aimed at attracting educated people from other Asian countries to settle in Singapore. This change made the Indian population grow from 6.4% to 9%. In addition to this residential population, many ethnic Indian migrant workers temporarily come to work in Singapore (Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Malaysian Indians or Indian Indians)[3].

Tamil language

is one of the longest surviving classical languages in the world [8]. Existing for over 2,000 years, Tamil has a rich literature history and was the first Indian language to be declared a classical language by the Government of India in 2004. Earliest records of written Tamil were dated from around the 2^nd century BC and, despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical change, this language demonstrates grammatical continuity across 2 millennium.

Tamil is the most populous language from the Dravidian language-family, with important groups of speakers in Malaysia, Philippines, Mauritius, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Reunion and Vietnam. Significant communities can also be found in Canada, England, Fiji, Germany, Netherlands or United States. It is the official language in Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well as in Sri Lanka and Singapore.

Like Malay, another local language, Tamil is agglutinative. Affixes are added to words to mark noun class, number, case or verb tense, person, number, mood and voice [7]. Like Finish, not a local language, Tamil sets no limit to the length and extent of agglutination. This leads to long words with a large number of affixes in which its translation might require several sentences in other languages.

Phonology of Tamil is characterized by the use of retroflex consonants and multiple rhotics. Native grammarians classify phonemes into vowels, consonants and a secondary character called āytam. Aytam is an allophone of /r/ or /s/ at the end of an utterance. Vowels are called uyireḻuttu (uyir – life, eḻuttu – letter) and are classified into short (kuṟil), long (neṭil) (with five of each type) and two diphthongs. Unlike most of Indian languages, aspirated and unaspirated consonants are not distinguished in Tamil. Consonants are called meyyeḻuttu (mey—body, eḻuttu—letters) and count three categories: valliṉam—hard, melliṉam—soft or nasal, and iṭayiṉam—medium. Voiced and unvoiced consonants are not distinguished but voice is assigned depending on the position of the consonant in the word.

Tamil writing currently includes twelve vowels, eighteen consonants and one special character for the āytam that combine to form a total of 247 characters.

In Singapore,

Among all the Indian residents in Singapore, 38.8% speaks Tamil daily, 39% speak English, 11% speak Malay, and the remaining 11% speak other Indian languages [2, 4]. Tamil is one the two Indian languages taught as second language (mother tong) in public schools, together with Hindi. It also used in daily newspapers, free-to-air and cable television, radio channels, cinema or theaters [5].

In the multi-cultural environment of Singapore, Tamil influences the other local languages and vice versa. There is especially strong interaction Malay and the colloquial Singaporean English known as Singlish. Singaporean usage of Tamil includes some words from English and Malays while certain words or phrases that are considered archaic in India remain in use in Singapore [2].

During your stay in Singapore,

you can easily get to know Tamil culture through its many aspects. Having a walk in Little India, in which its architecture is protected since 1989, is a great opportunity to be exposed to Tamil music and lifestyle.

The two-storey shop-houses of Singapore's Indian hub host some of the best ambassadors of Indian cuisine. Here you'll find the local version of the Tamil cuisine that has evolved in response to local taste and influences of other cuisines present in Singapore. Other cuisines also include elements of Indian cuisine such as Singapore-Malay cuisine or Peranakan cuisine. Singaporean Tamil must-try include dishes such as achar, curry fish head, rojak, Indian mee goreng, murtabak, roti john, roti prata and teh tarik. Note that other Indian cuisines from Northern India can also be found.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indians_in_Singapore

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indians_in_Singapore

[3] Leow, Bee Geok (2001). Census of Population 2000: Demographic Characteristics. p.47-49.

[4] Singapore Census 2010

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_languages_in_Singapore

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_language

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_language

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Multilingualism in Singapore

In September (this year), when attending INTERSPEECH, get ready to experience a stimulating multilingual experience. Every year at INTERSPEECH one can hear many languages from all over the world and meet a number of multilingual researchers. However, unlike other editions of this conference, INTERSPEECH 2014 will be held in a highly multilingual environment. From 2000 until 2007, Singapore was ranked the most globalized nation in the world five times¹ considering flow of goods, services, people and communications. Indeed, in addition to the four official languages of Singapore, one can also experience many languages across the five continents in the wet markets and shopping malls of Singapore. What’s more interesting is, for many of these Singaporean, they code switch from one language to another naturally and effortlessly.

To speak or not to speak a language

Multilingualism is the ability to use more than one language. When the number of languages is reduced to two, which is the most common form, one talk about bilingualism. There are many ways to use a language so deciding what are the minimum abilities a person should have to be considered as bilingual is a difficult question. For a long time, linguists have limited the definition of bilingual to individuals who had native competency in two languages. This very restrictive definition, which assimilates bilingualism to ambilingualism has now been commonly extended. In its current interpretation, a bilingual person is one who can function at some level in two languages. Whether functioning consists of reading, speaking or, in the case of receptive bilingual, just understanding does not matter. The degree to which the bilingual subject can interact does not matter either and thus, the ability of asking your way in Bahasa Malayu toward a famous conference venue or reading a map in Chinese Mandarin makes you bilingual (as you read these lines).

Bilingualism and Multilingualism

Amongst the most famous multilingual speakers, is Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19th century Italian Cardinal, was reputed to speak 72 languages. If you consider claiming to know 72 languages to be a bit too gimmicky, consider this other case of a Hungarian interpreter during the cold war who was able to speak 16 languages (including Chinese and Russian) by the age of 86 [1]. Nevertheless, not all multilingual are hyper-polyglot as being able to learn 12 languages or more is not so common.

The complex mechanism of learning a new language is not clear yet and many questions remain, regarding a possible age limitation or the relationship between already mastered languages and the ease of learning a new one. Nevertheless, before considering learning an additional language you should be aware that this is a complicated process that has many effects. It might of course open your mind to other cultures and ways of thinking, but more importantly, it can deeply modify your brain. Neuroscience is a very active field when it comes to multilingualism. The powerful imaging tools available as well as the observation of subjects affected by trauma have led to a better understanding of the language learning process. Different language areas have been located within the brain and an augmented plasticity of the over-whole structure has been demonstrated for the case of multilingual speakers [2, 3]. Interestingly, the brain structure of simultaneous bilinguals, who learned two languages without formal education during childhood, is similar to that of monolingual subjects. On the contrary, learning a second language after gaining proficiency in the first language modifies the brain structure in an age-dependent manner [4].

Amongst the benefits of multilingualism, it has been shown that it increases the ability to detect grammatical errors and improve the reading ability. In the case of bimodal subjects, who use both a spoken language and a signed language, bilingualism improves the brain's executive function that directs the attention processes used for planning, solving problems and performing various mentally demanding tasks [2].

When it comes to society, multilingualism is the fact of having several languages spoken in a reduced area. Speakers don't have to interact or to be multilingual themselves. This phenomenon is observed in many countries or cities in the world and can take different forms. When a structural distribution of languages exists in the society, one talk about polyglossia. Multipart-lingualism refers to the case where most speakers are monolingual and speak different languages, while omnilingualism, the less common, describes the situation where no structural distribution can be observed and that it is nearly impossible to predict which language is going to be spoken in a certain context. That's the former one that you are going to experience in Singapore.

Multilingualism in Singapore

The city-state of Singapore is born from multi-multiculturalism and multilingualism. No wonder then that the choice of having four official languages was thought to be a central piece of the community harmony. In 1966, considering the lack of natural resources and the dominance of international trade in their local economy, Singaporean leaders decided to reinforce English as a medium of economic development [5]. In 1987, English was officially acknowledge as first language while others official languages were referred to as mother tongues [6]. Singapore's bilingualism is thus described as “English-knowing” because of the central role of English [7].

The success of Singapore is said to be partly the result of the language policy which fueled the globalization process of the Lion City [8]. Indeed, the promotion of English as the common neutral language amongst ethnic groups in Singapore facilitated Singapore's integration into the world economy. On the other hand, predominance of English has raised concerns about the decreasing usage of mother tongues and the demise of traditional cultural values [8].

In the last 30 years, language education has been undertaken by the state as one way to control globalization and to reduce the impact of Western culture that tends to replace Asian culture [8]. The growing importance of Western culture in Singapore is reflected by the shift in home languages towards English. Therefore, to reinforce the Asian cultural identity, Singapore's government has emphasized the learning of mother tongues. This policy is considered controversial to some as it led to the popularity of Mandarin Chinese and Bahasa Malayu at the expense of the loss of many other Chinese and Malay language varieties. It is no doubt a delicate and challenging trade-off between preserving language diversity and enforcing common languages for the convenience of communication and economic development.

Moving away from a language policy stemming from boosting economic development will probably take time. The implicit role of languages in Singapore’s multi-ethnic society can be significant yet complex. However, there is no doubt that Singaporeans consider multilingualism as a major component of their national identity that relies not only on the four official languages. One way to realize that during your stay with us is to ask any Singaporean about her/his language background and to get immersed in the rich diversity of spoken languages in Singapore .

[1] http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/multilingualism (accessed on 7 April, 2014)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_to_bilingualism (accessed on 7 April, 2014)

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_multilingualism (accessed on 7 April, 2014)

[4] Klein, D., Mok, K., Chen, J. K., & Watkins, K. E. (2013). Age of language learning shapes brain structure: A cortical thickness study of bilingual and monolingual individuals. Brain and language.

[5] 'Interview: Chinese Language education in Singapore faces new opportunities'. People's Daily Online. 2005-05-13. (accessed on 7 April, 2014)

[6] Pakir, A. (2001). Bilingual education with English as an official language: Sociocultural implications. GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ROUND TABLE ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS 1999, 341.

[7] Tupas, R. (2011). English knowing bilingualism in Singapore: Economic pragmatics, ethnic relations and class. English language education across greater China, 46-69.

[8] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/cultural-diversity/languages-and-multilingualism/ (accessed on 7 April, 2014)

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Language Education

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

Nelson Mandela

There is no doubt that this quote will continue to inspire generations of language learners despite the recent advancement of statistical machine translation. Before learning more about the latest discovery in language learning and machine translation during INTERSPEECH 2014, the newsletter of this month is dedicated to language education in Singapore.

Brief history of language education

Discovery of the “New World” is sometimes considered as the starting point of globalization. Of course travelers, merchants and scholars didn't wait that long to study languages but, surprisingly, theorization of language education is quite recent. In the 17^th century, Latin was commonly used for education, language and religion in the Western countries. Its teaching was almost exclusively done through grammatical aspects until Jan Amos Komenský, a Czech teacher and educator, created a complete course for learning this language [12]. Jan Amos Komenský major contributions also include the invention of the primer and textbook which are now widely used to teach reading and languages.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, research on language education sped up and led to a large number teaching practices which were supposed to improve the experience of language learners. In 1963, Anthony [14] proposed a three-layer hierarchical framework to describe language teaching including approaches, methods and techniques. Approaches are related to general concepts about the nature of languages, while methods refer to the over-whole plan of the language teaching organization which is implemented in class through techniques which aim at achieving short term objectives. Anthony's framework was later extended by Richards and Rogers [15], who especially extended the concepts of methods and techniques to designs and procedures that were intended to be more specific and less descriptive.

Amongst the most popular, the structural methods consider languages through the prism of grammar, functional methods focus more on languages as a vehicle to accomplish certain functions and interactive ones emphasize on social relations such as acts, negotiation and interactions. Of course this list is not exhaustive and do not address the complexity of the whole range of existing methods.

Language education in the world

In Africa, where most countries used to be colonized, language policies strongly depend on the former colonial power and its tolerance of the local languages [16] but also on the post-independence political evolution, on the socio-linguistic contour of each country and on the level of education. During colonization, the French, Portuguese and Spanish used to teach their language at all levels and from the first day of school. The Germans did promote their language while giving prominence to local languages in the first years of schooling and the British conducted the first year of education in the local language before changing it to English in the following years. In some parts of Western Africa, British even encourage the teaching of certain languages such as Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Efik, Ga, or Ewe but kept English as a reference point. After independence, most of the African countries considered reforming education to promote indigenous languages but in a lot of cases, those politics have been questioned as teaching in the mother tongue could weaken the national unity. Of course, it has been easier for the few monolingual countries (Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Madagascar, etc.) to promote education in their native languages while some multilingual countries have chosen to develop regional languages. For instance, Zambia uses six zonal languages in education, Zaire four, and Togo two. For economical reasons, English and French are still taught across the former colonies and are still strong factor of regional cohesion.

Bilingual education in South America mostly refers to the teaching of a “mainstream” language such as Spanish or Portuguese to non-Spanish and non-Portuguese speaking people [17]. It usually follows a “transition” or “maintenance” model. In the first one, the official language progressively replaces the mother tongue while the second one makes use of the two languages through the whole curriculum. Language distribution in South America is mainly characterized by the fact that many populations are located in isolated area where communication and outside contact are poor and thus, monolingualism is prevalent. In this context, a number of countries have launched bilingual education programs in the 1970's. Those programs have provided good results since bilingual education improved education amongst indigenous children.

North America’s modern history includes periods of colonialism too. However, the language education evolved in a very different way and strongly differ between Canada and U.S.. In the 19^th century, U.S. was especially friendly towards bilingualism as immigrant communities commonly maintained and published in their native language [19]. Starting from the 1880's, and due to a huge influx of non-English speaking immigrants, English was used to develop an “American” identity. Monolingualism as then become the norm and second language learning is still uncommon before high school. Therefore, only 15 to 20 percent of Americans consider themselves bilingual compared to 56 percent of European (European commission survey, 2006). The most common second languages taught in the U.S. include Spanish, due to the large number of recent Spanish-speaking immigrants, followed by French, German, Latin, Mandarin, Italian and Japanese, in descending order of frequency. As a multilingual country, Canada allows two languages of instruction: English by default and French in the case of “Francophone children whose parents qualify for minority language rights” [18]. Additionally, aboriginal languages can be taught as a second language as all students are required to learn a second language from 9 to 14 years old.

In Europe, all children studied at least one foreign language as part of their compulsory curriculum except in Ireland where instruction includes English and Irish, both considered a native language, and a third European language. In all European countries, English is by far the most commonly learned language before French, Spanish, German and Russian. On average, children start learning a second language between 6 and 9 years old [20]. This age has strongly decreased in the last 15 years and it is now common for children to start learning in pre-school. However, the weekly number of hours spent learning a language did not really increased in the same time. Due to the multilingual context, and in order to encourage cross-border exchanges, the European Union strongly encourages learning of foreign languages and, on average, in 2009/10, 60.8% of lower secondary education students were learning two or more foreign languages. From a local point of view, almost all European countries have regional languages and more than half of the countries use partial immersion to teach both the minority and the state language.

In South-East Asia, 550 millions inhabitants speak hundreds of languages including local (Javanese, Hmong for example), national (Khmer, Thai, for instance) and regional languages (varieties of Chinese and Malay) [2]. Amongst the eleven countries of this region, all except Thailand have endured colonization and been exposed to European languages: Dutch in Indonesia, English in Brunei, Burma, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore, French in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and Portuguese in East Timor. After decolonization, most governments used languages to strengthen national cohesion and forge a national identity. All eleven Southeast Asian countries have included English in education, often as a foreign language. In certain countries, however, instruction is given in the national language while sciences and technologies are taught in a foreign language, for instance English in Myanmar and French in Laos.

Singapore:

Under British colonial rule, school systems in the main four languages, namely Chinese Mandarin, English, Malay and Tamil, cohabited in Singapore [4]. After World War II, the schools were gradually brought under the control of the government, which decided to establish one of the existing languages as lingua franca to strengthen the national unity. Amongst the possible languages, Malay was considered a good choice given the integration of Singapore to the Federation of Malaya, and Hokkien was already spoken by the majoritys of Chinese Singaporeans. However, the government decided to chose English as it was both a tool for economic development and an ethnic neutral language in the context of Singapore’s multi-ethnic population including Chinese, Malay and Indian.

The bilingual education policy was officially introduced in 1966 with the possibility to teach English as a first or second language. However, schools teaching English as a second language declined rapidly as English was considered a key element for professional success. By 1986, there remained a single class of 28 secondary school students following a curriculum in Malay and Malay-medium schools, came to a natural demise like the Tamil-medium schools in 1982. Chinese-medium schools were removed by the government [4]. The government then officially defined English as the first language and the three other official languages as mother tongues. In a will of preserving the Asian culture in Singapore, the government imposed the learning of the mother tongue as second language. This mother tongue is determined for each student depending on her/his ethnicity. Therefore, Malay Singaporean have to learn Bahasa Malayu, Chinese learn Mandarin while Indian from a Dravidian language learn Tamil. Indian is a special case as non-Vernacular Languages like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati and Urdu can be chosen as a mother tongue by non-Tamil but the state does not provide teachers in those languages [3]. On the opposite, all Singaporean Chinese have to learn Mandarin despite the various linguistic backgrounds present in the local community. Due to this policy, importance of non-Mandarin Chinese languages strongly decreased in the last 50 years and Mandarin is now the first-spoken language in Singaporean homes. Since 2002, Chinese associations in Singapore propose dialect classes in order to reconnect the population with its Chinese culture and enable the younger generation to talk to elderly [3]. A third language can be learn starting from secondary school for which students can chose amongst Mandarin (for non-Chinese), Malay (for non-Malays), Bahasa Indonesia (for non-Malays), Arabic, Japanese (only for Chinese), French, German and Spanish [4,6].

Although it is one of the reasons of Singapore's exceptional economic success, bilingual policy has been, according to the government itself, a cultural failure. By promoting English as a business and inter-ethnic language, the bilingual policy made other languages less attractive to the younger generation. Additionally, the mother tongues have been taught as discipline while using methods developed for a native language. As a consequence, many Singaporean students don't see the point of learning a language which is not a vector of culture but only a subject of study. Realizing this mistake, the government recently decided to make language learning more interesting and IT-based. For example, language learning through the use of smart phones and on-line computer games [5,10]

From a wider perspective, Singapore is unique in Asia as it has a strong national education system at a moment where other countries massively privatize instruction [11] and also because of the way, probably unparalleled in any other developed country, the state’s intervention changed the people’s language and speech patterns [1].

[1] Language, Society and Education in Singapore: Issues and Trends (Second Edition); S. Gopinathan, Anne Pakir, Ho Wah Kam and Vanithamani Saravanan (Eds.); Times Academic Press, Singapore, 1998

[2] Language Education Policies in Southeast Asia, T Clayton, elsevier

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_education_in_Singapore

[5] news.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20100603-219929.html

[6] http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2004/pr20040318.htm

[7] http://www.moelc.moe.edu.sg/index.php/courses

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20131002211453/http://libguides.nl.sg/content.php?pid=57257&sid=551371

[9] http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=_Wsh1EbUJB0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

[10] http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/multimedia-aid-chinese-instruction-singapore-schools

[11] Globalization and Multilingualism in Singapore: Implications for a hybrid identity

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_education

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_education_by_region

[14] Anthony, E. M. (1963). 'Approach, Method, and Technique'. ELT Journal (2): 63–43. doi:10.1093/elt/XVII.2.63

[15] Richards, Jack; Rogers, Theodore (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-00843-3

[16] http://fafunwafoundation.tripod.com/fafunwafoundation/id7.html

[17] http://faculty.smu.edu/rkemper/anth_6306/anth_6306_language_and_education_in_latin_america.htm

[18] http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/topic.page?id=93A2746B883E4DA89C4E7E584D447E4B

[19] http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2013/10/06/americans-suffer-from-inadequate-foreign-language-education

[20] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-990_en.htm

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Interspeech 2014

 Singapore 

September 14-18, 2014

INTERSPEECH 2014 paper submission deadline is on 24 March 2014.  There will be no extension of deadline.  Get ready your paper submissions and gear up for INTERSPEECH in Singapore.

INTERSPEECH is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on issues surrounding the science and technology of spoken language processing, both in humans and in machines.

The theme of INTERSPEECH 2014 is 'Celebrating the Diversity of Spoken Languages'. INTERSPEECH 2014 emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach covering all aspects of speech science and technology spanning basic theories to applications. In addition to regular oral and poster sessions, the conference will also feature plenary talks by internationally renowned experts, tutorials, special sessions, show & tell sessions, and exhibits. A number of satellite events will take place immediately before and after the conference. Please follow the details of these and other news at the INTERSPEECH website www.interspeech2014.org.

We invite you to submit original papers in any related area, including but not limited to:

1: Speech Perception and Production

2: Prosody, Phonetics, Phonology, and Para-/Non- Linguistic Information

3: Analysis of Speech and Audio Signals

4: Speech Coding and Enhancement

5: Speaker and Language Identification

6: Speech Synthesis and Spoken Language Generation

7: Speech Recognition - Signal Processing, Acoustic Modeling, Robustness, and Adaptation

8: Speech Recognition - Architecture, Search & Linguistic Components

9: LVCSR and Its Applications, Technologies and Systems for New Applications

10: Spoken Language Processing - Dialogue, Summarization, Understanding

11: Spoken Language Processing -Translation, Info Retrieval

12: Spoken Language Evaluation, Standardization and Resources 

A detailed description of these areas is accessible at: 

http://www.interspeech2014.org/public.php?page=conference_areas.html

Paper Submission

Papers for the INTERSPEECH 2014 proceedings should be up to 4 pages of text, plus one page (maximum) for references only. Paper submissions must conform to the format defined in the paper preparation guidelines and provided in the Authors’ kit, on the INTERSPEECH 2014 website, along with the Call for Papers. Optionally, authors may submit additional files, such as multimedia files, which will be included in the official conference proceedings USB drive. Authors must declare that their contributions are original and are not being submitted for publication elsewhere (e.g. another conference, workshop, or journal). Papers must be submitted via the online paper submission system, which will be opened in February 2014. The conference will be conducted in English. Information on the paper submission procedure is available at:

http://www.interspeech2014.org/public.php?page=submission_procedure.html

There will be NO extension to the full paper submission deadline.

Important Dates

We look forward to welcoming you to INTERSPEECH 2014 in Singapore!

Helen Meng and Bin Ma

Technical Program Chairs

Contact

Email: tpc@interspeech2014.org

organizers.interspeech2014@isca-speech.org— For general enquiries

Conference website: www.interspeech2014.org

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Call for Proposals

Speech Technology for the Interspeech App

During the past Interspeech conference in Lyon, a mobile application (app) was provided for accessing the conference program, designing personal schedules, inspecting abstracts, full papers and the list of authors, navigating through the conference center, or recommending papers to colleagues. This app was designed by students and researchers of the Quality and Usability Lab, TU Berlin, and will be made available to ISCA and to future conference and workshop organizers free-of-charge. It will also be used for the upcoming Interspeech 2014 in Singapore, and is available under both iOS and Android.

In its current state, the app is limited to mostly touch-based input and graphical output. However, we would like to develop the app into a useful tool for the spoken language community at large, which should include speech input and output capabilities, and potentially full spoken-language and multimodal interaction. The app could also be used for collecting speech data under realistic environmental conditions, for distributing multimedia examples or surveys during the conference, or for other research purposes. In addition, the data which is being collected with the app (mostly interaction usage patterns) could be analyzed further.

The Quality and Usability Lab of TU Berlin would like to invite interested parties to contribute to this development. Contributions could be made by providing ready-built modules (e.g. ASR, TTS, or alike) for integration into the app, by proposing new functionalities which would be of interest to a significant part of the community, and preferably by offering workforce for such future developments.

If you are interested in contributing to this, please send an email with your proposals to

interspeechapp@qu.tu-berlin.de

by October 31, 2013. In case that a sufficient number of interested parties can be found, we plan to submit a proposal for a special session around speech technology in mobile applications for the upcoming Interspeech in Singapore.

More information on the current version of the app can be found in: Schleicher, R., Westermann, T., Li, J., Lawitschka, M., Mateev, B., Reichmuth, R., Möller, S. (2013). Design of a Mobile App for Interspeech Conferences: Towards an Open Tool for the Spoken Language Community, in: Proc. 14th Ann. Conf. of the Int. Speech Comm. Assoc. (Interspeech 2013), Aug. 25-29, Lyon.

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It is a great pleasure to announce that the 15^th edition of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH) will be held in Singapore during September 14-18, 2014. INTERSPEECH 2014 will bring together the community to celebrate the diversity of spoken languages in the vibrant city state of Singapore.  INTERSPEECH 2014 is proudly organized by the Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society (COLIPS), the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Ten steps to Singapore

You want to know more about Singapore?

During the next ten months, the organization committee will introduce you to Singaporean culture through a series of brief newsletters featuring topics related to spoken languages in Singapore. Please stay tuned!

Workshops

Submission deadline:  December 1, 2013

Satellite workshops related to speech and language research will be hosted in Singapore as well as in Phuket Island, Thailand (1 hr 20 min flight from Singapore) and in Penang, Malaysia (1 hr flight from Singapore).

Proposals must be submitted by email to workshops@interspeech2014.org before December 1, 2013. Notification of acceptance and ISCA approval/sponsorship will be announced by January 31, 2014.

Sponsorship and Exhibition

The objective of INTERSPEECH 2014 is to foster scientific exchanges in all aspects of Speech Communication sciences with a special focus on the diversity of spoken languages. We are pleased to invite you to take part in this major event as a sponsor. For more information, view the Sponsorship
Brochure.

Conference venue

INTERSPEECH 2014 main conference will be held in the MAX Atria @ Singapore Expo.

Organizers

Lists of the organizing, advisory and technical program committees are available on line (here).

Follow us

Facebook: ISCA

Twitter: @Interspeech2014 follow hash tags: #is2014 or #interspeech2014

LinkedIn Interspeech

Contact

Conference website: www.interspeech2014.org

organizers.interspeech2014@isca-speech.org— For general enquiries

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Interspeech 2014 special session : Speech technologies for Ambient Assisted Living.

Submission deadline: 24th March 2014

Singapore, 14-18 September 2014

http://www.interspeech2014.org/public.php?page=special_sessions.html#speech-technologies-ambient This special session focuses on the use of speech technologies for ambient assisted living, the creation of smart spaces and intelligent companions that can preserve independence and executive function, social communication and security of people with special needs. Currently, speech input for assistive technologies remains underutilized despite its potential to deliver highly informative data and serve as the primary means of interaction with the home. Speech interfaces could replace or augment obtrusive and sometimes outright inaccessible conventional computer interfaces. Moreover, the smart home context can support speech communication by providing a number of concurrent information sources (e.g., wearable sensors, home automation sensors, etc.), enabling multimodal communication. In practice, its use remains limited due to challenging real-world conditions, and because conventional speech interfaces can have difficulty with the atypical speech of many users. This, in turn, can be attributed to the lack of abundant speech material, and the limited adaptation to the user of these systems. Taking up the challenges of this domain requires a multidisciplinary approach to define the user's needs, record corpora in realistic usage conditions, develop speech interfaces that are robust to both environment and user's characteristics and are able to adapt to specific users. This special session aims at bringing together researchers in speech and audio technologies with people from the ambient assisted living and assistive technologies communities to meet and foster awareness between members of either community, discuss problems, techniques and datasets, and perhaps initiate common projects. Topics of the session will include: Assistive speech technology Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living Understanding, modelling, or recognition of aged and atypical speech Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR) Multimodal emotion recognition Audio scene and smart space context analysis Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications Language modelling for Augmentative and Alternative Communication text entry and speech generating devices Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes Evaluation of systems and components. Submission instructions: Researchers who are interested in contributing to this special session are invited to submit a paper according to the regular submission procedure of INTERSPEECH 2014, and to select 'Speech technologies for Ambient Assisted Living' in the special session field of the paper submission form. Please feel free to contact the organisers if you have any question regarding the special session.

Organizers: Michel Vacher michel.vacher [at] imag.fr Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, François Portet francois.portet [at] imag.fr Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, Frank Rudzicz frank [at] cs.toronto.edu University of Toronto, Jort F. Gemmeke jgemmeke [at] amadana.nl KU Leuven, Heidi Christensen h.christensen [at] dcs.shef.ac.uk University of Sheffield,

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--- INTERSPEECH 2014 - SINGAPORE

--- September 14-18, 2014

--- http://www.INTERSPEECH2014.org

INTERSPEECH is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on issues surrounding

the science and technology of spoken language processing, both in humans and in machines.

The theme of INTERSPEECH 2014 is

--- Celebrating the Diversity of Spoken Languages ---

INTERSPEECH 2014 includes a number of special sessions covering interdisciplinary topics

and/or important new emerging areas of interest related to the main conference topics.

Special sessions proposed for the forthcoming edition are:

• A Re-evaluation of Robustness

• Deep Neural Networks for Speech Generation and Synthesis

• Exploring the Rich Information of Speech Across Multiple Languages

• INTERSPEECH 2014 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE)

• Multichannel Processing for Distant Speech Recognition

• Open Domain Situated Conversational Interaction

• Phase Importance in Speech Processing Applications

• Speaker Comparison for Forensic and Investigative Applications

• Text-dependent for Short-duration Speaker Verification

• Tutorial Dialogues and Spoken Dialogue Systems

• Visual Speech Decoding

A description of each special session is given below.

For paper submission, please follow the main conference procedure and chose the Special Session track when selecting

your paper area.

Paper submission procedure is described at:

http://www.INTERSPEECH2014.org/public.php?page=submission_procedure.html

For more information, feel free to contact the Special Session Chair,

Dr. Tomi H. Kinnunen, at email tkinnu [at]cs.uef.fi

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Special Session Description

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Re-evaluation of Robustness

The goal of the session is to facilitate a re-evaluation of robust speech

recognition in the light of recent developments. It’s a re-evaluation at two levels:

• a re-evaluation in perspective brought by breakthroughs in performance obtained

by Deep Neural Network which leads to a fresh questioning of the role and

contribution of robust feature extraction.

• A literal re-evaluation on common databases to be able to present and compare

performances of different algorithms and system approaches to robustness.

Paper submissions are invited on the theme of noise robust speech recognition

and required to submit results on the Aurora 4 database to facilitate cross comparison

of the performance between different techniques.

Recent developments raise interesting research questions that the session aims to help

Progress by bringing focus and exploration of these issues. For example

1. What role is there for signal processing to create feature representations to use as

inputs to Deep Learning or can deep learning do all the work?

2. What feature representations can be automatically learnt in a deep learning architecture?

3. What other techniques can give great improvement in robustness?

4. What techniques don’t work and why?

The session organizers wish to encourage submissions that bring insight and understanding to

the issues highlighted above. Authors are requested not only to present absolute performance

of the whole system but also to highlight the contribution made by various components in a

complex system.

Papers that are accepted for the session are encouraged to also evaluate their techniques on new test

data sets (available in July) and submit their results at the end of August.

Session organization

The session will be structured as a combination of

1. Invited talks

2. Oral paper presentations

3. Poster presentations

4. Summary of contributions and results on newly released test sets

5. Discussion

Organizers:

David Pearce, Audience dpearce [at]audience.com

Hans-Guenter Hirsch, Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, hans-guenter.hirsch [at]hs-niederrhein.de

Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, University of Paderborn, haeb [at]nt.uni-paderborn.de

Michael Seltzer, Microsoft, mseltzer [at]microsoft.com

Keikichi Hirose, The University of Tokyo, hirose [at]gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh, s.renals [at]ed.ac.uk

Sim Khe Chai, National University of Singapore, simkc [at]comp.nus.edu.sg

Niko Moritz, Fraunhofer IDMT, Oldenburg, niko.moritz [at]idmt.fraunhofer.de

K K Chin, Google, kkchin [at]google.com

Deep Neural Networks for Speech Generation and Synthesis

This special session aims to bring together researchers who work actively on deep neural

networks for speech research, particularly, in generation and synthesis, to promote and

to understand better the state-of-art DNN research in statistical learning and compare

results with the parametric HMM-GMM model which has been well-established for speech synthesis,

generation, and conversion. DNN, with its neuron-like structure, can simulate human speech

production system in a layered, hierarchical, nonlinear and self-organized network.

It can transform linguistic text information into intermediate semantic, phonetic and prosodic

content and finally generate speech waveforms. Many possible neural network architectures or

typologies exist, e.g. feed-forward NN with multiple hidden layers, stacked RBM or CRBM,

Recurrent Neural Net (RNN), which have been used to speech/image recognition and other applications.

We would like to use this special session as a forum to present updated results in the research frontiers,

algorithm development and application scenarios. Particular focused areas will be on

parametric TTS synthesis, voice conversion, speech compression, de-noising and speech enhancement.

Organizers:

Yao Qian, Microsoft Research Asia, yaoqian [at]microsoft.com

Frank K. Soong, Microsoft Research Asia, frankkps [at]microsoft.com

Exploring the Rich Information of Speech Across Multiple Languages

Spoken language is the most direct means of communication between human beings. However,

speech communication often demonstrates its language-specific characteristics because of,

for instance, the linguistic difference (e.g., tonal vs. non-tonal, monosyllabic vs. multisyllabic)

across languages. Our knowledge on the diversities of speech science across languages is still limited,

including speech perception, linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., emotion) information, etc.

This knowledge is of great significance to facilitate our design of language-specific application of

speech techniques (e.g., automatic speech recognition, assistive hearing devices) in the future.

This special session will provide an opportunity for researchers from various communities

(including speech science, medicine, linguistics and signal processing) to stimulate further discussion

and new research in the broad cross-language area, and present their latest research on understanding

the language-specific features of speech science and their applications in the speech communication of

machines and human beings. This special session encourages contributions all fields on speech science,

e.g., production and perception, but with a focus on presenting the language-specific characteristics

and discussing their implications to improve our knowledge on the diversities of speech science across

multiple languages. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. characteristics of acoustic, linguistic and language information in speech communication across

multiple languages;

2. diversity of linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., emotion) information among multiple spoken languages;

3. language-specific speech intelligibility enhancement and automatic speech recognition techniques; and

4. comparative cross-language assessment of speech perception in challenging environments.

Organizers:

Junfeng Li, Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, junfeng.li.1979 [at]gmail.com

Fei Chen, The University of Hong Kong, feichen1 [at]hku.hk

INTERSPEECH 2014 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE)

The INTERSPEECH 2014 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) is an open Challenge

dealing with speaker characteristics as manifested in their speech signal's acoustic properties.

This year, it introduces new tasks by the Cognitive Load Sub-Challenge, the Physical Load

Sub-Challenge, and a Multitask Sub-Challenge: For these Challenge tasks,

the COGNITIVE-LOAD WITH SPEECH AND EGG database (CLSE), the MUNICH BIOVOICE CORPUS (MBC),

and the ANXIETY-DEPRESSION-EMOTION-SLEEPINESS audio corpus (ADES) with high diversity of

speakers and different languages covered (Australian English and German) are provided by the organizers.

All corpora provide fully realistic data in challenging acoustic conditions and feature rich

annotation such as speaker meta-data. They are given with distinct definitions of test,

development, and training partitions, incorporating speaker independence as needed in most

real-life settings. Benchmark results of the most popular approaches are provided as in the years before.

Transcription of the train and development sets will be known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors

to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature set

will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have to stick to the definition of

training, development, and test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set,

but have only five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are unknown to them.

Each participation will be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes peer-review

and has to be accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge.

The results of the Challenge will be presented in a Special Session at INTERSPEECH 2014 in Singapore.

Further, contributions using the Challenge data or related to the Challenge but not competing within

the Challenge are also welcome.

More information is given also on the Challenge homepage:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is14-compare

Organizers:

Björn Schuller, Imperial College London / Technische Universität München,schuller [at]IEEE.org

Stefan Steidl, Friedrich-Alexander-University, stefan.steidl [at]fau.de

Anton Batliner, Technische Universität München / Friedrich-Alexander-University,

batliner [at]cs.fau.de

Jarek Krajweski, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, krajewsk [at]uni-wuppertal.de

Julien Epps, The University of New South Wales / National ICT Australia, j.epps [at]unsw.edu.au

Multichannel Processing for Distant Speech Recognition

Distant speech recognition in real-world environments is still a challenging problem: reverberation

and dynamic background noise represent major sources of acoustic mismatch that heavily decrease ASR

performance, which, on the contrary, can be very good in close-talking microphone setups.

In this context, a particularly interesting topic is the adoption of distributed microphones for

the development of voice-enabled automated home environments based on distant-speech interaction:

microphones are installed in different rooms and the resulting multichannel audio recordings capture

multiple audio events, including voice commands or spontaneous speech, generated in various locations

and characterized by a variable amount of reverberation as well as possible background noise.

The focus of the proposed special session will be on multichannel processing for automatic speech recognition (ASR)

in such a setting. Unlike other robust ASR tasks, where static adaptation or training with noisy data sensibly

ameliorates performance, the distributed microphone scenario requires full exploitation of multichannel

information to reduce the highly variable dynamic mismatch. To facilitate better evaluation of the proposed

algorithms the organizers will provide a set of multichannel recordings in a domestic environment.

The recordings will include spoken commands mixed with other acoustic events occurring in different

rooms of a real apartment.

The data is being created in the frame of the EC project DIRHA (Distant speech Interaction for Robust

Home Applications)

which addresses the challenges of speech interaction for home automation.

The organizers will release the evaluation package (datasets and scripts) on February 17;

the participants are asked to submit a regular paper reporting speech recognition results

on the evaluation set and comparing their performance with the provided reference baseline.

Further details are available at: http://dirha.fbk.eu/INTERSPEECH2014

Organizers:

Marco Matassoni, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, matasso [at]fbk.eu

Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, ramon.astudillo [at]inesc-id.pt

Athanasios Katsamanis, National Technical University of Athens, nkatsam [at]cs.ntua.gr

Open Domain Situated Conversational Interaction

Robust conversational systems have the potential to revolutionize our interactions with computers.

Building on decades of academic and industrial research, we now talk to our computers, phones,

and entertainment systems on a daily basis. However, current technology typically limits conversational

interactions to a few narrow domains/topics (e.g., weather, traffic, restaurants). Users increasingly want

the ability to converse with their devices over broad web-scale content. Finding something on your PC or

the web should be as simple as having a conversation.

A promising approach to address this problem is situated conversational interaction. The approach leverages

the situation and/or context of the conversation to improve system accuracy and effectiveness.

Sources of context include visual content being displayed to the user, Geo-location, prior interactions,

multi-modal interactions (e.g., gesture, eye gaze), and the conversation itself. For example, while a user

is reading a news article on their tablet PC, they initiate a conversation to dig deeper on a particular topic.

Or a user is reading a map and wants to learn more about the history of events at mile marker 121.

Or a gamer wants to interact with a game’s characters to find the next clue in their quest.

All of these interactions are situated – rich context is available to the system as a source of priors/constraints

on what the user is likely to say.

This special session will provide a forum to discuss research progress in open domain situated

conversational interactions.

Topics of the session will include:

• Situated context in spoken dialog systems

• Visual/dialog/personal/geo situated context

• Inferred context through interpretation and reasoning

• Open domain spoken dialog systems

• Open domain spoken/natural language understanding and generation

• Open domain semantic interpretation

• Open domain dialog management (large-scale belief state/policy)

• Conversational Interactions

• Multi-modal inputs in situated open domains (speech/text + gesture, touch, eye gaze)

• Multi-human situated interactions

Organizers:

Larry Heck, Microsoft Research, larry [at]ieee.org

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Microsoft Research, dilek [at]ieee.org

Gokhan Tur, Microsoft Research, gokhan [at]ieee.org

Steve Young, Cambridge University, sjy [at]eng.cam.ac.uk

Phase Importance in Speech Processing Applications

In the past decades, the amplitude of speech spectrum is considered to be the most important feature in

different speech processing applications and phase of the speech signal has received less

attention. Recently, several findings justify the phase importance in speech and audio processing communities.

The importance of phase estimation along with amplitude estimation in speech enhancement,

complementary phase-based features in speech and speaker recognition and phase-aware acoustic

modeling of environment are the most prominent

reported works scattered in different communities of speech and audio processing. These examples suggest

that incorporating the phase information can push the limits of state-of-the-art phase-independent solutions

employed for long in different aspects of audio and speech signal processing. This Special Session aims

to explore the recent advances and methodologies to exploit the knowledge of signal phase information in different

aspects of speech processing. Without a dedicated effort to bring researchers from different communities,

a quick advance in investigation towards the phase usefulness in speech processing applications

is difficult to achieve. Therefore, as the first step in this direction, we aim to promote the 'phase-aware

speech and audio signal processing' to form a community of researchers to organize the next steps.

Our initiative is to unify these efforts to better understand the pros and cons of using phase and the degree

of feasibility for phase estimation/enhancement in different areas of speech processing including: speech

enhancement, speech separation, speech quality estimation, speech and speaker recognition,

voice transformation and speech analysis and synthesis. The goal is to promote the importance of

the phase-based signal processing and studying its importance and sharing interesting findings from different

speech processing applications.

Organizers:

Pejman Mowlaee, Graz University of Technology, pejman.mowlaee [at]tugraz.at

Rahim Saeidi, University of Eastern Finland, rahim.saeidi [at]uef.fi

Yannis Styilianou, Toshiba Labs Cambridge UK / University of Crete, yannis [at]csd.uoc.gr

Speaker Comparison for Forensic and Investigative Applications

In speaker comparison, speech/voice samples are compared by humans and/or machines

for use in investigation or in court to address questions that are of interest to the legal system.

Speaker comparison is a high-stakes application that can change people’s lives and it demands the best

that science has to offer; however, methods, processes, and practices vary widely.

These variations are not necessarily for the better and though recognized, are not generally appreciated

and acted upon. Methods, processes, and practices grounded in science are critical for the proper application

(and non-application) of speaker comparison to a variety of international investigative and forensic applications.

This special session will contribute to scientific progress through 1) understanding speaker comparison

for investigative and forensic application (e.g., describe what is currently being done and critically

analyze performance and lessons learned); 2) improving speaker comparison for investigative and forensic

applications (e.g., propose new approaches/techniques, understand the limitations, and identify challenges

and opportunities); 3) improving communications between communities of researchers, legal scholars,

and practitioners internationally (e.g., directly address some central legal, policy, and societal questions

such as allowing speaker comparisons in court, requirements for expert witnesses, and requirements for specific

automatic or human-based methods to be considered scientific); 4) using best practices (e.g., reduction of bias

and presentation of evidence); 5) developing a roadmap for progress in this session and future sessions; and 6)

producing a documented contribution to the field. Some of these objectives will need multiple sessions

to fully achieve and some are complicated due to differing legal systems and cultures.

This special session builds on previous successful special sessions and tutorials in forensic applications

of speaker comparison at INTERSPEECH beginning in 2003. Wide international participation is planned,

including researchers from the ISCA SIGs for the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP)

and the Speaker and Language Characterization (SpLC).

Organizers:

Joseph P. Campbell, PhD, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, jpc [at]ll.mit.edu

Jean-François Bonastre, l'Université d'Avignon, jean-francois.bonastre [at]univ-avignon.fr

Text-dependent for Short-duration Speaker Verification

In recent years, speaker verification engines have reached maturity and have been deployed in

commercial applications. Ergonomics of such applications is especially demanding and imposes

a drastic limitation in terms of speech duration during authentication. A well known tactic to address

the problem of lack of data, due to short duration, is using text-dependency. However, recent breakthroughs

achieved in the context of text-independent speaker verification in terms of accuracy and robustness

do not benefit text-dependent applications. Indeed, large development data required by the recent

approaches is not available in the text-dependent context. The purpose of this special session is

to gather the research efforts from both academia and industry toward a common goal of establishing

a new baseline and explore new directions for text-dependent speaker verification.

The focus of the session is on robustness with respect to duration and modeling of lexical information.

To support the development and evaluation of text-dependent speaker verification technologies,

the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) has recently released the RSR2015 database,

including 150 hours of data recorded from 300 speakers. The papers submitted to the special

session are encouraged, but not limited, to provide results based on the RSR2015 database

in order to enable comparison of algorithms and methods. For this purpose, the organizers strongly

encourage the participants to report performance on the protocol delivered with the database

in terms of EER and minimum cost (in the sense of NIST 2008 Speaker Recognition evaluation).

To get the database, please contact the organizers.

Further details are available at: http://www1.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/~kalee/is2014/tdspk.html

Organizers:

Anthony LARCHER (alarcher [at]i2r.a-star.edu.sg) Institute for Infocomm Research

Hagai ARONOWITZ (hagaia [at]il.ibm.com) IBM Research – Haifa

Kong Aik LEE (kalee [at]i2r.a-star.edu.sg) Institute for Infocomm Research

Patrick KENNY (patrick.kenny [at]crim.ca) CRIM – Montréal

Tutorial Dialogues and Spoken Dialogue Systems

The growing interest in educational applications that use spoken interaction and dialogue technology has boosted

research and development of interactive tutorial systems, and over the recent years, advances have been achieved

in both spoken dialogue community and education research community, with sophisticated speech and multi-modal

technology which allows functionally suitable and reasonably robust applications to be built.

The special session combines spoken dialogue research, interaction modeling, and educational applications,

and brings together the two INTERSPEECH SIG communities: SLaTE and SIGdial. The session focuses

on methods, problems and challenges that are shared by both communities, such as sophistication

of speech processing and dialogue management for educational interaction, integration of the models

with theories of emotion, rapport, and mutual understanding, as well as application of the techniques

to novel learning environments, robot interaction, etc. The session aims to survey issues related

to the processing of spoken language in various learning situations, modeling of the teacher-student

interaction in MOOC-like environments, as well as evaluating tutorial dialogue systems from

the point of view of natural interaction, technological robustness, and learning outcome.

The session encourages interdisciplinary research and submissions related to the special focus

of the conference, 'Celebrating the Diversity of Spoken Languages'.

For further information click http://junionsjlee.wix.com/INTERSPEECH

Organizers:

Maxine Eskenazi, max+ [at]cs.cmu.edu

Kristiina Jokinen, kristiina.jokinen [at]helsinki.fi

Diane Litman, litman [at]cs.pitt.edu

Martin Russel, M.J.RUSSELL [at]bham.ac.uk

Visual Speech Decoding

Speech perception is a bi-modal process that takes into account both the acoustic (what we hear)

and visual (what we see) speech information. It has been widely acknowledged that visual clues play

a critical role in automatic speech recognition (ASR) especially when audio is corrupted by,

for example, background noise or voices from untargeted speakers, or even inaccessible.

Decoding the visual speech is utterly important for ASR technologies to be widely implemented

to realize truly natural human-computer interactions. Despite the advances in acoustic ASR,

visual speech decoding remains a challenging problem.

The special session aims to attract more effort to tackle this important problem. In particular,

we would like to encourage researchers to focus on some critical questions in the area.

We propose four questions as the initiative as follows:

1. How to deal with the speaker dependency in visual speech data?

2. How to cope with the head-pose variation?

3. How to encode temporal information in visual features?

4. How to automatically adapt the fusion rule when the quality of the two individual (audio and visual)

modalities varies?

Researchers and participants are encouraged to raise more questions related to visual speech decoding.

We expect the session to draw a wide range of attention from both the speech recognition and machine vision

communities to the problem of visual speech decoding.

Organizers:

Ziheng Zhou, University of Oulu, ziheng.zhou [at]ee.oulu.fi

Matti Pietikäinen, University of Oulu, matti.pietikainen [at]ee.oulu.fi

Guoying Zhao, University of Oulu, gyzhao [at]ee.oulu.fi

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**** Call for Satellite Workshops **** 

INTERSPEECH 2015 will be held in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany, on September 6-10, 2015

The theme is 'Speech beyond Speech - Towards a Better Understanding of the Most Important 

Biosignal'. The Organizing Committee of INTERSPEECH 2015 is now inviting proposals for 

satellite workshops, which will be held in proximity to the main conference. 

The Organizing Committee will work to facilitate the organization of such satellite workshops, 

to stimulate discussion in research areas related to speech and language, at locations in Central 

Europe, and around the same time as INTERSPEECH. We are particularly looking forward to 

proposals from neighboring countries. If you are interested in organizing a satellite workshop, 

or would like a planned event to be listed as an official satellite event, please contact the organizers

 or the Satellite Workshop Chair at fmetze@cs.cmu.edu The Satellite Workshop coordinator along 

with the INTERSPEECH team will help to connect (potential) workshop organizers with local 

contacts in Germany, if needed, and will try to be helpful with logistics such as payment, publicity,

 and coordination with ISCA or other events. Proposals should include:

 * workshop name and acronym 

* organizers' name and contact info 

* website (if already known) 

* date and proposed location of the workshop 

* estimated number of participants 

* a short description of the motivation for the workshop 

* an outline of the program and invited speakers 

* a description of the submission process (e.g. deadlines, target acceptance rate) 

* a list of the scientific committee members 

Proposals for satellite workshops should be submitted by email to workshops@interspeech2015.org

 by August 31st, 2014 We strongly recommend that organizers also apply for

 ISCA approval/ sponsorship, which will greatly facilitate acceptance as an INTERSPEECH satellite 

event. We plan to notify proposers no later than October 30, 2014. If you have any questions about 

whether a potential event would be a good candidate for an INTERSPEECH 2015 satellite workshop 

feel free to contact the INTERSPEECH 2015 Satellite Workshops Chair. 

Sincerely, 

Florian Metze 

Satellite Workshops Chair fmetze@cs.cmu.edu

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Interspeech 2015

September 6-10, 2015, Dresden, Germany

www.interspeech2015.org

SPECIAL TOPIC

Speech Beyond Speech: Towards a Better Understanding of the Most Important Biosignal

MOTIVATION

Speech is the most important biosignal humans can produce and perceive. It is the most common means of human-human communication, and therefore research and development in speech and language are not only paramount for understanding humans, but also to facilitate human-machine interaction. Still, not all characteristics of speech are fully understood, and even fewer are used for developing successful speech and language processing applications. Speech can exploit its full potential only if we consider the characteristics which are beyond the traditional (and still important) linguistic content. These characteristics include other biosignals that are directly accessible to human perception, such as muscle and brain activity, as well as articulatory gestures.

INTERSPEECH 2015

will therefore be organized around the topic “Speech beyond Speech: Towards a Better Understanding of the Most Important Biosignal”. Our conviction is that spoken language processing can make a substantial leap if it caters for the full information which is available in the speech signal. By opening our prestigious conference to researchers in other biosignal communities, we expect that substantial advances can be made discussing ideas and approaches across discipline and community boundaries.

ORGANIZERS

The following preliminary list of principal organizers plan INTERSPEECH 2015:

• Sebastian Möller, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Technische Universität Berlin (General Chair)
• Rüdiger Hoffmann, Chair for System Theory and Speech Technology, Technische Universität Dresden
• Ercan Altinsoy, Chair for Communication Acoustics, Technische Universität Dresden
• Ute Jekosch, Chair for Communication Acoustics, Technische Universität Dresden
• Siegfried Kunzmann, European Media Laboratory GmbH, Heidelberg
• Bernd Möbius, Dept. of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University
• Hermann Ney, Chair of Computer Science 6, RWTH Aachen
• Elmar Nöth, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Alexander Raake, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Technische Universität Berlin
• Gerhard Rigoll, Institute of Human-Machine Communication, Technische Universität München
• Tanja Schultz, Cognitive Systems Lab, Universität Karlsruhe (TH)

LOCATION

The event will be staged in the recently built Maritim International Congress Center (ICD) in Dresden, Germany. As the capital of Saxony, an up-and-coming region located in the former eastern part of Germany, Dresden combines glorious and painful history with a strong dedication to future and technology. It is located in the heart of Europe, easily reached via two airports, and will offer a great deal of history and culture to INTERSPEECH 2015 delegates. Guests are well catered for in a variety of hotels of different standards and price ranges, making INTERSPEECH 2015 an exciting as well as an affordable event.

CONTACT

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Möller, Quality and Usability Lab, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, TU Berlin

Sekr. TEL-18, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, D-10587 Berlin, Germany

Web: www.interspeech2015.org

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Interspeech 2016 will take place

from September 8-12 2016 in San Francisco, CA, USA

General Chair is Nelson Morgan.

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eNTERFACE 2014 - 10th SUMMER WORKSHOP ON MULTIMODAL INTERFACES
Bilbao, Spain, June 9th – July 5th, 2014
==============================================================

http://aholab.ehu.es/eNTERFACE14


CALL FOR PROJECTS

Aholab Signal Processing research group, Faculty of Engineering of the University of the 
Basque Country, in Bilbao (Spain), invites project proposals for eNTERFACE’14.

Following the tremendous success of the previous eNTERFACE workshops (www.enterface.net), eNTERFACE’14 aims at continuing and enhancing the tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place, leading researchers in multimodal interfaces and students to work on specific projects for 4 complete weeks.

eNTERFACE’14 will encompass presentation sessions, including tutorial state-of-the-art surveys on several aspects of design of multimodal interfaces, given by invited senior researchers, and periodical presentations of the results achieved by each project group. The ultimate goal is to make this event a unique opportunity for students and experts all over the world to meet and effectively work together, so as to foster the development of tomorrow’s multimodal research community. The results of the projects are expected to be published in the Workshop proceedings.


THEMES (not exhaustive list):

- Multimodal signal analysis and synthesis 
- Intuitive interfaces and personalized systems in real and virtual environments 
- Assistive technologies for education and social inclusion 
- Assistive and rehabilitation technologies 
- Search in multimedia and multilingual documents 
- Affective and social signal processing 
- Multimodality for biometrics and security 
- Innovative musical interfaces 
- Augmented reality 
- Embodied agents 
- Human-robot and human-environment interactions in smart environments 
- Multimodal conversational systems 
- Self-learning and adapting systems 
- Innovative modalities and modalities conversion 
- Applications of Multimodal interfaces 
- Performing arts applications 
- Teleoperation and telerobotics


IMPORTANT DATES

November 30th, 2013
Reception of a 1-page Notification of Interest, with a summary of projects goals, temptative workpackages, and deliverables.

December 15th, 2013
Reception of the Full Project Proposal.

January 10th, 2014
Notification of acceptance to project leaders. Start Call for Participation.

February 28th, 2014 
End Call for Participation. Team building.

March 28th, 2014
Notification of acceptance to participants.


IMPORTANT NOTES

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format to enterface14@aholab.ehu.es.

The proposals will be evaluated by the Scientic Committee with respect to suitability to the workshop goals and format. A call for PhD students and researchers participation will then be launched on January 10th, 2014. Authors of the accepted proposals will then be invited to build their teams.

There is no registration fee for participants. Participants are expected to pay for their own lodging and meals (see http://aholab.ehu.es/eNTERFACE14 for information about facilities and prices). Some grants for students will be offered in due course.


CONTACT

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us: enterface14@aholab.ehu.es.

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Appel à Communications JEP 2014 (www.jep2014.org)

 Les Journées d'Études de la Parole (JEP) sont consacrées à l'étude de la communication parlée 

ainsi qu'à ses applications. Ces journées ont pour but de rassembler l'ensemble des 

communautés scientifiques francophones travaillant dans le domaine. La conférence se veut 

aussi un lieu d'échange convivial entre doctorants et chercheurs confirmés.

 En 2014, les JEP sont organisées au Mans par le Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université 

du Maine (LIUM) et par le Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique (LINA), sous l'égide 

de l'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP). 

Dates importantes 

Soumission des communications : 31 janvier 2014 (modification de la soumission possible 

jusqu'au 7 février, sous condition d'une première version soumise avant le 31 janvier)

Notification d’acceptation : 28 mars 2014 

Soumission des versions définitives : 11 avril 2014 

Conférence : du 23 au 27 juin 2014

Thématiques 

Les communications porteront sur la communication parlée et le traitement de la parole dans

 leurs différents aspects. Les thèmes de la conférence incluent, de façon non limitative : 

Acoustique de la parole 

Acquisition de la parole et du langage 

Analyse, codage et compression de la parole 

Applications à composantes orales (dialogue, indexation, etc) 

Apprentissage d'une langue seconde 

Communication multimodale 

Dialectologie 

Évaluation, corpus et ressources 

Langues en danger 

Modèles de langage 

Parole audio-visuelle 

Pathologies de la parole 

Perception de parole 

Phonétique et phonologie

 Phonétique clinique 

Prises de position présentant un point de vue sur les sciences et technologies de la parole 

Production de parole 

Prosodie 

Psycholinguistique 

Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole 

Reconnaissance de la langue 

Reconnaissance du locuteur 

Signaux sociaux, sociophonétique 

Synthèse de la parole 

Critères de Sélection 

Les auteurs sont invités à soumettre des travaux de recherche originaux, n'ayant pas fait l'objet 

de publications antérieures. Les contributions proposées seront examinées par au moins deux 

spécialistes du domaine. Seront considérées en particulier : - l’importance et l’originalité de la contribution ; - la discussion critique des résultats, en particulier par rapport aux autres travaux du domaine ; - la situation des travaux présentés dans le contexte de la recherche internationale ; - l’organisation et la clarté de la présentation ; - l’adéquation aux thèmes de la conférence. Les articles sélectionnés seront publiés dans les actes de la conférence. Bourses L’AFCP offre un certain nombre de bourses pour les doctorants et jeunes chercheurs désireux de 

prendre part à la conférence, voir le site de l’AFCP. L’ISCA apporte également un soutien financier aux jeunes chercheurs participant à des 

manifestations scientifiques sur la parole et le langage, voir le site de l’ISCA. Contacts : yannick.esteve@univ-lemans.fr ou emmanuel.morin@univ-nantes.fr 

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17th International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2014) Brno, Czech Republic,

8-12 September 2014

http://www.tsdconference.org/

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International Speech Communication Association. Venue: Brno, Czech Republic

TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in both spoken and written language processing from all over the world. Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.

TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to): Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual, text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation, specialized lexicons, dictionaries) Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words, alternative way of feature extraction, new models for acoustic and language modelling) Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech (morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis, credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization, authorship attribution) Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing) Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web, knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense disambiguation, plagiarism detection) Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing (machine translation, natural language understanding, question-answering strategies, assistive technologies) Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual, question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in dialogues) Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions and personality modelling) Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Hynek Hermansky, USA (general chair) Eneko Agirre, Spain Genevieve Baudoin, France Paul Cook, Australia Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia Karina Evgrafova, Russia Darja Fiser, Slovenia Radovan Garabik, Slovakia Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico Louise Guthrie, GB Jan Hajic, Czech Republic Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic Yannis Haralambous, France Ludwig Hitzenberger, Germany Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic Ales Horak, Czech Republic Eduard Hovy, USA Maria Khokhlova, Russia Daniil Kocharov, Russia Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic Valia Kordoni, Germany Steven Krauwer, The Netherlands Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic Diana McCarthy, United Kingdom France Mihelic, Slovenia Hermann Ney, Germany Elmar Noeth, Germany Karel Oliva, Czech Republic Karel Pala, Czech Republic Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia Fabio Pianesi, Italy Maciej Piasecki, Poland Adam Przepiorkowski, Poland Josef Psutka, Czech Republic James Pustejovsky, USA German Rigau, Spain Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands Anna Rumshisky, USA Milan Rusko, Slovakia Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine Pavel Skrelin, Russia Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic Petr Sojka, Czech Republic Stefan Steidl, Germany Georg Stemmer, Germany Marko Tadic, Croatia Tamas Varadi, Hungary Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands Yorick Wilks, GB Marcin Wolinski, Poland Victor Zakharov, Russia KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Ralph Grishman, New York University, USA Bernardo Magnini, FBK - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions. Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal interactions.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

The conference program will include oral presentations and poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of the issues raised.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 15 2014 ............ Submission of abstract

March 22 2014 ............ Submission of full papers

May 15 2014 .............. Notification of acceptance

May 31 2014 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration

August 3 2014 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts

August 10 2014 ........... Notification of acceptance for demonstrations sent to the authors

September 8-12 2014 ...... Conference date

The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time of the conference. OFFICIAL LANGUAGE The official language of the conference is English. ADDRESS All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to Ales Horak, TSD 2014 Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63 fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20 email: tsd2014@tsdconference.org The official TSD 2014 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/

LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights. South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural center of the region. Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Eindhoven, Rome and Prague and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

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2014 Spoken Language Technology Workshop
December 7-10, 2014 - South Lake Tahoe, NV, USA

IEEE - IEEE Signal Processing Society

http://www.slt2014.org - Follow @SLT_2014


The Fifth IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2014) will be held in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on Dec 7-10, 2014.


Workshop Technical Theme & Main Goals & Novelties

The main theme of the workshop will be 'machine learning in spoken language technologies'. There will be keynote/guest speakers from the machine learning community.
One of the workshop goals is to increase both intra and inter community interactions. Towards this goal, in addition to tutorials and keynote speeches on main workshop theme and emerging areas, this year's SLT will host special sessions and self-organizing Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings, as well as panel discussions before/during workshop. If you want to excite the community about a topic and to have an impact on the workshop content, now this is your chance!
In addition to submitting papers and/or proposing/organizing SIG meetings, you can get involved in workshop organization in different ways: by nominating keynote speakers (nominations@slt2014.org), or by volunteering to be part of workshop organization (volunteers@slt2014.org). Please visit www.slt2014.org for more details.


Call for Papers: Areas/Topics

Submission of papers in all areas of spoken language technology is encouraged, with emphasis on the following topics, including both traditional SLT areas as well as emerging ones:

- Traditional topic coverage: speech recognition and synthesis, spoken language understanding, spoken dialog systems, spoken document summarization, machine translation for speech, question answering from speech, speech data mining, spoken document retrieval, spoken language databases, speaker/language recognition, multimodal processing, human/computer interaction, assistive technologies, natural language processing, educational and healthcare applications.  

- Emerging areas: large scale spoken language understanding, massive data resources for SLT,
unsupervised methods in SLT, capturing and representing world knowledge in SLT, web search with SLT, SLT in social networks, multimedia applications, intelligent environments.

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the SLT 2014 website (slt2014.org).


Important Dates

Paper submission: July 21, 2014
Notification of acceptance: September 5, 2014
Demo submission: September 10, 2014
Notification of Demo acceptance: October 10, 2014
Special Session (SS) proposal submission: June 6, 2014
Notification of SS proposals (1st/2nd decision):  June 15 / September 19, 2014
Special Interest Group (SIG) proposal submission: November 21, 2014
Early registration deadline: October 17, 2014
Workshop: December 7-10, 2014


Supported by:
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

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The Fourth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014) will be held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on 13-16 May 2014. The symposium, which follows the successful TAL 2012 in Nanjing, is held on a vibrant campus, which boasts three highly visible academic institutions whose research is relevant to the topic of the symposium: the Centre for Language Studies, the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, both part of Radboud University Nijmegen, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Nijmegen (by Maarten Takens)

TAL 2014 is held in the week before the International Conference on Speech Prosody 2014, which is held in Dublin from 21 to 25 May 2014 and like that conference enjoys the support of ISCA SProSig and ISCA SIG-CSLP.

The symposium continues the tradition of the previous three symposia of focusing on tone languages, aiming to present state-of-the–art research on the typological, phonetic, phonological, psycholinguistic, acquisitional and technological aspects of tonal contrasts, but will also welcome contributions on non-tone languages and art forms like songs and poetry.

Important dates

Submission of full papers

15 February 2014 (this date will not be postponed)

Notification of acceptance

20 March 2014

Camera-ready paper due

15 June 2014

Registration deadline

30 April 2014

Registration desk open

13 May 2014, 2 p.m.

Conference meeting

14-16 May 2014

Tutorial Speech Analysis

13 May 2014, 4 p.m.

Final versions paper due

15 June 2014

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The 7^th Speech Prosody Conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland, May 20-23, 2014, at Trinity College Dublin, directly preceding LREC, the Linguistic Resources and Evaluation Conference.

The special theme is social prosody, but we invite papers addressing any aspect of the science and technology of prosody, speaking styles, and voice quality.  Papers are due December 15th.

Topics of interest include: communicative situation and speaking style, dynamics of register and style, l2 prosody, phonology and phonetics of prosody, pitch accent, prosody and spoken language systems, prosody and the sounds of language, prosody development in first language acquisition, prosody for forensic applications, prosody in face-to-face interaction: audiovisual modeling and analysis, prosody in neurological disorders, prosody in speech synthesis, recognition and understanding; prosody models and theoretical issues, prosody of sign language, prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects; psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural correlates of prosody; signal processing; voice quality, phonation, and vocal dynamics, and prosodic characteristics of individuals; and as special review areas, the prosody of nonverbal vocalisations, speech-gesture interaction, and joint/choral speech.

More information is available at http://www.speechprosody2014.org/ .

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For info: s2g.conference@gmail.com      

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ELRA and the LREC Programme Committee are very pleased to announce that the

LREC 2012 Proceedings have been accepted for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings

Citation Index of Thomson Reuters. The CPCI is searchable through the

Web of Science

platform and will provide authors with unprecedented recognition.

LREC 2010 proceedings are currently under review, and chances that they will be

accepted are high! Once published, the proceedings of LREC 2014 will be submitted for

inclusion in the CPCI.

Schedule of all the LREC 2014 Workshops and Tutorials is now online at http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/conference-programme/workshops-and-tutorials.
On this web page you will find a link to each Workshop Call for Papers and each Tutorial Outline, when available.
Don't hesitate to contact Workshop and/or Tutorial organisers if you have specific questions on their event.

For general LREC 2014 matters, please contact us at http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/contact/

 

ELRA is glad to announce the 9th edition of LREC, organised with the support of a wide range of international organisations.

The online registration to the Main conference, the workshops and tutorials is now open @ http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/registration/.
Contact: registration@lrec-conf.org

CONFERENCE AIMS

LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language

Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new

R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their

applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, on-going and planned activities, industrial

uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to policy

issues and to scientific/technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across

a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and

promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language

sciences, progress in language technologies (LT) and development of corresponding products,

services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, multimodality

* Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability

* Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation

* Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge

* Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation

* LRs and Semantic Web

* LRs and Crowdsourcing

* Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications

* Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication

* LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval,

audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided

Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation,

speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing,

reasoning, etc.

* Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and

multimodal/multisensorial interactions,

* Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-culture, ehealth,

e-participation, mobile applications, digital humanities, etc.

* Industrial LRs requirements, user needs

Issues in LT evaluation

* LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures

* Validation and quality assurance of LRs

* Benchmarking of systems and products

* Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems

* User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation

* International and national activities, projects and collaboration

* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs

* Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages

* Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures

* Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues.

LREC 2014 HOT TOPICS

Big Data, Linked Open Data, LRs and HLT

The ever-increasing quantities of large and complex digital datasets, structured or

unstructured, multilingual, multimodal or multimedia, pose new challenges but at the same

time open up new opportunities for HLT and related fields. Ubiquitous data and information

capturing devices, social media and networks, the web at large with its big data / knowledge

bases and other information capturing / aggregating / publishing platforms are providing

useful information and/or knowledge for a wide range of LT applications.

LREC 2014 puts a strong emphasis on the synergies of the big Linked Open Data and LRs/LT

communities and their complementarity in cracking LT problems and developing useful

applications and services.

LRs in the Collaborative Age

The amount of collaboratively generated and used language data is constantly increasing and

it is therefore time to open a wide discussion on such LRs at LREC. There is a need to discuss

the types of LRs that can be collaboratively generated and used.

Are lexicons, dictionaries, corpora, ontologies (of language data), grammars, tagsets, data

categories, all possible fields in which a collaborative approach can be applied? Can

collaboratively generated LRs be standardised/harmonised? And how can quality control be

applied to collaboratively generated LRs? How can a collaborative approach ensure that lessresourced

languages receive the same digital dignity as mainstream languages?

There is also a need to discuss legal aspects related to collaboratively generated LRs. And last

but not least: are there different types of collaborative approaches, or is the Wikimedia style

the best approach to collaborative generation and use of LRs?

LREC 2014 SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT

Share your LRs!

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission

procedure of many conferences – LREC 2014 recognises that the time is ripe to launch

another important initiative, the LREC Repository of shared LRs!

When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools,

web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC META-SHARE repository set up by

ELRA.

Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be reused,

compared, analysed, …

This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new

'regular' feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common

repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo

presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio

Zampolli Prize.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo)

papers: 15 October 2013

Abstracts should consist of about 1500-2000 words, will be submitted through START @

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/main/

and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 15 October 2013

Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website (

click Submission

from the Home page

) and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.

There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the

appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the

paper will be considered.

In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa -

Italy (Conference chair)

Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France

Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany

Hrafn Loftsson – School of Computer Science, Reykjavík University - Iceland

Bente Maegaard – CST, University of Copenhagen - Denmark

Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, Orsay - France

Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain

Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands

Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece

voice-activated services, etc.

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WILDRE2- 2nd Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation

Date: Tuesday, 27th May 2014     

Venue: Harpa Conference Centre, Reykjavik, Iceland (Organized in under the platform of LREC2014 (26-31 May 2014))   

Website:

• main website - http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/wildre2
• submit papers on - http://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/WILDRE/

  WILDRE – the 2nd workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation is being organized in Reykjavik, Iceland on 27th May, 2014 under the LREC platform.  India has a huge linguistic diversity and has seen concerted efforts from the Indian government and industry towards developing language resources. European Language Resource Association (ELRA) and its associate organizations have been very active and successful in addressing the challenges and opportunities related to language resource creation and evaluation. It is therefore a great opportunity for resource creators of Indian languages to showcase their work on this platform and also to interact and learn from those involved in similar initiatives all over the world.
  The broader objectives of the WILDRE will be

  • To map the status of Indian Language Resources
  • To investigate challenges related to creating and sharing various levels of language resources
  • To promote a dialogue between language resource developers and users
  • To provide opportunity for researchers from India to collaborate with researchers from other parts of the world

DATES      

February 17, 2014 Paper submissions due     
March 10, 2014 Paper notification of acceptance     
April 4, 2014 Camera-ready papers due     
May 27, 2014 Workshop

SUBMISSIONS     

Papers must describe original, completed or in progress, and  unpublished work. Each submission will be reviewed by two program committee members.     

Accepted papers will be given up to 10 pages (for full papers) 5 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and will be presented oral presentation or poster.     

Papers should be formatted according to the style-sheet, which will be provided on the LREC 2014 website (lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/).   

Please submit papers in PDF/doc format to the LREC website

We are seeking submissions under the following category

• Full papers (10 pages)
• Short papers (work in progress – 5 pages)
• Posters (innovative ideas/proposals, research proposal of students)
• Demo (of working online/standalone systems)  

Though our area of interest covers all NLP/language technology related activity for Indian languages, we would like to focus on the resource creation in the following areas-

• Text corpora
• Speech corpora
• Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries
• Ontologies
• Grammars
• Annotation of corpora
• Language resources for basic NLP, IR and Speech Technology tasks, tools and
• Infrastructure for constructing and sharing language resources
• Standards or specifications for language resources  applications
• Licensing and copyright issues

Both submission and review processes will handled electronically using the Start interface of the LREC website. The workshop website will provide the submission guidelines and the link for the electronic submission.

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.), to enable their reuse, replicability of experiments, including evaluation ones, etc...

For further information on this initiative, please refer to http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/.

Conference Chairs

• Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India Lab, Bangalore
• Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai

Program Committee (to be updated)

• A. Kumaran, Microsoft Research, India
• Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, India
• Ashwani Sharma, Google India
• Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania
• Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
• Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
• Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
• Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University, Germany
• Indranil Datta, English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India
• Jopseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Jyoti Pawar, Goa University, India
• Kalika Bali, MSRI, Bangalore, India
• Karunesh Arora, CDAC Noida, India
• Khalid Choukri, ELRA, France
• L Ramamoorthy, LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore, India
• Malhar Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, India
• Monojit Choudhary, Microsoft Research, India
• Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Niladri Shekhar Dash, ISI Kolkata, India
• Panchanan Mohanty, University of Hyderabad, India
• Pushpak Bhattacharya, IIT Bombay, India
• Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai, India
• Umamaheshwar Rao, University of Hyderabad, India
• Vikram Dendi, Microsoft Research, USA
• Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

Workshop contact:

Esha Banerjee, Sr Linguist, ILCI project @JNU  esha.jnu@gmail.com

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LREC 2014 Workshop Language Technology Service Platforms: Synergies, Standards, Sharing - May 31, 2014, Reykjavik
Contact: lrec-infra@lrec-conf.org

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Motivation and background
Increasingly, Human Language Technology (HLT) requires sophisticated infrastructures to support research, development, innovation, collaboration and deployment as services ready for production use. To address this need, several supporting infrastructures have been established over the past few years, and others are being built or planned.
The LREC 2014 Workshop on Language Technology Service Platforms brings together major infrastructural/coordination initiatives from all over the world. The overall goal is to explore means by which these and other infrastructure projects can best collaborate and interoperate in order to avoid duplication of effort, fragmentation, and above all, to facilitate the use and reuse of technologies and resources distributed throughout the world.

Focus
Web services are an increasingly common means to provide access to language technologies and resources. These services typically work in combination with repositories of language resources and workflow managers. This development brings with it its own set of issues in relation to collaboration and interoperability, including:
interoperability of input to and output from language technologies deployed as web services;
means to provide services for evaluation/replicability of results and iterative development;
means to support multi-site collaborative work;
licensing and cataloguing of language technologies and resources;     
sharing and access mechanisms to language technologies and resources;
quality assessment and sustainability of language technologies and resources.

Aims
This workshop aims to foster discussion on these (and related) issues in order to arrive at a set of concrete plans for future collaboration and cooperation as well as immediate next steps.
General discussions will focus on the following questions: How can the various infrastructures collaborate, in both the near and long-term future? What are the steps needed in order to share both language technologies and resources? How can the projects and initiatives (including not only those involved in the workshop, but also others) join forces in order to eventually create a global infrastructure for Human Language Technologies?

The goal is to leave the workshop with a resolution that 1. lists all active infrastructure and platform initiatives, 2. describes the consensus of all initiatives involved in the workshop, 3. outlines the requirements for collaboration and 4. proposes solutions.

Researchers and technologists interested in platforms, services, sharing of language resources etc. are encouraged to participate in the workshop in order to make sure that their voice is heard. As described above, the consensus and outcome of the workshop will be put down in writing in a short resolution document meant to be used by the whole community for public relation and dissemination purposes, especially with regard to discussions with journalists, administrators, politicians and funding agencies.

Preliminary program plan
The first session will provide short introductions to the infrastructural/coordination initiatives involved in the organisation.
In order to outline some concrete next steps for the immediate future, there will be sessions devoted to surveying two to four currently implemented solutions to crucial problems, with an eye toward assessing and comparing the various solutions in order to determine immediate action items. These sessions will address topics such as:
interoperability and the use of standards, for example, syntax and semantics used to exchange information between web services and/or technologies that may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., that do not necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.) 
implemented means to provide evaluation/replicability and means to enable multi-site collaboration
licensing for data and tools shared over networks and services.
  
Contribute to an overview of the Language Resources and Technologies landscape!
In order to facilitate the discussion we ask workshop participants to answer the following questions and to send their answers to the organisers (see Contact mail below) at the beginning of May. A summary of the responses will be provided at the workshop to inform and to focus the discussion.
(1) Access – How do you make information about your tools and/or resources available to the world? How and where do you find information on tools and resources you would like to use?
(2) Obstacles to Data and Technology Exchange – What do you see as the major obstacle(s) to the exchange of data between technologies?
(3) Data or Technology Gaps – Are there tools, technologies or resources that do not exist at this time that are required to answer your research or development questions?
(4) Interoperability and Standards – What syntax and semantics do you use to exchange information between web services and/or tools that may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., do not necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.)?  
(5) Evaluation – What have you implemented to provide evaluation/replicability?  
(6) Licensing – How are you handling licensing for data shared over networks and services?
(7) Collaboration – How would you propose to promote collaboration among the various infrastructure projects located around the world? 

We also welcome any additional comments or views that you wish to express.

We look forward to welcoming you in Reykjavik!

Organising Initiatives
COCOSDA
ELRA – European Language Resource Association
FLaReNet
Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid
Language Grid
META-NET
MLi – Towards a MultiLingual Data & Services infrastructure
MUSE FP7 – ClowdFlows initiative
Research Data Alliance

Organisers
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Italy and ELRA, France)
Khalid Choukri (ELRA, France)
Christopher Cieri (LDC, USA)
Tomaž Erjavec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
Oleksandr Kolomiyets (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS and IMMI, France)
Yohei Murakami (Kyoto University, Japan)
Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Senja Pollak (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, USA)
Georg Rehm (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Herman Stehouwer (Max Planck, Germany)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Andrejs Vasiļjevs (Tilde, Latvia)
Peter Wittenburg (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands)

     

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ODYSSEY 2014: THE SPEAKER AND LANGUAGE RECOGNITION WORKSHOP 
June 16-19, 2014, Joensuu, Finland 
 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 
https://www.facebook.com/SpeakerOdyssey2014 
 
Registration now opened: 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/registration/ 
 
Early-bird deadline: April 30 
Late-bird deadline:  May 31 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
KEYNOTE TALKERS: 
 
Dr. Samy Bengio, Google Research 
http://research.google.com/pubs/bengio.html 
'Large scale learning of a joint embedding space' 
 
Prof. Martin Cooke, University of the Basque Country 
http://laslab.org/martin 
'Speaking in adverse conditions: from behavioural observations to 
intelligibility-enhancing speech modifications' 
 
Dr. Joseph P. Campbell, MIT Lincoln Lab 
http://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/cybersec/HLT/biographies/campbell-bio.html 
'Speaker Recognition for Forensic Applications' 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
CONFERENCE TOPICS: 
 
The general themes of the conference include speaker  and 
language  recognition and characterization. The specific topics 
include, but are not limited to, the following: 
 
o Speaker characterization and adaptation 
o Features for speaker and language recognition 
o Multi-speaker training, detection and diarization 
o Robustness in channels and environment 
o Robust classification and fusion 
o Speaker recognition corpora and evaluation 
o Speaker recognition with speech recognition 
o Forensics, multimodality, and multimedia speaker recognition 
o Speaker and language confidence estimation 
o Language, dialect, and accent recognition 
o Speaker synthesis and transformation 
o Human recognition of speaker and language 
o Analysis and countermeasures against spoofing attacks 
o Commercial applications 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
REGULAR PAPER SUBMISSIONS: 
 
All regular submissions (max 8 pages) will be reviewed by at least 
three members of the scientific review committee. The regular 
submissions must include scientific or methodological novelty; the 
paper has to review the relevant prior work and state clearly the 
novelty in the Introduction part. The accepted papers will appear in 
electronic proceedings. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
INDUSTRY TRACK AND DEMOS: 
 
Odyssey committee recognizes a large gap between theoretical research 
results and real-world deployment of the methods. To foster closer 
collaboration across industry and academia, Odyssey 2014 features an 
industry submission track. This can include a description of your 
target application, a product, a demonstrator, or any combination. In 
addition to voice biometrics providers, we encourage submissions from 
companies who are in need for speaker or language recognition 
technology. The industry paper submissions do NOT have to present 
methodological novelty, but the submission MUST address one or all of 
the following aspects: 
 
- Description of the application, role of speaker/language recognition 
- Research results and methods that worked well in your application 
- Negative research results that have NOT worked in practice 
- Unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention 
 
The industry submissions will NOT undergo full peer review 
nor will be included to the proceedings. All the industry track 
submissions can be presented as a posters. The organizing committee 
may select a few most interesting ones for oral presentation. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
NIST SPECIAL SESSIONS: I-VECTOR CHALLENGE & NIST SRE-2012 FOLLOW-UP 
 
In addition to regular and industry paper submissions, Odyssey 2014 
features two special sessions co-organized with National Institute of 
Standards and Technologies (NIST). NIST SRE-2012 special session 
focuses on extended analyses on the latest, NIST 2012 speaker 
recognition evaluation (SRE) benchmark, and is targeted for the 
participants of NIST SRE 2012. 
 
The i-vector challenge is a new type of challenge targeted for anyone 
interested for a 'quick start-up' in speaker recognition. Building 
modern speaker and language recognition systems requires a lot of 
preprocessing, corpus engineering and computations, making it 
challenging for newcomers to enter the field. This prohibits piloting 
of possibly promising modeling ideas developed outside of speaker 
recognition community (e.g. machine learning and image processing 
communities). To bridge this gap, NIST organizes a new type of 
benchmark, i-vector challenge, synchronized with Odyssey 2014. 
 
Preliminary due-date for paper submissions to both special sessions is 
February 2014. Submissions by this deadline will undergo review both 
by NIST and by the scientific review committee, and will be included 
to the conference proceedings if accepted. Late challenge submissions 
(without a paper) are also encouraged; they can be presented as 
posters, but will not undergo peer review nor will be included to the 
conference proceedings. 
 
To ensure smooth organization, early (non-binding) preliminary sign-up 
is required. More details and registration for the i-vector challenge 
will be available in November 2013. 
 
See https://ivectorchallenge.nist.gov/ for more info about the i-vector 
challenge. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
AWARDS: 
 
Odyssey 2014 features three awards: 
 
- A best paper award 
- A best student paper award 
- Free registration for 1 to 2 top-performers in the i-vector challenge 
 
All regular and special session papers submitted in time are 
candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review 
reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student 
paper award, the first author must be a student (does not yet hold a 
PhD degree) at the time of paper submission. 
 
Best 1 to 2 teams (max 1 person per site) in i-vector challenge are 
provided FREE REGISTRATION to the full Odyssey 2014 workshop. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: 
 
Tomi Kinnunen, chair        University of Eastern Finland, Finland 
Pasi Franti, co-chair       University of Eastern Finland, Finland 
Jean-Francois Bonastre      University of Avignon, France 
Niko Brummer                Agnitio, South Africa 
Lukas Burget                Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 
Joseph Campbell             MIT Lincoln Lab, USA 
Jan 'Honza' Cernocky        Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 
Haizhou Li                  Inst. Infocomm Research, Singapore 
Alvin Martin                NIST, USA 
Douglas Reynolds            MIT Lincoln Lab, USA 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
SCIENTIFIC REVIEW COMMITTEE: 
 
Eliathamby Ambikairajah     Univ. New South Wales, Australia 
Tim Anderson                Air Force Research Lab, USA 
Walt Andrews                BBN, USA 
Hagai Aronowitz             IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel 
Roland Auckenthaler         NMS Comm., USA 
Claude Barras               LIMSI, France 
Kay Berkling                Inline, Intern. Online Dienste GmbH, Germany 
Jean-Francois Bonastre      Univ. Avignon, France 
Hynek Boril                 Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Niko Brummer                AGNITIO, South Africa 
Lukas Burget                Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Joseph Campbell             MITLL, USA 
Bill Campbell               MITLL, USA 
Jan 'Honza' Cernocky        Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Nancy Chen                  I2R, Singapore 
Sandro Cumani               Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Najim Dehak                 MIT, USA 
George Doddington           US. Gov. Consultant, USA 
Nicholas Evans              EURECOM, France 
Mauro Falcone               Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy 
Kevin Farrell               Nuance, USA 
Benoit Fauve                Validsoft, UK 
Daniel Garcia-Romero        Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Ondrej Glembek              Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Joaquin Gonzalez-Rodriguez  Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Craig Greenberg             NIST, USA 
Cemal Hanilci               Uludag Univ., Turkey 
John H.L. Hansen            Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Taufiq Hasan                Univ. Texas at Dallas, USA 
Ville Hautamaki             Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Hynek Hermansky             Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Chien-Lin Huang             National Inst. Inf. and Comm. Tech., Japan 
Michael Jessen              Bundeskriminalamt, Germany 
Patrick Kenny               CRIM, Canada 
Tomi Kinnunen               Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Tina Kohler                 DoD, USA 
Pietro Laface               Politecnico di Torino, Italy 
Anthony Larcher             I2R, Singapore 
Kong Aik Lee                I2R, Singapore 
Yun Lei                     SRI International, USA 
Cheung-Chi Leung            I2R, Singapore 
Haizhou Li                  I2R, Singapore 
Ming Li                     Sun Yat-sen Univ, China 
Bin Ma                      I2R, Singapore 
Dave Marks                  Sandia, DoE National Labs, USA 
Alvin Martin                NIST, USA 
David Martinez              Univ. Zaragoza, Spain 
John Mason                  Swansea Univ, UK 
Pavel Matejka               Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Driss Matrouf               Univ. Avignon, France 
Tomoko Matsui               Inst. Stat. Math, Japan 
Yuri Matveev                ITMO University, Russia 
Alan McCree                 Johns Hopkins Univ, USA 
Pejman Mowlaee              Graz Univ. Tech., Austria 
Jiri Navratil               IBM Research, USA 
Raymond W.M. Ng             Univ. Sheffield, UK 
Javier Ortega-Garcia        Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Jason Pelecanos             IBM Research, USA 
Oldrich Plchot              Brno Univ. Tech, Czech Republic 
Padmanabhan Rajan           Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Daniel Ramos                Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Douglas Reynolds            MITLL, USA 
Fred Richardson             MITLL, USA 
Rahim Saeidi                Univ. Eastern Finland, Finland 
Nicolas Scheffer            SRI International, USA 
Jan Silovsky                TU Liberec, Czech Republic 
Themos Stafylakis           CRIM, Canada 
Doug Sturim                 MITLL, USA 
Rong Tong                   I2R, Singapore 
Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo   MITLL, USA 
Michael Wagner              Univ. Canberra, Australia 
David van Leeuwen           Radboud Univ. Nijmegen, The Netherlands 
Jesus Villalba              Univ. Zaragoza, Spain 
Changhuai You               I2R, Singapore 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
VENUE AND TRAVEL: 
 
Odyssey 2014 will be hosted by School of Computing of the University of 
Eastern Finland (UEF). Joensuu is a small town of 75,000 inhabitants 
in the lakeside Finland -- the capital of green. It is famous for its 
peaceful nature, excellent outdoor opportunities as well as many saunas. 
 
Joensuu can be easily reached from Helsinki (50 min flight), which can 
be reached via direct flights from several European, North American 
and Asian cities. 
 
For more details: 
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 
 
Email: odyssey@cs.uef.fi 
 

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We are  pleased to announce the 10th Oxford Dysfluency Conference (ODC) is to be held  at St Catherine's College Oxford from 17 - 20 July, 2014.

ODC has a reputation as one of the leading international scientific  conferences in the field of dysfluency. The conference brings together researchers and clinicians, providing a showcase and forum for discussion and  collegial debate about the most current and innovative research and clinical  practices.  Throughout the history of ODC, the primary aim has been to bridge the gap between research and clinical practice.                           

The conference seeks  to promote research that informs management, with interventions that are  supported by sound theory and which inform future research.

In 2014, the  goal of the Oxford Dysfluency Conference is to lead a challenging international  debate about the latest research in disorders of fluency and its clinical  applications. The 2014 conference will enable delegates to:

                   
• Present the latest research developments and       findings
                   
• Explore issues relating to the nature of       stuttering and its treatment
                   
• Develop knowledge and clinical skills working       with children and adults who stutter
                   
• Consider ways to integrate research into       clinical practice
                   
• Support and encourage new researchers in the       field
                   
• Develop collaborations with researchers       working in dysfluency
                   
• Provide informal opportunities to meet and       discuss ideas with leading experts in the field in a friendly environment
                   
• Advance research in the field of dysfluency
                 

Conference Co-Chairs                    

David Rowley, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, De Montfort University, UK
                    Sharon Millard, The Michael Palin Centre, UK                  

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   CALL FOR PAPERS 
        Extended paper submission deadline:  February 28, 2014

        C B M I    2014
        12th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing
        18-20 June 2014, Klagenfurt, Austria

        http://cbmi2014.itec.aau.at/
        in cooperation with IEEE CSS and ACM SIGMM
******************************************************************************

The 12th International Content Based Multimedia Indexing Workshop aims
to bring together the various communities involved in all aspects of
content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing and presentation.
Following the eleven successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999,
Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania
2009, Grenoble 2010, Madrid 2011, Annecy 2012, and Veszprem 2013), CBMI
2014 will take place in Klagenfurt, in the very south of Austria from
June 18th to June 20th 2014. CBMI 2014 is organized in cooperation with
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and ACM SIG Multimedia. Topics of the
workshop include but are not limited to visual indexing, audio and
multi-modal indexing, multimedia information retrieval, and multimedia
browsing and presentation. Additional special sessions are planned in
the fields of endoscopic videos and images and multimedia metadata.


Paper submission: Authors are invited to submit full-length and special
session papers of 6 pages and short (poster) and demo papers of 4 pages
maximum. All peer-reviewed, accepted and registered papers will be
published in the CBMI 2014 workshop proceedings to be indexed and
distributed by the IEEE Xplore. The submissions are peer reviewed in
single blind process, the language of the workshop is English. Selected
papers of the conference will be invited to submit extended versions of
their contributions to a special issue of Multimedia Tools and
Applications journal (MTAP).


* Important dates:
   Paper submission deadline:    February 16, 2014
   Notification of acceptance:   March 30, 2014
   Camera-ready papers due:      April 14, 2014
   Author registration:          April 14, 2014
   Early registration:           May 25, 2014

* Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
      * Visual Indexing (image, video, graphics)
      * Visual content extraction Identification and tracking of semantic regions
      * Identification of semantic events
      * Audio and Multi-modal Indexing
      * Audio indexing (audio, speech, music)
      * Audio content extraction
      * Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
      * Multimedia fusion
      * Metadata generation, coding and transformation
      * Multimedia Information Retrieval (image, audio, video, …)
      * Matching and similarity search
      * Content-based search
      * Multimedia data mining
      * Multimedia recommendation
      * Large scale multimedia database management
      * Multimedia Browsing and Presentation
      * Summarization, browsing and organization of multimedia content
      * Personalization and content adaptation
      * User interaction and relevance feedback
      * Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools

* Contact
For more information please visit http://cbmi2014.itec.aau.at/ and for
additional questions, remarks, or clarifications please contact
cbmi2014@itec.aau.at 

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The REAL Challenge – Call for Participation

The Dialog Research Center at Carnegie Mellon (DialRC) is organizing the REAL Challenge. The goal of the REAL Challenge (dialrc.org/realchallenge) is to build speech systems that are used regularly by real users to accomplish real tasks. These systems will give the speech and spoken dialog communities steady streams of research data as well as platforms they can use to carry out studies. It will engage both seasoned researchers and high school and undergrad students in an effort to find the next great speech applications.

Why have a REAL Challenge?

Humans greatly rely on spoken language to communicate, so it seems natural that we would be likely to communicate with objects via speech as well. Some speech interfaces do exist and they show promise, demonstrating that smart engineering can palliate indeterminate recognition. Yet the general public has not yet picked up this means of communication as easily as they have the tiny keyboards. About two decades ago, many researchers were using the internet, mostly to send and receive email. They were aware of the potential that it held and waited to see when and how the general public would adopt it. Practically a decade later, thanks to providers such as AmericaOnline, who had found how to create easy access, everyday people started to use the internet. And this has dramatically changed our lives. In the same way, we all know that speech will eventually replace the keyboard in many situations when we want to speak to objects. The big question is what is the interface or application that will bring us into that era.

Why hasn’t speech become a more prevalent interface? Most of today’s speech applications have been devised by researchers in the speech domain. While they certainly know what types of systems are “doable”, they may not be the best at determining which speech applications would be universally acceptable.

We believe that students who have not yet had their vision limited by knowledge of the speech and spoken dialog domains and who have grown up with computers as a given, are the ones that will find new, compelling and universally appealing speech applications. Along with the good ideas, they will need some guidance to gain focus. Having a mentor, attending webinars and participating in a research team can provide this guidance.

The REAL challenge will combine the talents of these two very different groups. First it will call upon the speech research community who know what it takes to implement real applications. Second, it will advertise to and encourage participation from high school students and college undergrads who love to hack and have novel ideas about using speech.

How can we combine these two types of talent?

The REAL Challenge is starting with a widely-advertised call for proposals. Students can propose an application. Researchers can propose to create systems or to provide tools. A proposal can target any type of application in any language. The proposals will be lightly filtered and the successful proposers will be invited to a workshop on June 21, 2014 to show what they are proposing and to team up. The idea is for students to meet researchers and for the latter to take one or more students on their team. Students will present their ideas and have time for discussion with researchers. A year later, a second workshop will assemble all who were at the first workshop to show the resulting systems, measure success and award prizes.

Student travel will be taken care of by DialRC through grants.

Preparing students

Students will have help from DialRC and from researchers as they formulate their proposals. DialRC will provide webinars on such topics as speech processing tool basics and how to present a poster. Students will also be assigned mentors. Researchers in speech and spoken dialog can volunteer to be a one-on-one mentor to a student. This consists of being in touch either in person or virtually. Mentors can tell the students about what our field consists of, what the state of the art is, and what it is like to work in research. They can answer questions about how the student can talk about their ideas. If you are a researcher in speech and/or spoken dialog and you would like to be a mentor, please let us know at realchallenge@speechinfo.org

What is an entry?

The groups will create entries. Here are the characteristics of a successful entry:

• there is a stateful interaction (not stateless, not on-off)

• the interaction is sustained over multiple turns

• language is central to the entry – it is the primary medium of exchange (not necessarily the only medium, but it is not peripheral to the main use of the entry)

• the entry makes a meaningful contribution to the interaction (so, it does not just pass messages)

• the entry must do some meaningful processing (not just passing messages like an email router). It has to make meaningful contributions to the interaction.

How can we assess success?

Success will be judged on the basis of originality, amount of regular users and of data and on other criteria to be agreed upon by the Challenge scientific committee and the participants.

Possible prize areas for an entry include:

• how much usage it gets

• how engaging it is / how novel is the interaction

• how good it is as a platform for future research – a platform is defined here as the output/result of an entry that would be of use for the research community. A platform is not just a computer program toolkit. It could, for example, be used the following year as the basis for a competition (like best ASR or best belief tracking)

Details of the measures of success will be refined at the workshop with input from the participants.

Timeline

The REAL Challenge was announced at several major conferences during the summer of 2013: SIGDIAL, Interspeech, ACL. It is also being announced to younger participants through their schools and hacker websites.

March 20, 2014 : Proposals due

April 20, 2014: Feedback on proposals and invitations to attend the workshop sent out.

June 21, 2014 : Workshop in Baltimore Maryland USA.

Early summer of 2015 : Resulting systems are presented a year after the first workshop.

What advantage is there for a student to participate?

For students, participation in the REAL Challenge will present several unique opportunities:

• the chance to work in a group with real researchers, on a real world problem

• the chance to see how ideas are turned into reality

• the chance to make something that works and that people actually use

• the chance to learn about new technology and use it to solve new problems

• the chance to observe what careers in technology are like and to be in contact with possible future employers

What does this Challenge contribute to the speech community?

For researchers, participation reaps several benefits:

• the number and type of speech applications will be greatly expanded

• there will be more datasets available for research

• there will be more platforms to run studies on and to use in speech and spoken dialog classes

• the enrichment that comes from mentoring

Why should industrial research groups be interested in the Challenge?

Industrial research groups should be interested to see:

• which types of applications actually appeal to the general public and which ones fail, which could be revenue-generating

• how students learn to apply the latest speech technologies in novel directions and which of these students could become future collaborators

Organization

This Challenge is run by the Dialog Research Center at Carnegie Mellon (DialRC)

REAL Challenge Scientific Committee

Alan W Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Helen Hastie, Heriot Watt University, Scotland

Gary Geunbae Lee, Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea

Sungjin Lee, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Santoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Elmar Noeth, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Antoine Raux, Lenovo, USA

David Traum, University of Southern California, USA

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

Contact information:

Website : http://dialrc.org/realchallenge

Email : realchallenge@speechinfo.org

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CALL FOR PAPERS

International Conference of young researchers in Language Didactics and Linguistics

Multidisciplinary conference on the study of language

24 juin – 27 juin 2014

LIDILEM laboratory Stendhal University, Grenoble, France

http://cedil2014.u-grenoble3.fr

In line with the areas of research of our laboratory, this multidisciplinary conference’s objective is to allow the community of PhD

students and young researchers to submit their research topics in the fields of language, its teaching and or literacy, psychology,

education sciences, ethnology, neurolinguistics, human-machine communication.

RESEARCH THEMES

·

Linguistics

·

Psycholinguistics

·

Linguistic development

·

Sociolinguistics

·

Multilingualism

·

Language didactics,

·

Natural Language Processing (NLP),

·

Digital Humanities.

CALENDAR

·

Submission deadline : 15th November 2013 29th November 2013

·

Announcement of acceptances : March 3rd, 2013

·

Preliminary program : May, 2014

·

Reception of final articles : June 2nd, 2014

·

Conference dates : Tuesday, 24 June (afternoon) to Friday, 27 June 2014

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Laurent BESACIER (Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, France), Jacqueline BILLIEZ (Université

Stendhal de Grenoble, France), Annette BOUDREAU (Université de Moncton, Canada), Gabrièle BUDACH (University of

Southampton, England) , Cécile CANUT (Université Paris-Descartes, France), Jean-Pierre CHEVROT (Université Stendhal de

Grenoble, France), Jean-Louis CHISS (Université Paris 3, France), Jean-François de PIETRO (Université de Neuchâtel, Institut de

Recherche et de Documentation Pédagogique, Switzerland), Jean-Marc DEWAELE (Birbeck, University of London, England),

Cécile FABRE (ERSS, Université de Toulouse, France), Isabel GONZALEZ REY (Université St Jacques de Compostelle, Spain),

Heather HILTON (Université Paris 8, France), Alexandra JAFFE (California State University Long Beach, United-States), Sophie

KERN (Université de Lyon 3, France), Marinette MATTHEY (Université Stendhal de Grenoble, France), Christophe PARISSE

(Université de Paris 10, France), Ludovic TANGUY (ERSS, Université de Toulouse, France).

LANGUAGES

The languages used during the conference will be French or English.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

This conference addresses only young researchers (PhD students and recent doctors). Abstracts must be in French or in English.

The abstract should not be more than 2 pages long, including references.

Deadline for submission : 15

th November 2013 29th November 2013

For more information refer to the instructions indicated on the conference site:

http://cedil2014.u-grenoble3.fr

MODALITIES OF COMMUNICATION

Presentations and posters of young researchers will follow one another and will be accompanied with plenary conferences of

renowned lecturers and researchers stemming from different disciplinary fields.

Communication in workshops (20 minutes presentation and an additional 10 minutes for discussion).

Presentation of posters.

PUBLICATION OF ACTS

The abstracts accepted for oral or displayed may be published in the form of articles (8-10 pages) to be submitted before June 2

nd,

2014. Articles will be subjected and selected to a proofreading committee with the possibility of being published in the University

Press of Grenoble (PUG) at the beginning of 2015.

CONTACT

For any further information about submissions or registrations, please email to:

cedil2014@gmail.com

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We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the fifth annual workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), to be co-located with ACL 2014 in Baltimore in June 2014. The deadline for submission of papers and demo proposals is 21 March. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline, and formatting of regular papers can be found here here:

       http://www.slpat.org/slpat2014

This 2-day workshop will bring together researchers from all areas of speech and language technology with a common interest in making everyday life more accessible for people with physical, cognitive, sensory, emotional, or developmental disabilities. This workshop will provide an opportunity for individuals from both research communities, and the individuals with whom they are working, to assist to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress. General topics include but are not limited to:

                • Automated processing of sign language

                • Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments

                • Speech transformation for improved intelligibility

                • Speech and Language Technologies for Assisted Living

                • Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language

                • Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC/AT applications

                • Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech

                • Silent speech: speech technology based on sensors without audio

                • Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication

                • Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies

                • Multimodal user interfaces and dialogue systems adapted to assistive technologies

                • NLP for cognitive assistance applications

                • Presentation of graphical information for people with visual impairments

                • Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications

                • Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications

                • Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies

                • Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology

                • Web accessibility; text simplification, summarization, and adapted presentation modes such as speech, signs or symbols

                • Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field

                • Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes

                • Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology

                • Anything included in this year's special topic

                • Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Please contact the conference organizers at slpat2014-workshop@googlegroups.com with any questions.

Important dates:

21 March: Paper/demo submissions due

11 April: Notification of acceptance

28 April: Camera-ready papers due

26 - 27 June: SLPAT workshop

We look forward to seeing you!

The organizing committee of SLPAT 2014,

Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany

Dimitra Anastasiou, University of Bremen, Gernany

Cui Jian, SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, University of Bremen, Germany

Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Rupal Patel, Northeastern University, USA

Frank Rudzicz, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and University of Toronto, Canada

Annalu Waller, University of Dundee, Scotland

Desislava Zhekova, University of Munich, Germany

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CALL FOR PAPERS

                               TALN-2014

             21st Conference on Natural Language Processing

                        http://www.taln2014.org

                             July 1-4 2014

                           Marseille, FRANCE

IMPORTANT DATES

==========

1. Long paper

    - Extended submission deadline : February 27, 2014

    - Notification : March 29, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 2, 2014

2. Short paper

    - Paper submission deadline : April 12, 2014

    - Notification : May 10, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 26, 2014

3. Demonstrations

    - Submission deadline : April 21, 2014

    - Notification : May 10, 2014

    - Camera ready paper due : May 26, 2014

PRÉSENTATION

============

Organized by the LPL (Laboratoire Parole et Langage) and the LIF

(Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale), the 21st Conference on

Natural Language Processing (TALN) will take place from 1st to the

4th July at Faculté Saint Charles, Marseille (France).

TALN'2014 is organised under the aegis of ATALA (Association pour

le Traitement Automatique des Langues) and will be held jointly with

RECITAL'2014, the conference for young researchers (separated call

for papers).

TALN'2014 will include oral presentations of research and position

papers, posters, invited speakers and demonstrations. The official

language is French. English presentations and papers are accepted for

non-French-speaking authors.

TYPES OF COMMUNICATIONS

=======================

Two communication formats are proposed: long papers (from 12 to 14 pages)

and short papers (from 6 to 8 pages).

Authors are invited to submit two types of communications:

  - original research work

  - position paper on the current state of the research work

Papers should present original works, with substantial new material when

comparing to previous publications of the same author(s). Translation of

previously published papers are not

There will be two presentation formats: Oral for long papers and Poster

for short papers.

All topics of NLP are eligible for a submission.

SELECTION CRITERIA

==================

Submissions will be reviewed by at least two experts of the domain. For research

papers, decisions will be based on the following criteria:

 - relevance to the conference topics

- importance and originality of the paper

- scientific and technical soundness

- comparison of the results obtained with those found in relevant works

- situation of the research in comparison with international work

- clarity of the presentation

For position papers, decisions will be based on the following criteria:

 - originality of the point of view presented

- breadth of view and the taking into account of the state-of-the-art

The selected communications will be published in the conference proceedings.

The program committee will select one paper (TALN Best Paper) among the

accepted papers which will be recommended for publication (extended form) in

the journal 'Traitement Automatique des Langues' (T.A.L.).

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

=======================

Papers will be written in French for French-speaking authors or English for non-French-speaking authors.

A LaTeX style file and a Word template will be made available on the

conference website: http://wwwtaln2014.org

ORGANIZING COMMITEE

=====================

                Philippe Blache (Président)

                Carine André                    Frédéric Béchet

                Sébastien Bermond       Brigitte Bigi

                Nadéra Bureau                Cyril Deniaud

                Stéphanie Desous          Benoît Favre

                Nuria Gala                          Joëlle Lavaud

                Grégoire Montcheuil     Alexis Nasr

                Catherine Perrot             Klim Peshkov

                Laurent Prévot                 Carlos Ramisch

                Stéphane Rauzy              Claudia Starke

CONTACTS

========

  philippe.blache[arobas]lpl-aix.fr

  nadera.bureau[arobas]lpl-aix.fr

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Special Session on Computational Intelligence Algorithms for Digital Audio Applications WCCI 2014 Special Session - Call for Papers 2014 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2014) Beijing, China, 

July 6-11 2014. 

 www.ieee-wcci2014.org Theme and Scope of the Session ___________________________________________ Computational Intelligence (CI) is widely used to face complex modelling, prediction, and recognition tasks, and is largely addressed in different research fields. One of these, characterized by a mature orientation to market for many years already, is represented by Digital Audio, which finds application in diverse contexts like entertainment, security, and health. Scientists and technicians worldwide actively cooperate to develop new solutions and propose them for commercial exploitation, and, from this perspective, the employment of advanced CI techniques, in combination with suitable Digital Signal Processing algorithms, surely constitutes a plus. In particular, this is typically accomplished with the aim of extracting and manipulating useful information from the audio stream to pilot the execution of automatized services, also in an interactive fashion. This often happens in conjunction with data coming from other media, like textual and visual, for which specific and application-driven fusion techniques are needed (which also require the involvement of advanced CI algorithms). Several are the Digital Audio topics touched by such a paradigm. In digital music applications we have music transcription, onset detection, genre recognition, just to name a few. Then, moving to speech processing, speech/speaker recognition, speaker diarization, and source separation are surely representative subjects with a florid literature already. Furthermore, auditory scene analysis, acoustic monitoring and sound detection and identification have lately encountered a certain success in the scientific community and can be thus included in this illustrative list. In dealing with the problems correlated to these different topics, the adoption of data-driven learning systems is often a ``must''. This is not, however, immune to technological issues. Indeed, big amount of data frequently needs to be managed and processed, data which features can change over time due to the time-varying characteristics of the audio stream and of the acoustic environment. Moreover, in many applicative scenarios hard real-time processing constraints must be taken into account. It is indeed of great interest for the scientific community to understand how and to what extent novel CI techniques can be efficiently employed in Digital Audio, in the light of all aforementioned aspects. The aim of this session is therefore to offer a CI oriented look at the large variety of Digital Audio research topics and applications and to discuss the most recent technological efforts from this perspective. Topics ___________________________________________ Intelligent Audio Analysis Audio Information Retrieval Music Content Analysis and Understanding Speech and Speaker Analysis and Classification Cross-domain Audio Analysis Sound Detection and Identification Computational Auditory Scene Analysis Acoustic Monitoring Context-aware Audio Source Separation Intelligent Audio Interfaces Important Dates ___________________________________________ •20 December 2013: Due date for paper submission •15 March 2014: Notification to authors •15 April 2014: Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers •6-11 July 2013: Conference Days Organisers ___________________________________________ Stefano Squartini Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy) s.squartini@univpm.it Aurelio Uncini Università La Sapienza (Italy) aurel@ieee.org Francesco Piazza Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy) f.piazza@univpm.it Björn Schuller Imperial College London (UK), TUM (Germany) schuller@tum.de 

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ICALIP2014 CALL FOR PAPERS

2014 International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing

July 7-9, 2014, Shanghai, China

Website: http://www.icalip2014.org/

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

As the flagship conference and the most import event in the region, the 4th International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing (ICALIP2014) will continue the great success of its three previous editions (ICALIP 2008, ICALIP2010 and ICALIP2012) with aiming to provide a unique forum for researchers, engineers and educators interested in audio, language and image processing to learn about recent progresses, to address related challenges and to develop new methods, applications and systems. The conference, to be held on July 7-9, 2014 in Shanghai, the largest city of China, is technically sponsored by IEEE CIS Shanghai Chapter and is co-organized by IET Shanghai Local Network, Shanghai University, Tongji University, Fudan University and Shanghai JiaoTong University. The conference proceedings including all the accepted papers will be published by IEEE (IEEE catalog number: No. CFP1450D-PRT and ISBN: 978-1-4799-3902-2) and submitted to both EI Compendex and ISTP which has indexed all accepted papers of previous three conferences. Best Paper Awards will be granted to the authors of those outstanding papers determined by the International Program Committee of the conference and also the expanded version of the selected papers will be published in four SCI-E indexed IET Research Journals.

IMPORTANT DATES

2 The Submission Deadline       March 25, 2014

2 Notification of Acceptance     May 10, 2014

2 Camera-ready Copy                 May 30, 2014

Topics

Conference topics include, but are not limited to:

A.  Audio and Music Processing:  

• Compression and Coding, 3D and Surround Sounds, Digital Rights and Watermarking
• Music Information Retrieval, Internet Audio, Audio Beam Loudspeaker, Hearing Aids
• Echo Cancellation, Noise Reduction, Beamforming, Audio Gesture System, Binaural Hearing
• Crosstalk Cancellation, Voice Processing in Cochlear Implants

B. Language and Speech Processing:

• Language Acquisition and Reproduction, Human Language Understanding and Learning
• Machine Translation, Speech Recognition and Understanding
• Speech Enhancement, Spoken Document Retrieval

C.  Image Processing:  

• Image Coding, Image Filtering and Enhancement, Image Segmentation and Understanding
• Image Representation and Modeling, Feature Extraction and Analysis
• Image Storage and Retrieval, Image Authentication and Watermarking, DSP/FPGA Implementations

D.  Computer Graphic and Virtual Reality:

• Computational Geometry, Modeling, Rendering, Visualization
• Animation and Simulation, Interactive Environments, Immersive Virtual Reality
•  Virtual environments, Applications of Virtual Reality

E. Bio-informatics:

• Biomedical Image Processing & Visualization, Bio-signal Processing and Analysis
• Biomedical Engineering, Medical and Biomedical Applications
• Health Monitoring Systems, Health Informatics

F.  Remote Sensing and GIS:

• Mobile and Wireless GIS, Geospatial Information Visualization and Service
• Multi-dimensional GIS (3D GIS), Indoor and Outdoor Location
• Remote Sensing Image Preprocessing, Multisensor and Multisource Data Fusion
• GPS Technology, Remote Sensing and GIS Application

G.  Multimedia SOC Design:

• Reconfigurable Processor for Multimedia, Multimedia system-on-a-chip
• Multi-core Technology for Multimedia Processing, GPU-based Multimedia Processing
• Novel Architecture for Multimedia Computing

H.  Big Data and Cloud Processing:

• Big Data Acquisition and Preprocessing, Big Data Storage and Cloud Storage and Management
• Modeling Technology and System for Big Date and Cloud, Big Data Analysis
• Big Data Intelligent Computing,  Big Data Mining, Big Data Visualization, Big Data and Cloud Applications

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to send full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the conference website (http://www.icalip2014.org/) following the Instructions for Authors. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Check the conference website for update.

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Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014

Organisé par l’

Institut de Linguistique Française (CNRS – FR 2393)

du 19 au 23 juillet 2014,

à l’Université Libre de Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin)

APPEL A COMMUNICATIONS

Dates

: 19 au 23 juillet 2014

Lieu

: Université Libre de Berlin

Site web

: http://www.ilf.cnrs.fr/, rubrique Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française

Contact

: cmlf2014@ling.cnrs.fr

Intérêt scientifique

Le quatrième Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française est organisé par l’Institut de

Linguistique Française (ILF), Fédération de Recherche du CNRS (FR 2393) qui est sous la

tutelle de cet organisme et du Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche.

L’ILF regroupe dix-sept laboratoires de recherche, qui sont les co-organisateurs de ce

congrès en partenariat avec de nombreuses associations nationales et internationales. Une

telle organisation, conjointement prise en charge par dix-sept unités de recherche, est

exceptionnelle par son ampleur et la volonté de partenariat scientifique qu’elle révèle.

Le premier Congrès Mondial a été organisé à Paris par l’ILF en 2008, le deuxième à La

Nouvelle-Orléans, le troisième à Lyon en 2012. Chacun de ces trois congrès a attiré plus de

300 participants et les résultats ont fait l’objet d’une publication en ligne immédiate

accompagnée par un volume de résumés et un CD-ROM d’actes.

Ce congrès est organisé sans aucun privilège d'école ou d'orientation et sans exclusive

théorique ou conceptuelle. Chaque domaine ou sous-domaine, chaque type d'objet, chaque

type de questionnement et chaque problématique portant sur le français peut y trouver sa

place.

Le CMLF est organisé en 15 sessions, lesquelles soulignent le fait que la linguistique

française n’est pas limitée à tel ou tel domaine érigé en modèle pour les autres sousdisciplines

du champ. Quatorze thématiques ont été retenues, qui permettent de balayer la

plus grande partie du champ scientifique : (1) Histoire du français : perspectives

diachronique et synchronique, (2) Linguistique et Didactique (français langue première,

français langue seconde), (3) Discours, Pragmatique et Interaction, (4) Francophonie, (5)

Histoire, Épistémologie, Réflexivité, (6) Lexique(s), (7) Linguistique de l’écrit, Linguistique

du texte, Sémiotique, Stylistique, (8) Morphologie, (9) Phonétique, Phonologie et

Interfaces, (10) Psycholinguistique et Acquisition, (11) Sémantique, (12)

Sociolinguistique, Dialectologies et Écologie des langues, (13) Syntaxe, (14) Ressources

et Outils pour l’analyse linguistique. A ces quatorze thématiques a été ajoutée une quinzième

session « pluri-thématique », laissant ouverte la possibilité de travailler dans plusieurs

domaines, voire en marge des territoires disciplinaires traditionnels.

Chaque thématique est pilotée par un Président et coordonnée par un Vice-président

(membre du Comité directeur de l’ILF, ou bien choisi par ce comité). Les comités

scientifiques comportent une proportion équilibrée de spécialistes français et étrangers. Un

soin particulier a été accordé à la sélection des comités afin de s’assurer qu’ils présenteraient

les plus grandes garanties scientifiques pour le succès du congrès. On trouve donc dans

chaque comité des linguistes connu(e)s mondialement pour leur contribution au domaine. Le

rôle de ces comités est de sélectionner les propositions de communications.

Les soumissions se feront sous la forme de brefs articles de 10 à 15 pages.

Toutes les communications (y compris les conférences plénières) seront publiées sous la

forme d'un article de 10 à 15 pages dans les actes du congrès (sous forme de CD-ROM

accompagnant un livret des titres et des résumés des communications) et maintenues sous

forme électronique sur le site du CMLF. L'archive électronique restera accessible après le

congrès.

Rappel du calendrier

•

15 mai 2013 : Ouverture de la plateforme de dépôt des propositions de communications

•

30 novembre 2013 : Date limite de réception des propositions de communication

•

25 février 2014 : Notification de l'acceptation ou du refus et directives pour la version

définitive

•

25 mars 2014 : Réception de la version définitive des articles

•

Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française : du 19 au 23 juillet 2014

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The 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 14) will be held from 25 to 27 July at the National Institute for Japanese Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan. For more details, see its official website, which is now open: http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/labphon14/

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Summer school on “Tools & Techniques in Geolinguistics”

Dealing with methods and techniques in geolinguistics, an international summer school will take place at the University of Kiel (Germany) 17-27 August 2014. In this new and interdisciplinary research paradigm, regional varieties will be analysed with respect to their linguistic, geographical, social, perceptual and spatial characteristics. With its many Low German dialects and the endangered Frisian language, Northern Germany is a very dynamic language area right on Kiel’s doorstep, and the summer school will take advantage of this. In the case of Low German, students will learn how to collect speech data in the laboratory and in the field, how to compile a text corpus and how to analyse the material multifactorially from a geolinguistic perspective.

The summer school does not only address students and graduates of (German) dialectology and geolinguistics but also provides new insights for everyone interested in speech documentation, field research, phonetics, corpus linguistics, perceptual dialectology, sociolinguistics and typology. International experts in dialectology and geolinguistics will offer a wide range of lectures, interactive workshops and practical exercises. Additionally, participants will be supported by student mentors.

The summer school is addressed to about 50 national and international students. Applicants will be postgraduates holding a bachelor degree (or higher) in linguistics, phonetics, language documentation/typology, German studies or a similar field. Please send the following documents (preferably in pdf format) by email to contact@geoling.uni-kiel.de

- relevant academic achievements, i.e. certificates and complementary proofs of qualification

- curriculum vitae, including experiences in statistics and speech processing software

- letter of motivation briefly summarizing the linguistic expertise and outlining personal research interests and future aims

- recommendation letter of a supervising academic teacher

We offer up to 30 full scholarships that cover all costs for travel and accommodation. Please note in your application whether or not you apply for a scholarship. If possible, all successful applicants from outside Kiel will receive a scholarship. The expenses will be reimbursed after the summer school, but other financial arrangements can be made as well, if necessary.

Applications should be sent by email to contact@geoling.uni-kiel.de by 28 February 2014. For further information, please visit our web site on http://www.geoling.uni-kiel.de/en/home

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the summer school is organised by Prof Dr Oliver Niebuhr, Dr Christina A Anders as well as Dr Uwe Vosberg and hosted by the Institute for Scandinavian studies, Frisian and General Linguistics along with a research centre on “The areality and sociality of language” (http://www.arealitaet.uni-kiel.de) at the University of Kiel.

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Invited speaker: Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome)

For more information, see : http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html
(Beware though that this page is still under construction)

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GOAL

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers involved in the construction and application of electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications of existing resources in line with the users' needs, thereby fully exploiting the advantages of the digital form. Given the breadth of the questions, we welcome reports on work from many perspectives, including but not limited to: computational lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, language learning and ergonomics.


MOTIVATION

The way we look at dictionaries (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. While being considered as an appendix to grammar in the past, by now they have moved to centre stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without them. Also, rather than being static entities (data-base view), dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, i.e. graphs, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines (society, economy, human brain) also apply to dictionaries: everything is linked, hence accessible, and everything is evolving. Given these similarities, one may wonder what we can learn from these disciplines.

In this 4th edition of the CogALex workshop we therefore also invite scientists working in these fields, with the goal to broaden the picture, i.e. to gain a better understanding concerning the mental lexicon and to integrate these findings into our dictionaries in order to support navigation. Given recent advances in neurosciences, it appears timely to seek inspiration from neuroscientists studying the human brain. There is also a lot to be learned from other fields studying graphs and networks, even if their object of study is something else than language, for example biology, economy or society.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and electronic dictionaries. To perform the groundwork for the next generation of such resources we invite researchers involved in the building of such tools. The idea is to discuss modifications of existing resources by taking the users’ needs and knowledge states into account, and to capitalize on the advantages of the digital media. For this workshop we solicit papers including but not limited to the following topics, each of which can be considered from various points of view: linguistics, neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip of the tongue problem, associations), network related sciences (sociology, economy, biology), mathematics (vector-based approaches, graph theory, small-world problem), etc.


1) Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

• What does a language producer start from (bag of words)?
• What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and looking for a word?
• What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the desired output (target word)?

2) The meaning of words

• Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
• Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
• Revelation of hidden information (distributional semantics, latent semantics, vector-based approaches: LSA/HAL)
• Neural models, neurosemantics, neurocomputational theories of content representation.

3) Structure of the lexicon

• Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of view (clustering, topical structure)
• Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations (reading between the lines, subliminal communication);
• Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
• Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information concerning words, organisation of words)

4) Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

• Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and indexes (crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.)
• Impact and use of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) for building dictionaries, for organizing and indexing the data (clustering of words), and for allowing to track navigational strategies, etc.
• (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym, hypernym, meronym, association, collocation, ...)
• Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to words, their uses, combinations and associations

5) Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies, interface issues,...)

• Search based on sound, meaning or associations
• Search (simple query vs multiple words)
• Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
• Recovery
• Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used by people)
• Interface problems, data-visualisation

6) Dictionary applications

• Methods supporting vocabulary learning (for example, creation of data-bases showing words in various contexts)
• Tools for supporting Human translation

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for paper submissions: May 25, 2014
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2014
Camera-ready papers due: July 7, 2014
Workshop date: August 23, 2014


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers should follow the COLING main conference formatting details (http://www.coling-2014.org/call-for-papers.php) and should be submitted as a PDF-file via the START workshop manager at https://www.softconf.com/coling2014/WS-1/ (you must register first). 

Contributions can be short or long papers. Short paper submission must describe original and unpublished work without exceeding six (6) pages (references included). Characteristics of short papers include: a small, focused contribution; work in progress; a negative result; a piece of opinion; an interesting application nugget. Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work without exceeding twelve (12) pages (references included).

Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

For further details see: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html

SHARED TASK

We invite participation in a shared task devoted to the problem of lexical access in language production, with the aim of providing a quantitative comparison between different systems.

Motivation of shared task

The quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on the accessibility of the information. That is, a crucial point is dictionary access. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the very moment of consultation (words, concepts, speech sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

To bring some structure into this multitude of possibilities, the shared task will concentrate on a crucial subtask, namely multiword association.  we will organize a novel type of shared task which will allow quantitative comparisons between different systems. The task chosen is multiword association.

What we mean by this in the context of this workshop is the following. Suppose, we were looking for a word expressing the following ideas: ísuperior dark coffee made of beans from Arabiaí, but could not remember the intended word mocha. Since people always remember something concerning the elusive word, it would be nice to have a system accepting this kind of input, to propose then a number of candidates for the target word. Given the above example, we might enter dark, coffee, beans, and Arabia, and the system would be supposed to come up with lists of associated words such as mocha, espresso, or cappuccino.


Procedure

The participants will receive lists of five given words (primes) such as 'circus', 'funny', 'nose', 'fool', and 'fun' and are supposed to compute the word which is most closely associated to all of them. In this case, the word 'clown' would be the expected answer. Here are some more examples:

We will provide a training set of 2000 sets of five input words (multiword stimuli), together with the expected target words (associative response). The participants will have several weeks to train their systems on this data. After the the training phase, we will release a test set containing another 2000 sets of five input words, but without providing the expected target words.

Participants will have five days to run their systems on the test data, thereby predicting the target words. For each system, we will compare the results to the expected target words and compute an accuracy. The participants will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach and the results.

For the participating systems, we will distinguish two categories: (1) Unrestricted systems. They can use any kind of data to compute their results. (2) Restricted systems: These systems are only allowed to draw on the freely available ukWaC corpus (comprising 2 billion words) in order to extract information on word associations. Participants are allowed to compete in either category or in both.


Schedule for Shared Task

• Training Data Release:  March 25, 2014
• Test Data Release:  May 5, 2014
• Final Results:  May 9, 2014
• Deadline for Paper Submission:  May 25, 2014
• Reviewers' feedback:  June, 15, 2014
• Camera-Ready Version:  July 7, 2014
• Workshop date:  August 23, 2014

All data releases to be found on the workshop website.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

• Bel Enguix, Gemma(LIF-CNRS, France) and (GRLMC, Tarragona, Spain)
• Chang, Jason(National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
• Cook, Paul(University of Melbourne, Australia)
• Cristea, Dan(University A.I.Cuza, Iasi, Romania)
• De Deyne, Simon(Experimental Psychology, Leuven, Belgium) and (Adelaide, Australia)
• De Melo, Gerard(IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
• Ferret, Olivier(CEA LIST, Gif sur Yvette, France)
• Fontenelle, Thierry(CDT, Luxemburg)
• Gala, Nuria(LIF-CNRS, Aix Marseille University, Marseille, France)
• Granger, Sylviane(Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Grefenstette, Gregory (Inria, Saclay, France)
• Hirst, Graeme(University of Toronto, Canada)
• Hovy, Eduard(CMU, Pittsburgh, USA)
• Hsieh, Shu-Kai(National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan)
• Huang, Chu-Ren(Hongkong Polytechnic University, China)
• Joyce, Terry(Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)
• Lapalme, Guy(RALI, University of Montreal, Canada)
• Lenci, Alessandro(CNR, university of Pisa, Italy)
• L'Homme, Marie Claude(University of Montreal, Canada)
• Mihalcea, Rada(University of Texas, USA)
• Navigli, Roberto(Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy)
• Pirrelli, Vito(ILC, Pisa, Italy)
• Polguère, Alain(ATILF-CNRS, Nancy, France)
• Rapp, Reinhard(LIF-CNRS, France) and (Mainz, Germany)
• Rosso, Paolo(NLEL, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
• Schwab, Didier(LIG-GETALP, Grenoble, France)
• Serasset, Gilles(IMAG, Grenoble, France)
• Sharoff, Serge(University of Leeds, UK)
• Su, Jun-Ming(University of Tainan, Taiwan)
• Tiberius, Carole(Institute for Dutch Lexicology, The Netherlands)
• Tokunaga, Takenobu(TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)
• Tufis, Dan(RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
• Valitutti, Alessandro(Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Finland)
• Wandmacher, Tonio(IRT SystemX, Saclay, France)
• Zock, Michael(LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), currently (University of Tainan, Taiwan)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS and CONTACT PERSONS

• Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
• Reinhard Rapp (University of Aix Marseille (France) and Mainz (Germany), reinhardrapp AT gmx.de
• Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong), churen.huang AT inet.polyu.edu.hk

For more details see:

http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-webpage/index.html
(again, this page is still under construction)

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org

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In the framework of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex) to be held at COLING 2014, we invite participation in a shared task devoted to the problem of lexical access in language production, with the aim of providing a quantitative comparison between different systems.

 
MOTIVATION

The quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on the accessibility of the information. That is a crucial point is dictionary access. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the very moment of consultation (words, concepts, speech sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

To bring some structure into this multitude of possibilities, the shared task will concentrate on a crucial subtask, namely multiword association.  What we mean by this in the context of this workshop is the following. Suppose, we were looking for a word expressing the following ideas: 'superior dark coffee made of beans from Arabia', but could not remember the intended word 'mocha' due to the tip-of-the-tongue problem. Since people always remember something concerning the elusive word, it would be nice to have a system accepting this kind of input, to propose then a number of candidates for the target word. Given the above example, we might enter 'dark', 'coffee', 'beans', and 'Arabia', and the system would be supposed to come up with one or several associated words such as 'mocha', 'espresso', or 'cappuccino'.

 
TASK DEFINITION

The participants will receive lists of five given words (primes) such as 'circus', 'funny', 'nose', 'fool', and 'fun' and are supposed to compute the word which is most closely associated to all of them. In this case, the word 'clown' would be the expected response. Here are some more examples:

   given words:  gin, drink, scotch, bottle, soda
   target word:  whisky

   given words:  wheel, driver, bus, drive, lorry
   target word:  car

   given words:  neck, animal, zoo, long, tall
   target word:  giraffe

   given words:  holiday, work, sun, summer, abroad
   target word:  vacation

   given words:  home, garden, door, boat, chimney
   target word:  house

   given words:  blue, cloud, stars, night, high
   target word:  sky

We will provide a training set of 2000 sets of five input words (multiword stimuli), together with the expected target words (associative responses). The participants will have about five weeks to train their systems on this data. After the training phase, we will release a test set containing another 2000 sets of five input words, but without providing the expected target words.

Participants will have five days to run their systems on the test data, thereby predicting the target words. For each system, we will compare the results to the expected target words and compute an accuracy. The participants will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach and their results.

For the participating systems, we will distinguish two categories:

(1) Unrestricted systems. They can use any kind of data to compute their results.
(2) Restricted systems: These systems are only allowed to draw on the freely available ukWaC corpus in order to extract information on word associations. The ukWaC corpus comprises about 2 billion words and is can be downloaded from http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=corpora.

Participants are allowed to compete in either category or in both.


VENUE

The shared task will take place as part of the CogALex workshop which is co-located with COLING 2014 (Dublin). The workshop date is August 23, 2014. Shared task participants who wish to have a paper published in the workshop proceedings will be required to present their work at the workshop.
 

SHARED TASK SCHEDULE

Training data release:  March 27, 2014
Test data release:  May 5, 2014
Final results due:  May 9, 2014
Deadline for paper submission: May 25, 2014 
Reviewers' feedback:  June, 15, 2014
Camera-ready version:  July 7, 2014
Workshop date:  August 23, 2014


FURTHER INFORMATION

CogALex workshop website: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html
Data releases: To be found on the above workshop website from the dates given in the schedule.
Registration for the shared task: Send e-mail to Michael Zock, with Reinhard Rapp in copy.


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
Reinhard Rapp (University of Aix Marseille (France) and Mainz (Germany), reinhardrapp AT gmx.de
Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong), churen.huang AT inet.polyu.edu.hk