Call For Papers : IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) Special Issue 

on 'Advances in Spoken Dialogue Systems and Mobile Interfaces: Theory and Applications' 

http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/uploads/special_issues_deadlines/spoken_dialogue.pdf 

Recently, there have been an array of advances in both the theory and practice of spoken dialog 

systems, especially on mobile devices. On theoretical advances, foundational models and algorithms

 (e.g., Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), reinforcement learning, 

Gaussian process models, etc.) have advanced the state-of-the-art on a number of fronts.

 For example, techniques have been presented which improve system robustness, enabling 

systems to achieve high performance even when faced with recognition inaccuracies. 

Other methods have been proposed for learning from interactions, to improve performance 

automatically. Still other methods have shown how systems can make use of speech input 

and output incrementally and in real time, raising levels of naturalness and responsiveness. 

On applications, interesting new results on spoken dialog systems are becoming available 

from both research settings and deployments 'in the wild', for example on deployed services 

such as Apple's Siri, Google's voice actions, Bing voice search, Nuance's Dragon Go!, 

and Vlingo. Speech input is now commonplace on smart phones, and is well-established 

as a convenient alternative to keyboard input, for tasks such as control of phone functionalities, 

dictation of messages, and web search. Recently, intelligent personal assistants have 

begun to appear, via both applications and features of the operating system. Many of these 

new assistants are much more than a straightforward keyboard replacement - they are 

first-class multi-modal dialogue systems that support sustained interactions, using spoken

 language, over multiple turns. New system architectures and engineering algorithms have 

also been investigated in research labs, which have led to more forward-looking spoken dialog 

systems. This special issue seeks to draw together advances in spoken dialogue systems from 

both research and industry. Submissions covering any aspect of spoken dialog systems are 

welcome. Specific (but not exhaustive) topics of interest include all of the following in relation 

to spoken dialogue systems and mobile interfaces: - theoretical foundations of spoken dialogue 

system design, learning, evaluation, and simulation - dialog tracking, including explicit 

representations of uncertainty in dialog systems, such as Bayesian networks; domain 

representation and detection - dialog control, including reinforcement learning, (PO)MDPs, 

decision theory, utility functions, and personalization for dialog systems - foundational 

technologies for dialog systems, including acoustic models, language models, language 

understanding, text-to-speech, and language generation; incremental approaches to input 

and output; usage of affect - applications, settings and practical evaluations, such as voice 

search, text message dictation, multi-modal interfaces, and usage while driving Papers must

be submitted online. The bulk of the issue will be original research papers, and priority will 

be given to the papers with high novelty and originality. Papers providing a 

tutorial/overview/survey are also welcome, although space is available for only a 

limited number of papers of this type. Tutorial/overview/survey papers will be evaluated 

on the basis of overall impact.

 -Manuscript submission: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jstsp-ieee 

- Information for authors: http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/jstsp/jstsp-author-info/ 

Dates Extended submission date of papers: July 22, 2012

 First review September 15, 2012 Revised Submission: October 10, 2012 

Second review: November 10, 2012 

Submission of final material: November 20, 2012 

Guest editors: - Kai Yu, co-lead guest editor (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) 

- Jason Williams, co-lead guest editor (Microsoft Research) 

- Brahim Chaib-draa (Laval University) 

- Oliver Lemon (Heriot-Watt University) 

- Roberto Pieraccini (ICSI) - Olivier Pietquin (SUPELEC) 

- Pascal Poupart (University of Waterloo) 

- Steve Young (University of Cambridge)