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ISCApad #301 |
| Thursday, July 06, 2023 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message of Professor Sebastian Möller, ISCA president
Dear friends of ISCA,
Before many of us leave for the summer break, this ISCApad will feed you with the latest information on events, developments and achievements in your community.
Your association will experience some changes through the ISCA Board elections: Beena Ahmed (Australia), Tom Bäckström (Finland), and Esther Klabbers (USA) have been newly elected to the Board, and Nobuaki Minematsu (Japan), Jianhua Tao (China) and Meg Zellers (Germany) have been re-elected for another period on the Board. Congratulations to all who have been elected! I am sure that you will make the work of our association even more productive and engaging.
While there will be some constancy with a larger number of members continuing to serve on the Board, there will also be some changes – parts of them have already been initiated in the current Board: We will continue to update our software tools, with a new membership administration software and website to be operational in autumn; this will hopefully avoid longer system outages as we have experienced recently with credit card payments. On the Technical Committee side, we will continue to professionalize the handling of an ever-growing number of scientific papers, and the handover of knowledge between Interspeech TPCs; Simon King and his team, together with our Scientific Coordinator Antoine Serrurier, have thankfully paved the way by initiating tools which will continue to be used in the years to come. We are discussing a new award structure, honoring members of different career stages. We will continue our efforts to create an ISCA foundation to financially support parts of our community.
In addition to continuing efforts, there will be new targets addressed by the new board. As I will not be a member of the new board after having served for two periods, I leave it to the upcoming president and their team to define what is deemed most important and helpful to improve services for all ISCA members. I am sure that a new way of communication with you – and amongst you – will help to make these activities more visible and experienceable to you. My term as your president will finish at the end of the General Assembly to which all of you are invited on Monday, August 21, 2023, 17h00-18h30 Dublin time. The event will be in person in the Dublin Conference Center, but for those members who cannot participate in person, there will be a zoom link with chat so that you can participate in writing in the discussions, and also vote remotely. The latter might be important as we will vote proposed changes to our statutes. More information will follow with the official invitation which will be sent to you by Emmanuelle Foxonet.
We look to welcoming you all to Dublin, IR for ISCA Interspeech 2023 this August 20-24: https://www.interspeech2023.org/
I wish you a very good read of this ISCApad, as usual nicely compiled thanks to Chris Wellekens, and a great summer. Again, hopefully we will see all of you in person in Dublin for Interspeech 2023.
Sebastian Möller
ISCA President
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| 2-2 | 2023 ISCA FELLOWS 2023 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:
Is it is common practice since several years, the ISCA Fellows Selection Committee has worked over the last months to seek out nominations and endorsements for this year’s ISCA Fellows selection. The ISCA Fellows Selection Committee maintains a rigorous process of collecting and evaluating all nominations (more details are found on the ISCA webpage at: https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/fellows). After extensive evaluations and reviews, the following eight distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA Fellow for 2023. Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join us in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communication and technology! All will be recognized at INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin, Ireland, in August.
Phil Green (ISCA Fellows Board Member) Sebastian Möller (ISCA President)
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| 2-3 | ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer: Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan) Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy) Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)
SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH. The 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) will be held as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022, Marseille (FR), 24-25 June 2022. The SIGUL venue will provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers, and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. Topics include but are not limited to:
We also invite position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues. Important Dates:
More details can be found on the workshop web page: https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/
SIGUL Board Sakriani Sakti Claudia Soria Maite Melero
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| 2-4 | ISCA Language SIGS ISCA supports speech communication research activities in various languages. The individual languages have equal interest, but they may involve have different technical or scientific problems. For example, some languages are tonal, while others are not; Some languages have only one writing system, while others have several. In the ISCA community, we have 6 language Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for Chinese, French, Italian, Iberian, Indian, and Russian. Each SIG is organised by researchers who speak the language of interest as L1 and others who have a technical or scientific interest in the language. Each SIG sponsors domestic and international research activities, and representative members of the SIGs attend a Lang SIG meeting every year during the INTERSPEECH conference. In this meeting, recent activities of each SIG are reported, and new ideas are exchanged. We also review what ISCA can do for the SIGs and what the SIGs can do for ISCA. Each SIG has its own web page, and you can visit the pages here. Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU The University of Tokyo Japan
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| 2-5 | ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG) 'Spoken Language Translation'
ISCA SIG “Spoken Language Translation” Aims. The SIG SLT covers all aspects of spoken language translation — simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas SIG SLT will (a) provide members of ISCA with a special interest in spoken language translation and its related areas with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in spoken language translation; (b) organize challenges and evaluation campaigns; (c) sponsor and organize the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), meetings, satellites, and tutorial workshops in spoken language translation, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and (d) make available open-source code and data resources, best practices and tools, and evaluation metrics relevant to spoken language translation.
Motivation. Recent interest in speech translation and simultaneous translation by machine has been growing explosively, due to continued performance advances and a growing international need for simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas. The under-covered elements in the current research are, for instance, incremental simultaneous speech-to-speech translation, paralinguistic translation, speaking style translation across languages. The proposed SIG will be organized by the members who are interested in spoken language translation/interpretation from various related areas such as ASR, TTS, and MT. SIG SLT emerged from over two decades of organizing the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) and its predecessor C-Star, scaling operations in response to significant growth in the field. The organizers of IWSLT and partners believe it is now time to join with ISCA by creating an ISCA SIG. IWSLT has a 15-year track record of profitability; it runs the premier benchmarking campaign on spoken language translation annually accompanied by an international scientific conference to present and discuss results.
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| 2-6 | ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA. ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) Annual Gathering aims to provide an opportunity for postdoc & early career researchers to meet and communicate at INTERSPEECH. In the framework of ISCA-PECRAC, we would like:
Contacts: Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)
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| 2-7 | ISCA social networks We encourage all members tokeep contact with ISCA via our social nets. Also you will bde kept informed about all events on our website. This is particularly important in this time where due to the coronavirus, many modifications may be brought to the conference.
ISCA Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/iscaspeech/ ISCA Twitter : https://twitter.com/ISCAFOX ISCA SAC Student Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/98794207409/ website : www.isca-speech.org
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| 2-8 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-9 | Prosody slides and lecture videos @ ACL 2021 Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,
We are pleased to announce the open-source release of our tutorial on prosody, originally presented at ACL 2021. This includes about 400 powerpoint slides, with notes, downloadable from https://nigelward.com/prosody/ , and 29 video lectures based on this content, totaling about 4 hours, hosted at Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCFybA0SDVTjbQQRxJ1p2NnirCw_tk_z7 .
These we hope will be useful for - professors seeking slides to use for general-audiences talks - graduate students wanting to learn about aspects of prosody not taught at their institutions - engineers, clinicians and others seeking an overview of the field or some specific knowledge
Comments are welcome!
Gina-Anne Levow, Nigel G. Ward
Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/
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| 2-10 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:
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| 2-11 | ISCA Board Election 2023-2027 (Results) ISCA Board Election 2023-2027
The ISCA Board Election has completed and the following have been elected to the ISCA Board for 2023-2027 (in alphabetical order):
Beena Ahmed, Australia Tom Bäckström, Finland Esther Klabbers, USA Nobuaki Minematsu, Japan Jianhua Tao, China Meg Zellers, Germany
Thanks to all the candidates for standing and the 544 members who voted. The new Board will take over after this year's General Assembly which will be held during INTERSPEECH 2023.
Torbjørn Svendsen ISCA Secretary on behalf of the ISCA Board
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