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)

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

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The 22nd European Signal Processing Conference  September 1 – 5, 2014, Lisbon, Portugal http://www.eusipco2014.org/ ============================================================== Deadline for the submission of Full Papers: FEBRUARY 17, 2014 ============================================================== EUSIPCO 2014 will be held on September 1- 5, 2014, in Lisbon, Portugal. This is one of the largest international conferences in the field of signal processing and will address all the latest developments in research and technology. The conference will bring together individuals from academia, industry, regulation bodies, and government, to exchange and discuss ideas in all the areas and applications of signal processing. EUSIPCO 2014 will feature world-class keynote speakers, special sessions, plenary talks, tutorials, and technical sessions. We invite the submission of original, unpublished technical papers on signal processing topics, including but not limited to: • Audio and acoustic signal processing • Design and implementation of signal processing systems • Multimedia signal processing • Speech processing • Image and video processing • Machine learning • Signal estimation and detection • Sensor array and multichannel signal processing • Signal processing for communications including wireless and optical communications and networking • Signal processing for location, positioning and navigation • Nonlinear signal processing • Signal processing applications including health and biosciences Submitted papers must be camera-ready and no more than five pages long, and conforming to the format that will soon be specified on the EUSIPCO website (http://www.eusipco2014.org/ ). ============================================================== Best Paper Awards ============================================================== Two “EUSIPCO best young author paper awards” will be given at the dinner banquet of EUSIPCO 2014 to the two best papers from authors under the age of 30. ============================================================== Important Dates ============================================================== Proposal for special sessions: December 9, 2013 Proposal for tutorials: February 17, 2014 Electronic submission of full papers: February 17, 2014 Notification of acceptance: May 26, 2014 Submission of camera-ready papers and copyright forms: June 23, 2014 _______________________________________________

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Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology 7 (LARP VII)
   

Aix-en-Provence, France
Sept. 3-5, 2014

The biannual conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology
(LARP) seeks to bring together international researchers interested in all
areas of Romance phonetics and phonology, in particular within the
 laboratory phonology approach. In the past decades, research in the
 laboratory phonology paradigm has expanded significantly so that the
 disciplines of phonetics and phonology are being investigated from a unique
 interdisciplinary angle. LARP aims at providing an interdisciplinary forum
 for world-wide research focusing on the experimental investigation
 of
 Romance phonetics and phonology and their related areas, such as language
 acquisition, language variation and change, prosody, speech pathology,
 speech technology, as well as the phonology-phonetics interface.
 LARP VII will be hosted for the first time in Europe, by the Laboratoire
 Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence, and will be the result of a joint
 effort between Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en-Provence, France) and the
 Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain).

 Meeting Dates:
 Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology VII will be held from
 03-Sept-2014 to 05-Sept-2014.

 Contact Information:
 Mariapaola D'Imperio: larp7conference@gmail.com
 
Organizers:
 Mariapaola D'Imperio (Aix-Marseille University & LPL,CNRS)
 Pilar Prieto (ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

 Conference webpage:
 http://larp7.sciencesconf.org/

 Abstract Submission Information:

Abstracts can be submitted from 15-Dec-2013 until 15-April-2014. 
 Invited speakers
 Laura Bosch, Univ. Barcelona
 Martine Grice, Univ. Koeln, Germany
 Thierry Nazzi, CNRS, Paris
 Daniel Recasens, Univ. Autonoma, Barcelona

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 56th International Symposium ELMAR-2014 

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

September 10-12, 2014 Zadar, Croatia

 Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2014 

http://www.elmar-zadar.org/ 

CALL FOR PAPERS TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS IEEE Region 8 

IEEE Croatia Section 

IEEE Croatia Section SP, 

AP and MTT Chapters 

EURASIP - 

European Association for Signal Processing 

TOPICS

 --> Image and Video Processing 

--> Multimedia Communications

 --> Speech and Audio Processing 

--> Wireless Communications 

--> Telecommunications

 --> Antennas and Propagation

 --> e-Learning and m-Learning 

--> Navigation Systems 

--> Ship Electronic Systems 

--> Power Electronics and Automation 

--> Naval Architecture

 --> Sea Ecology 

--> Special Sessions: http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2014/special_sessions/ 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER 

Prof. Milo Oravec, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, SLOVAKIA: 

Feature Extraction and Classification by Machine Learning Methods for Biometric Recognition 

of Face and Iris

 SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES 

Deadline for submission of full papers: May 15, 2014 

Notification of acceptance mailed out by: June 3, 2014 

Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: June 10, 2014 

Preliminary program available online by: June 17, 2014 

Registration forms and payment deadline: June 17, 2014 

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SLAM2014 Call for Paper (important update at the end of this announcement)
================

2nd Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM 2014)Penang, Malaysia
http://language.cs.usm.my/SLAM2014/
11-12 September, 2014
Following the first successful edition of the Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM) in Marseille, France last year, we will be bringing the next edition of the workshop to Penang, Malaysia! SLAM workshop aims at bringing together researchers working in speech, language and audio processing to analyze, index and access multimedia data. Multimedia data are now available in very large amounts: Lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast, podcasts, social videos on the Web, etc. Such data, along with the associated use scenarios, raise specific challenges: Robustness facing the high variability in quality; Efficiency to handle very large amount of data; Semantics shared across modalities; Potentially high error rates in transcription; etc. Worldwide, several national and international research projects are focusing on audio analysis of multimedia data. Similarly, various benchmark initiatives have been initiated such as TRECVID MED, Me!
diaEval, or ETAPE and REPERE in France.

SLAM 2014 is organized in conjunction with Interspeech 2014 over one and a half days, starting Thursday 11 September 2014 and ending Friday 12 September 2014. Penang is conveniently connected by bus, train and flight to Singapore, where the Interspeech 2014 conference will take place. The format of the workshop will include an invited talk, oral presentations of scientific work and a poster session for project and benchmark presentations. SLAM 2014 Workshop is jointly organized by the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia and the IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing in Multimedia. The proceeding will be published by ISCA and available online at ISCA Online Archive. Best papers selected will be able to extend their paper to be submitted to special issue in a dedicated journal that we will announce later.


SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Chng Eng Siong, Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
Eric Castelli, Hanoi University of Science and Technology - Vietnam
Fernando Fernández-Martínez, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid - Spain
Florian Metze, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh - USA
Frédéric Bechet, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille - France
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Dublin - Ireland
Gerald Friedland, University of California, Berkeley - USA
Guillaume Gravier, Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires (IRISA), Rennes - France
Juan Manuel Montero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Laurent Besacier, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble - France
Lin-Shan Lee, Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
Luis Fernando D’Haro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, Delft - Netherlands
Ricardo de Córdoba, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Roberto Barra-Chicote, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Rubén San-Segundo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid - Spain
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo - Japan
Tang Enya Kong, Linton University College, Negeri Sembilan - Malaysia
Xavier Anguera, Telefónica Research, Barcelona - Spain

Two distinguished professors will be giving keynotes presentations during the workshop, they are Prof. Shrikanth S. Narayanan and Assoc. Prof. Min-Yen Kan

IMPORTANT DATES:
Full paper submission deadline 20th June 2014 (extended deadline)
Notification of acceptance 16th July 2014
Camera ready paper 31st July 2014
SLAM workshop 11-12th September 2014
Interspeech conference 14-18th September 2014

Independently of the scientific actions we will provide tour around George Town, Penang, which is a Unesco World Heritage Historical City.  

Jointly Organised by:
Universiti Sains Malaysia, SLAM Organising Committee, Interspeech 2014, ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia, IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing in Multimedia

  ***** ISCA/IEEE SLAM UPDATE *****


The deadline for the 2nd ISCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech, Language and Multimedia is now very close! Below are two important pieces of information if you are considering submitting a paper (which I hope you are). Please circulate the information to relevant mailing list you might have access to and to your colleagues.

*Student grants*

We're happy to inform you that ISCA will reserve two grants for students attending SLAM 2014. Grant application will be handled by ISCA, following the standard procedure as described in http://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/grants. The ISCA grant coordinator is expecting applications for SLAM before August, 1, i.e., shortly after the author notification date.

*Paper submission procedure*

We were informed that some people are experiencing difficulties to access the SLAM 2014 website at http://language.cs.usm.my/SLAM2014. Our apologies if this is the case: We're currently trying to resolve the problem. The unavailability of the web site does not mean that SLAM has been cancelled. We recall here the main information you need to prepare and submit your paper even if you can't access the SLAM 2014 website:

Paper template: same as Interspeech 2014 (see http://www.interspeech2014.org/doc/IS2014_AuthorsKit.zip), following the 4+1 page standard

Submission website: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slam2014

Submission deadline: June 20, 2014
Author notification: July 21, 2014
Camera ready paper: August 1, 2014
Early bird registration: before August 15, 2014
SLAM workshop: September 11-12, 2014

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Welcome to ISCSLP 2014

第九届中文口语语言处理国际会议

http://www.iscslp2014.org

The 9th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP 2014) will be held on September 12-14, 2014 in Singapore.

ISCSLP 2014 is a joint conference between ISCA Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing and National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication of China.

ISCSLP is a biennial conference for scientists, researchers, and practitioners to report and discuss the latest progress in all theoretical and technological aspects of spoken language processing.

While the ISCSLP is focused primarily on Chinese languages, works on other languages that may be applied to Chinese speech and language are also encouraged. The working language of ISCSLP is English.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Speech Production and Perception

2. Speech Analysis

3. Speech Coding

4. Speech Enhancement

5. Hearing Aids and Cochlear Implant

6. Phonetics and Phonology

7. Corpus-based Linguistics

8. Speech and Language Disorders

9. Speech Recognition

10. Spoken Language Translation

11. Speaker, Language, and Emotion Recognition

12. Speech Synthesis

13. Language Modeling

14. Speech Prosody

15. Spoken Dialog Systems

16. Machine Learning Techniques in Speech and Language Processing

17. Voice Conversion

18. Indexing, Retrieval and Authoring of Speech Signals

19. Multi-Modal Interfaces

20. Speech and Language Processing in Education

21. Spoken Language Resources and Technology Evaluation

22. Applications of Spoken Language Processing Technology

23. Others

Important Dates

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                    Call for Papers
--------------------------------------------------------------
8th Workshop:
     'emotion and computing  - 
            current research and future impact'

WORKSHOP at the KI 2014
Stuttgart, September 22nd, 2014

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

The workshop series Òemotion and computing Ð current research and future impactÓ has been
providing a platform for discussion of emotion related topics of computer science and AI since
2006. In recent years computer science research has shown increasing efforts in the field of
software agents which incorporate emotion. Several approaches have been made concerning
emotion recognition, emotion modelling, generation of emotional user interfaces and dialogue
systems as well as anthropomorphic communication agents. Motivations for emotional
computing are manifold. From a scientific point of view, emotions play an essential role in
decision making, as well as in perception and learning. Furthermore, emotions influence rational
thinking and therefore should be part of rational agents as proposed by artificial intelligence
research. Another focus is on human computer interfaces which include believable animations of
interface agents. From a user perspective, emotional interfaces can significantly increase
motivation and engagement which is of high relevance to the games and e-learning industry.
Moreover, motivational and emotional aspects may play a key role in persuasive technologies,
which intend to influence the user behaviour.

Contributions are solicited from the following fields:
 
-Artificial Intelligence Research
-Cognitive Sciences and Cognitive Robotics
-Multi-agent System Technology
-Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition
-Dialogue Systems and Communication
-Modeling Uncertainty and Vagueness
-Computer Game Development
-User Modeling and Personalization
-Applications using models of emotion
-Persuasive Computing/Technologies
-Affective Computing
        
Contributions are expected in the following form:

- Presentations should have a duration of 15-20 minutes. Each 
  presenter is required to submit a short paper on the presented
  topic. Papers are subject to regular peer review and subsequent
  publication within the workshop proceedings (4-8 pages).

- Demonstrations are documented by an extended abstract which
  should not exceed 1 page in total

- Workshop submission is electronic. Submitted papers
  should conform Springer LNCS style and must
  be written in English. Papers will be published on the
  workshop website. Further publication is in discussion
  and depends on submitted papers.

Important Dates:

Workshop paper submission deadline:          July 4th, 2014
Notification of workshop paper acceptance:   July 18th, 2014
Workshop camera ready copy submission:       August 1st, 2014

Organization and Scientific Committee:

Prof. Dr. Dirk Reichardt, Baden-WŸrttemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart (main contact)
Dr. Joscha Bach, MIT
Dr. Christian Becker-Asano, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Dr. Hana Boukricha,University of Bielefeld
Dr. Patrick Gebhard, DFKI SaarbrŸcken
Prof. Dr. Michael Kipp, Hochschule Augsburg
Prof. Dr. Paul Levi, University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr. John-Jules Charles Meyer, University of Utrecht
Dr. Gštz Renner, Daimler AG, Customer Research Center
Prof. Dr. Michael M. Richter, University of Calgary
Dr.-Ing. Bjšrn Schuller, Imperial College London / TU MŸnchen
Prof. Dr. David SŸndermann, DHBW Stuttgart

Please refer to the workshop website for further information:

Workshop Website:       http://www.emotion-and-computing.de
Email:                  mailto://info@emotion-and-computing.de

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SPECOM 2014 - CALL FOR PAPERS

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

16th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2014)

Venue: Novi Sad, Serbia, 5-9 October 2014

Web: www.specom.nw.ru

SPECOM NEWS

SPECOM this year is organized in parallel with DOGS (The Tenth Conference on Digital Speech and Image Processing) in the same time at the same place. Participants will be able to attend both conferences.

ORGANIZERS

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad (UNS, Novi Sad, Serbia), in cooperation with Moscow State Linguistic University (MGLU, Moscow, Russia) and St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Science (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia).

SPECOM conferences

The SPECOM conferences are long time being organised by SPIIRAS (St.Petersburg) and MGLU (Moscow). Recently SPECOM venue is significantly varied: Patras, Greece, 2005; Kazan, Russia, 2011; Plzen, Czech Republic, 2013.

The last conference was organized in parallel with TSD'2013 (The 16th International Conference of Text, Speech and Dialogue) and had a great success and benefits of joining the various research teams. Continue this tradition SPECOM'2014 and DOGS'2014 will be organized jointly. The both conferences are devoted to issues of human-machine interaction and their topics harmonically add each other.

Since 2013 due to extending contribution of University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic the SPECOM proceedings are published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC, or COMPENDEX.

TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

Signal processing and feature extraction

Speech enhancement

Multichannel signal processing

Speech recognition and understanding

Spoken language processing

Spoken dialogue systems

Speaker identification and diarization

Speech forensics and security

Language identification

Text-to-speech systems

Speech perception and speech disorders

Speech translation

Multimodal analysis and synthesis

Audio-visual speech processing

Multimedia processing

Speech and language resources

Applications for human-computer interaction

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the event will be English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and a poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

Social events including a trip to the Krusedol monastery and wine makers on Fruska Gora will allow for additional informal interactions. Details about the social event will be available on the web page.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 8 pages formatted in the LNCS style (see below). Those accepted will be presented either orally or as posters. The decision on the presentation format will be based upon the recommendation of three independent reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission form accessible from the conference web site.

Papers submitted to SPECOM 2014 must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

As the reviewing is blind, the paper should not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...', should be avoided. Instead, use citations, such as 'Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'. Papers that do not conform to the requirements above are determined to be rejected without review.

The paper format for the review has to be the PDF file with all required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance, speakers will receive further information on submitting their camera-ready and electronic sources (for detailed instructions on the final paper format see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

IMPORTANT DATES

May 18, 2014 ............. Submission of full papers

June 1, 2014 ............. Notification of acceptance

June 15, 2014 ............ Final papers (camera ready) and registration

October 5-9, 2014 ........ Conference dates

The contributions to the conference will be published in proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time of the conference.

CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your status. It includes one copy of the conference proceedings, refreshments/coffee breaks, opening dinner, welcome party, mid-conference social event admissions, and organizing costs. In order to lower the fee as much as possible, meals during the conference, the accommodation, and the conference trip are not included.

Full participant:

early registration by June 15, 2013 – RSD 40000 (approx. 350 EUR)

late registration by September 1, 2013 – RSD 43000 (approx. 380 EUR)

on-site registration – RSD 50000 (approx. 440 EUR)

Student (reduced):

early registration by June 15, 2013 – RSD 32000 (approx. 280 EUR)

late registration by September 1, 2013 – RSD 35000 (approx. 310 EUR)

on-site registration – RSD 40000 (approx. 350 EUR)

The payment may be refunded up until September 15, at the cost of RSD 6.500. No refund is possible after this date. All costs are in Serbian Dinar (RSD), see e.g. http://www.xe.com/ucc/ for the current exchange rate.

At least one of the authors has to register and pay the registration fee by June 15, 2014 for their paper to be included in the conference proceedings. Only one paper of up to 8 pages is included in the regular registration fee. The additional paper and page charge is RSD 5000 per page. Any additional paper is treated as extra pages. An extra page charge is RSD 5000 per page. An author with more than one paper pays the additional paper rates unless a co-author has also registered and paid the full registration fee. In the case of uncertainty, feel free to contact the organising committee for clarification.

VENUE

The conference will be organized in Hotel Park, Novi Sad, Serbia (http://hotelparkns.com).

Novi Sad is the second largest city in Serbia. The city has population of 231,798 inhabitants. It is located in the southern part of Pannonian Plain, on the border of the Bačka and Srem regions, on the banks of the Danube river and Danube-Tisa-Danube Canal, facing the northern slopes of Fruška Gora mountain. The city was founded in 1694, when Serb merchants formed a colony across the Danube from the Petrovaradin fortress, a Habsburg strategic military post. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it became an important trading and manufacturing centre, as well as a centre of Serbian culture of that period, earning the nickname Serbian Athens. Today, Novi Sad is an industrial and financial centre of the Serbian economy, as well as a major cultural center.

The University of Novi Sad was founded on 28 June 1960. Today it comprises 14 faculties located in the four major towns of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina: Novi Sad, Subotica, Zrenjanin, and Sombor. The University of Novi Sad is now the second largest among six state universities in Serbia. The main University Campus, covering an area of 259,807m², provides the University of Novi Sad with a unique and beautiful setting in the region and the city of Novi Sad. Having invested considerable efforts in intensifying international cooperation and participating in the process of university reforms in Europe, the University of Novi Sad has come to be recognized as a reform-oriented university in the region and on the map of universities in Europe.

The Faculty of Technical Sciences (Fakultet Tehničkih Nauka, FTN, www.ftn.uns.ac.rs) with 1,200 employees and more than 12,000 students is the largest faculty at UNS. FTN offers engineering education within 71 study programmes. As a research and scientific institution, FTN has 13 departments and 31 research centres. FTN also publishes 4 international journals and organises 16 scientific conferences on various aspects of engineering, including the conference DOGS which is dedicated to the area of speech technologies where FTN has the leading position in the Western Balkan region.

ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee has arranged accommodation for reasonable prices in the same Hotel Park, which is situated near the city center. The rooms with sufficient discount are reserved for the conference days.

ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

SPECOM Secretariat

E-mail: specom@iias.spb.su

Phone/Fax: +7 812 328 7081

Fax: +7 812 328 4450 — Please, designate the faxed material with capitals 'SPECOM' on top.

SPECOM-2014 conference web site: www.specom.nw.ru

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2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

PROCESSING

SLSP 2014

Grenoble, France

October 14-16,

2014

Organised by:

Équipe GETALP

Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/slsp2014/

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

AIMS:

SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research

on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational

language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though

there exist large, well‐known conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of

these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and

people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2014, significant room will be reserved to young

scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.

VENUE:

SLSP 2014 will take place in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps.

SCOPE:

The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical methods

(including machine learning) within language and speech processing. The list below is

indicative and not exhaustive:

phonology, morphology

syntax, semantics

discourse, dialogue, pragmatics

statistical models for natural language processing

supervised, unsupervised and semi‐supervised machine learning methods applied to

natural language, including speech

statistical methods, including biologically‐inspired methods

similarity

alignment

language resources

part‐of‐speech tagging

parsing

semantic role labelling

natural language generation

anaphora and coreference resolution

speech recognition

speaker identification/verification

speech transcription

text‐to‐speech synthesis

machine translation

translation technology

text summarisation

information retrieval

text categorisation

information extraction

term extraction

spelling correction

text and web mining

opinion mining and sentiment analysis

spoken dialogue systems

author identification, plagiarism and spam filtering

STRUCTURE:

SLSP 2014 will consist of:

invited talks

invited tutorials

peer‐reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

to be announced

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Sophia Ananiadou (Manchester, UK)

Srinivas Bangalore (Florham Park, US)

Patrick Blackburn (Roskilde, DK)

Hervé Bourlard (Martigny, CH)

Bill Byrne (Cambridge, UK)

Nick Campbell (Dublin, IE)

David Chiang (Marina del Rey, US)

Kenneth W. Church (Yorktown Heights, US)

Walter Daelemans (Antwerpen, BE)

Thierry Dutoit (Mons, BE)

Alexander Gelbukh (Mexico City, MX)

Ralph Grishman (New York, US)

Sanda Harabagiu (Dallas, US)

Xiaodong He (Redmond, US)

Hynek Hermansky (Baltimore, US)

Hitoshi Isahara (Toyohashi, JP)

Lori Lamel (Orsay, FR)

Gary Geunbae Lee (Pohang, KR)

Haizhou Li (Singapore, SG)

Daniel Marcu (Los Angeles, US)

Carlos Martín‐Vide (Tarragona, ES, chair)

Manuel Montes‐y‐Gómez (Puebla, MX)

Satoshi Nakamura (Nara, JP)

Shrikanth S. Narayanan (Los Angeles, US)

Vincent Ng (Dallas, US)

Joakim Nivre (Uppsala, SE)

Elmar Nöth (Erlangen, DE)

Maurizio Omologo (Trento, IT)

Barbara H. Partee (Amherst, US)

Gerald Penn (Toronto, CA)

Massimo Poesio (Colchester, UK)

James Pustejovsky (Waltham, US)

Gaël Richard (Paris, FR)

German Rigau (San Sebastián, ES)

Paolo Rosso (Valencia, ES)

Yoshinori Sagisaka (Tokyo, JP)

Björn W. Schuller (London, UK)

Satoshi Sekine (New York, US)

Richard Sproat (New York, US)

Mark Steedman (Edinburgh, UK)

Jian Su (Singapore, SG)

Marc Swerts (Tilburg, NL)

Jun'ichi Tsujii (Beijing, CN)

Renata Vieira (Porto Alegre, BR)

Dekai Wu (Hong Kong, HK)

Feiyu Xu (Berlin, DE)

Roman Yangarber (Helsinki, FI)

Geoffrey Zweig (Redmond, US)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

Laurent Besacier (Grenoble, co‐chair)

Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)

Benjamin Lecouteux (Grenoble)

Carlos Martín‐Vide (Tarragona, co‐chair)

Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit non‐anonymized papers in English presenting original and

unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single‐spaced pages (including

eventual appendices) and should be prepared according to the standard format for

Springer Verlag's LNAI/LNCS series (see

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0‐164‐6‐793341‐0).

Submissions have to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp2014

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI/LNCS series will be available

by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer‐reviewed

extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it

will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from January 16, 2014 to October 14, 2014. The

registration form can be found at:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/slsp2014/Registration.php

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: May 7, 2014 (23:59h, CET)

Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: June 18, 2014

Final version of the paper for the LNAI/LNCS proceedings: June 25, 2014

Early registration: July 2, 2014

Late registration: September 30, 2014

Submission to the post‐conference journal special issue: January 16, 2015

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

SLSP 2014

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)

Rovira i Virgili University

Av. Catalunya, 35

43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34 977 559 543

Fax: +34 977 558 386

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Departament d’Economia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya

Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

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--------------------------------------------------
Call for Participation
MediaEval 2014 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation
http://www.multimediaeval.org
Early registration deadline: 1 May 2014
--------------------------------------------------

MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2014 focuses on aspects of multimedia that include speech and audio. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2014 workshop.

The tasks that focus on speech are:

*QUESST: Query by Example Search on Speech Task (ex SWS)*
*Search and Hyperlinking*

The entire list of tasks and their descriptions is below.

For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a 'required reading' list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. To sign up, please click the “MediaEval 2014 registration site” link at:

http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2014

The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2014:

*Synchronization of multi-user Event Media (New!)*
This task requires participants to automatically create a chronologically-ordered outline of multiple image galleries corresponding to the same event, where data collections are synchronized altogether and aligned along parallel lines over the same time axis, or mixed in the correct order.

*C@merata: Question Answering on Classical Music Scores (New!)*
In this task, systems take as input a noun phrase (e.g., 'harmonic perfect fifth') and a short score in MusicXML (e.g., J.S. Bach, Suite No. 3 in C Major for Cello, BWV 1009, Sarabande) and return an answer stating the location of the requested feature (e.g., 'Bar 206').

*Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task*
This task requires participants to automatically refine a ranked list of Flickr photos with landmarks using provided visual and textual information. The objective is to select only a small number of photos that are equally representative matches but also diverse representations of the query.

*Search and Hyperlinking*
This task requires participants to find video segments relevant to an information need and to provide a list of useful hyperlinks for each of these segments. The hyperlinks point to other video segments in the same collection and should allow the user of the system to explore the collection with respect to the current information need in a non-linear fashion. The task focuses on television data provided by the BBC and real information needs from home users.

*QUESST: Query by Example Search on Speech Task (ex SWS)*
The task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. This task is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection or low-resource speech processing.

*Visual Privacy*
This task requires participants to implement privacy filtering solutions that provide an optimal balance between obscuring information that personally identifies people in a video, and retraining information that allows viewers otherwise to interpret the video.

*Emotion in Music (an Affect Task)*
We aim at detecting emotional dynamics of music using its content. Given a set of songs, participants are asked to automatically generate continuous emotional representations in arousal and valence.

*Placing: Geo-coordinate Prediction for Social Multimedia*
This task requires participants to estimate the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of multimedia items (photos, videos and accompanying metadata), as well as predicting how “placeable” a media item actually is. The Placing Task integrates all aspects of multimedia: textual meta-data, audio, image, video, location, time, users and context.

*Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection*
This task requires participants to automatically detect portions of movies depicting violence. Participants are encouraged to deploy multimodal approaches (audio, visual, text) to solve the task.

*Social Event Detection in Web Multimedia*
This task requires participants to discover, retrieve and summarize social events, within a collection of Web multimedia. Social events are events that are planned by people, attended by people and for which the social multimedia are also captured by people.

*Crowdsourcing: Crowdsorting Multimedia Comments (New!)*
This task asks participants to combine human computation (i.e., input from the crowd) with automatic computation to carry out classification. The classification involves sorting timed-comments in music, i.e., comments that users have made at certain points in a song, into categories according to their type (e.g., useful vs. non-useful and informative vs. affective).

Tasks marked 'New!' are the 2014 Brave New Tasks. If you sign up for these tasks, please be aware that you will be asked to keep in close touch with the task organizers concerning the details of the task over the course of the benchmarking cycle. We ask for extra-tight communication in order to ensure that these tasks have the flexibility they need to reach their goals.

MediaEval 2014 Timeline
(dates vary slightly from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2014)

April-May: Registration and return usage agreements.
May-June: Release of development/training data.
June-July: Release of test data.
Mid-Sept.: Participants submit their completed runs.
Mid-Sept.-End-Sept.: Evaluation of submitted runs. Participants write their 2-page working notes papers.
16-17+18 October: MediaEval 2014 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain

We ask you to register by 1 May, when the first task will release its data set. After that point, late registration will be possible, but we encourage teams to register as early as they can.

Contact
For questions or additional information please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl or visit http://www.multimediaeval.org

MediaEval 2014 Organization Committee:

Martha Larson at Delft University of Technology and Gareth Jones at Dublin City University act as the overall coordinators of MediaEval. Individual tasks are coordinated by a group of task organizers, who form the MediaEval Organizing Committee. It is the collective efforts of this group of people that makes MediaEval possible. The complete list of MediaEval organizers is at:

http://www.multimediaeval.org/who

A large number of organizations and projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including the projects (alphabetical): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), CNGL (http://www.cngl.ie), CrowdRec (http://crowdrec.eu), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu), Media Mixer (http://mediamixer.eu), Mucke (http://www.chistera.eu/projects/mucke), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl), SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org), and VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu).

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Call for short and long paper contributions for ACM Multimedia 2014 - 

Area on Music, Speech, and Audio Processing in Multimedia 

November 3-7, 2014 Orlando, Florida, USA 

(For general information and information on other areas check http://www.acmmm.org/2014/) 

As a core part of multimedia data, the acoustic modality is of great importance as a source of 

information that is orthogonal to other modalities like video or text. This allows for richer

 information to be extracted when performing content analysis, as well as a rich mean of 

communication of information. We are seeking strong technical submissions revolving around 

music, speech and audio processing in multimedia. One topic of interest is submissions

 performing an analysis of the acoustic signals in order to extract information from multimedia 

content (e.g. what notes are being played, what is being said, or what sounds appear), or the 

context (e.g. language spoken, age and gender of the speaker, localization using sound). 

Another topic of interest is submissions performing synthesis of acoustic content for multimedia 

purposes (e.g. speech synthesis, singing voices, acoustic scene synthesis). Furthermore, we are 

also interested in ways to represent acoustic data as multimedia; for example, in symbolic form

 (e.g. closed captioning of speech), in the form of sensor input and visual images (e.g. recordings

 of gestures in musical performances). or others. Another topic of interest is applications that 

involve the acoustic modality. The inclusion of acoustics opens up interesting possibilities for 

novel multimedia interfaces and user interactions. In addition, contextual, social and affective 

aspects play an important role when using acoustics, which can be seen, for example, in the 

consumption and enjoyment of music, and the sound design of cinematic productions.

 All submissions should maintain a clear relation to multimedia: there either should be an 

explicit relation to multimedia items, applications or systems, or an application of a multimedia 

perspective, in which information sources from different modalities are considered. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 · Multimedia audio analysis and synthesis · Multimedia audio indexing, search, and retrieval

 · Music, speech, and audio annotation, similarity measures, and evaluation 

· Multimodal and multimedia approaches to music, speech, and audio

 · Multimodal and multimedia context models for music, speech, and audio 

· Computational approaches to music, speech, and audio inspired by other domains (e.g. 

computer vision, information retrieval, musicology, psychology) 

· Multimedia localization using acoustic information 

· Social data, user models and personalization in music, speech, and audio 

· Music, audio, and aural aspects in multimedia user interfaces

 · Algorithms and applications of music, speech, and audio

 · New and interactive musical instruments, systems and other music, speech, and audio 

applications · Novel interaction interfaces using/with music, speech, and audio 

· Music, speech, and audio coding, transmission, and storage for multimedia applications 

Deadlines for long papers is March 31st, 2014 and for short papers is April 14th, 2014 

For other deadlines please check http://www.acmmm.org/2014/important_dates.html 

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ALBAYZIN 2014 SEARCH ON SPEECH EVALUATION

The Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology (RTTH) and the ISCA Special Interest Group
on Iberian Languages (SIG-IL) are pleased to announce the ALBAYZIN 2014 Search on Speech Evaluation,
which will be carried out as part of Iberspeech 2014, a biennial event gathering the Spanish researchers
on speech Technology. This year’s event will take place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain),
on November 19-21, 2014 (see http://iberspeech2014.ulpgc.es for details).

Research groups worldwide are invited to participate in this evaluation.
Here we just provide the key points. The full evaluation plan can be found in:

http://iberspeech2014.ulpgc.es/index.php/albayzin/search-on-speech-evaluation

**TASKS**

The ALBAYZIN 2014 Search on Speech evaluation involves searching in audio content a list of terms/queries.
This evaluation focuses on retrieving the appropriate audio files that contain any of those terms/queries.
Four different tasks are defined:

1) KEYWORD SPOTTING (KWS), where the input to the system is a list of terms, which is known
when processing the audio and hence word-based recognizers can be effectively used to hypothesize detections.

2) SPOKEN TERM DETECTION (STD), where the input to the system is a list of terms (as in the KWS task),
but terms/queries are unknown when processing the audio. This is the same task as in NIST STD 2006 evaluation
[1] and Open Keyword Search 2013 [2].

3) QUERY-BY-EXAMPLE SPOKEN TERM DETECTION (QbE STD), where the input to the system
is an acoustic example per query and hence a prior knowledge of the correct word/phone transcription
corresponding to each query cannot be made. This task must generate a set of occurrences for each
query detected in the audio files, along with their timestamps as output, as in the STD task.
QbE STD is the same task as those proposed in MediaEval 2011, 2012 and 2013 [3].

4) QUERY-BY-EXAMPLE SPOKEN DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL (QbE SDR), where the input to the system
is composed of several acoustic examples per query and hence a prior knowledge of the correct word/phone
transcription corresponding to each query cannot be made. This task must generate an output score for each
of the provided queries, which reflects the probability that each of the queries appears in each audio file,
and no information about the timestamp is required. Formally, given a spoken example of a given query q
and a spoken document x (whose transcriptions are unknown), a QbE SDR system must carry out some kind
of detection procedure and output a score s ∈ R, the higher (the more positive) the score the higher the likelihood
that q appears in x. Note that systems are neither required to make a strong decision about whether or not
q appears in x, nor to provide the time marks of the place (or places) where q appears. Systems are just required
to produce a score, which must be computed by automatic means, with no human supervision.
This is the same task as that proposed in MediaEval 2014 Query-by-Example Search on Speech (QUESST) [4].

**REGISTRATION**

Interested groups must register for the evaluation before July 15th 2014, by contacting the organizing team at:

javiertejedornoguerales@gmail.com
luisjavier.rodriguez@ehu.es

with CC to the Chairs of Iberspeech 2014(iberspeech2014@ulpgc.es), and providing the following information:

    Research group (name and acronym)
    Institution (university, research center, etc.)
    Contact person (name)
    Email

**SCHEDULE**

•      June 30, 2014: Release of training and development data

•      July 15, 2014: Registration deadline

•      September 3, 2014: Release of evaluation data

•      September 30, 2014: Deadline for the submission of system outputs and description papers

•      October 15, 2014: Results distributed to participants

•      November 19-21, 2014: Evaluation Workshop at Iberspeech 2014


For more information, please follow the link to the Albayzin 2014 Search on Speech Evaluation:

http://iberspeech2014.ulpgc.es/index.php/albayzin/search-on-speech-evaluation

**REFERENCES**

[1] http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/std/2006/index.html

[2] http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws13.cfm

[3] Florian Metze, Xavier Anguera, Etienne Barnard, Marelie Davel and Guillaume Gravier. 'Language Independent Search in Mediaeval's Spoken Web Search Task'. Computer Speech and Language, Special Issue on Information Extraction & Retrieval, 2014.

[4] http://multimediaeval.pbworks.com/w/page/79432139/QUESST2014

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Technical Program Chairs: Douglas Williams, Timothy Davidson, and Ghassan AlRegib
General Chairs: Geoffrey Li and Fred Juang

The IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) is a recently launched flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. GlobalSIP’14 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, during the week of December 1, 2014. The conference will focus broadly on signal and information processing with an emphasis on up-and-coming signal processing themes. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and technical sessions consisting of poster or oral presentations. GlobalSIP’14 will be comprised of colocated symposia selected competitively based on responses to this call-for-symposium proposals. Symposium topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Signal processing in communications and networks, including green communication and optical communications
• Image and video processing
• Selected topics in speech and language processing
• Acoustic array signal processing
• Signal processing in security applications
• Signal processing in finance
• Signal processing in energy and power systems
• Signal processing in genomics and bioengineering (physiological, pharmacological, and behavioral)
• Neural signal processing
• Selected topics in statistical signal processing
• Seismic signal processing
• Graph-theoretic signal processing
• Machine learning and human machine interfaces
• Compressed sensing, sparsity analysis, and applications
• Big data processing, heterogeneous information processing, and informatics
• Radar and array processing including localization and ranging techniques
• Multimedia transmission, indexing and retrieval, and playback challenges
• Hardware and real-time implementations
• Other novel and significant applications of selected areas of signal processing

Symposium proposals should include the title of the symposium; length of the symposium (one day or two days); projected selectivity of the symposium; paper length requirements (submission: from 2 to 6 pages, final: 4-6 pages, invited papers may be longer); names, addresses, and short CVs (up to 250 words) of the organizers, including the general organizers and the technical chairs; an up-to two page description of the technical issues that the symposium will address (including timeliness and relevance to the signal processing community; names of (potential) technical program committee members; name of (potential) invited speakers (up to 2 for one-day symposia and 4 for two-day ones)); and a draft call-for-papers. Please package everything in a single pdf file. More detailed information can be found at http://renyi.ece.iastate.edu/globalsip2014/cfs.html

Symposium proposals should be emailed to Doug Williams (doug.williams@ece.gatech.edu) and Geoffrey Li (liye@ece.gatech.edu) according the following timeline:

November 8, 2013: Symposium proposals due
November 22, 2013: Symposium selection decision notification
November 29, 2013: Final version of the call-for-papers for the accepted symposia due

Tentative timeline for paper submission:
May 16, 2014: Paper submission deadline (regular and invited)
June 27, 2014: Review results announced
September 5, 2014: Camera-ready regular and invited papers due

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We are pleased to announce the opening of the third Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC3). Complete information, including the challenge handbook, training data, evaluation scripts, and baseline trackers are available on the DSTC3 website:

http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc/

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) is a research challenge focused on improving the state of the art in tracking the state of spoken dialog systems. State tracking refers to accurately estimating the user's goal as a dialog progresses. Accurate state tracking is desirable because it provides robustness to errors in speech recognition, and helps reduce ambiguity inherent in language within a temporal process like dialog.

In this challenge, participants are given labelled corpora of dialogs to develop state tracking algorithms. The trackers will then be evaluated on a common set of held-out dialogs which are released, un-labelled, during a one week period. This is a corpus-based challenge: participants do not need to implement a speech recognizer, a semantic parser, or an end-to-end dialog system.

The first DSTC completed in 2013, with 9 teams participating and a total of 27 entries, with 9 papers presented at SIGDIAL 2013, advancing the state-of-the-art in several dimensions. DSTC2 introduced a completely new dataset, in a new domain (restaurant information), with more complicated and dynamic dialog states that may change throughout the dialog. DSTC2 concluded a few months ago, again with 9 participating teams (about half new) -- results have been submitted to and will be presented at a special session at SIGDIAL 2014.

DSTC3 will focus on the task of adapting and expanding to a new domain, when there is a lot of labelled data in a smaller domain. The 'smaller domain' is the restaurants domain from DSTC2; the 'new extended domain' is a larger tourist information domain: DSTC3 includes restaurants and adds pubs and coffee shops, and more detail (slots) for restaurants relative to the DSTC2 data.

Participants are encouraged to submit papers describing their work to SLT 2014, whose deadline will be approx. 20 July. The organisers are awaiting confirmation of a proposed special session at the conference.

DSTC3 schedule:

- 4 April 2014 : Labelled tourist information seed set released

- 9 June 2014 : Unlabelled tourist information test set released

- 16 June 2014 : Tracker output on tourist information test set due

- 23 June 2014 : Results on tourist information test set given to participants

- 20 July 2014 : SLT paper deadline (approximate)

- 7-10 Dec 2014 : SLT workshop (Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA)

The training data, scoring scripts, baselines, domain ontology and database are all available for public download. Prospective participants are strongly encouraged to join the mailing list, to ensure you receive notifications of updates to data or scripts, and are included in discussions about the challenge. To join, email listserv@lists.research.microsoft.com with 'subscribe DSTC' in the body of the message (without quotes).

Feel free to direct questions to the organizers. We hope you will consider participating!

DSTC3 organizers

Matt Henderson (lead) - Cambridge University [matthen@gmail.com]

Blaise Thomson - Cambridge University [brmt2@cam.ac.uk]

Jason D. Williams - Microsoft Research [jason.williams@microsoft.com]

DSTC3 advisory board

Bill Byrne - University of Cambridge

Paul Crook - Microsoft Research

Maxine Eskenazi - Carnegie Mellon University

Milica Gasic - University of Cambridge

Helen Hastie - Herriot Watt

Kee-Eung Kim - KAIST

Sungjin Lee - Carnegie Mellon University

Oliver Lemon - Herriot Watt

Olivier Pietquin - SUPELEC

Joelle Pineau - McGill University

Deepak Ramachandran - Nuance Communications

Brian Strope - Google

Steve Young - University of Cambridge

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The 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2014) will be held in South Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada, on Dec 7-10, 2014. The main theme of the workshop will be 'machine learning in spoken language technologies'. One of our goals is to increase both intra and inter community interaction, by means of (inter alia)

• keynote/guest speakers from machine learning community (e.g. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and others);

• online panel discussions before/during the conference;

• miniSIGs - small discussion groups to get organized before/during /after the panel discussions or as independent SIG meetings;

• highlight sessions, where 3-5 best papers will be presented orally.

Following tradition from the last two SLT workshops in 2010 (Berkeley, CA) and 2012 (Miami, FL), we are looking forward to hosting challenges and special or themed sessions.

Submission of papers in all areas of spoken language technology is encouraged, with emphasis on the following topics:

·      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

·      Multimodal processing

·      Human/computer interaction

·      Educational and healthcare applications

·      Assistive technologies

·      Natural Language Processing

Important Deadlines

Paper Submission Monday, July 21, 2014

Notification of Acceptance Friday, September 5, 2014

Demo Submission September 2014

Demo Acceptance October 2014

Early registration deadline October 17, 2014

Workshop December 7-10, 2014

Submission Procedure

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the SLT 2014 website. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

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The Iranian Society of Acoustics and Vibration (ISAV) has the great pleasure of inviting you to the 4th International Conference on Acoustics and Vibration (ISAV2014). ISAV2014 is jointly organized by ISAV and Iran University of Science and Technology and will be held in Tehran, Iran from 10-11 December, 2014. Following three successful conferences in three last years (ISAV2011, ISAV2012 and ISAV2013), we look forward to welcoming you to another memorable and exciting ISAV conference in 2014. Through keynote lectures and oral and poster presentations, the conference will present an overview of the latest developments in theoretical and applied acoustics and vibration. We cordially invite you to submit your papers for oral and poster sessions through the conference website www.isav.ir/2014. We also invite sponsors and exhibitors to participate in the conference exhibition where they can present their latest scientific and industrial achievements, advertise their new products and services, and learn about the latest developments in acoustics and vibration. Please use the link here to go to the conference website. The deadline for paper submission is 22th June 2014. We look forward to seeing you at ISAV2014 in December 2014 in Tehran.

Sincerely,

ISAV2014 Secretariat

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Call for papers

International Conference on Human Machine Interaction 2014 23 – 25, December 2014 http://intconfhmi.com

In association with SETIT, Sfax University, Tunisia. and ASDF (Association of Scientists, Developers and Faculties) Chennai Chapter, we will organize the International Conference HMI 2014 which will be held in New delhi -INDIA.

Human Machine Interaction (HMI), is a main annual research conference aimed at presenting current research being carried out. The idea of the conference is for the scientists, scholars, engineers and students from the Universities all around the world and the industry to present ongoing research activities, and hence to foster research relations between the Universities and the industry. HMI 2014 is co-sponsored by Association of Scientists, Developers and Faculties and SETIT, Sfax University, Tunisia and technical co-sponsored by many other universities and institutes.
The HMI 2014 conference proceeding will be published in the ASDF Proceedings as one volume, and will be included in the Engineering & Technology Digital Library, and indexed by EBSCO, World Cat, Google Scholar, and sent to be reviewed by Ei Compendex and ISI Proceedings. Selected papers will be recommended to be published in the Journals.

Area of Submission

Topics of interest for HMI is widely declared for the above, but not limited to.

Conference Registration Fees Rebate (Discount)

We are pleased to inform you that the organizing committee of the HMI2014 allocates a financial support for all participants from developing or emerging countries. This Financial support of among of 150 Dollars is available to help participants to attend HMI2014

You can find more details in: http://intconfhmi.com/register.html

We are waiting for seeing you in India.

NB : A select number of Post Conference Excursions will take place during 5 days.

As examples : 1 Day Tour to Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Mathura in AC Bus : 25 $ per person 1 Day Tour to Qutub Minar, Parliament, Lotus Temple, India Gate, Gandhi Smiriti, Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Rajghat: 25 $ per person

Best Regards

 Mohamed Salim BOUHLEL General Co-Chair, HMI2014 Head of Research Unit: Sciences & Technologies of Image and Telecommunications ( Sfax University ) GSM +216 20 200005

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LATA 2015

Nice, France

March 2-6, 2015

Organized by:

CNRS, I3S, UMR 7271
Nice Sophia Antipolis University

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/lata2015/

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

AIMS:

LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field developed at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2015 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas.

VENUE:

LATA 2015 will take place in Nice, the second largest French city on the Mediterranean coast. The venue will be the University Castle at Parc Valrose.

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

algebraic language theory
algorithms for semi-structured data mining
algorithms on automata and words
automata and logic
automata for system analysis and programme verification
automata networks
automata, concurrency and Petri nets
automatic structures
cellular automata
codes
combinatorics on words
computational complexity
data and image compression
descriptional complexity
digital libraries and document engineering
foundations of finite state technology
foundations of XML
fuzzy and rough languages
grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, unification, categorial, etc.)
grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
graphs and graph transformation
language varieties and semigroups
language-based cryptography
parallel and regulated rewriting
parsing
patterns
power series
string and combinatorial issues in bioinformatics
string processing algorithms
symbolic dynamics
term rewriting
transducers
trees, tree languages and tree automata
unconventional models of computation
weighted automata

STRUCTURE:

LATA 2015 will consist of:

invited talks
invited tutorials
peer-reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

to be announced

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Andrew Adamatzky (West of England, Bristol, UK)
Andris Ambainis (Latvia, Riga, LV)
Franz Baader (Dresden Tech, DE)
Rajesh Bhatt (Massachusetts, Amherst, US)
José-Manuel Colom (Zaragoza, ES)
Bruno Courcelle (Bordeaux, FR)
Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú (Eötvös Loránd, Budapest, HU)
Aldo de Luca (Naples Federico II, IT)
Susanna Donatelli (Turin, IT)
Paola Flocchini (Ottawa, CA)
Enrico Formenti (Nice, FR)
Tero Harju (Turku, FI)
Monika Heiner (Brandenburg Tech, Cottbus, DE)
Yiguang Hong (Chinese Academy, Beijing, CN)
Kazuo Iwama (Kyoto, JP)
Sanjay Jain (National Singapore, SG)
Maciej Koutny (Newcastle, UK)
Antonín Kučera (Masaryk, Brno, CZ)
Thierry Lecroq (Rouen, FR)
Salvador Lucas (Valencia Tech, ES)
Veli Mäkinen (Helsinki, FI)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, ES, chair)
Filippo Mignosi (L’Aquila, IT)
Victor Mitrana (Madrid Tech, ES)
Ilan Newman (Haifa, IL)
Joachim Niehren (INRIA, Lille, FR)
Enno Ohlebusch (Ulm, DE)
Arlindo Oliveira (Lisbon, PT)
Joël Ouaknine (Oxford, UK)
Wojciech Penczek (Polish Academy, Warsaw, PL)
Dominique Perrin (ESIEE, Paris, FR)
Alberto Policriti (Udine, IT)
Sanguthevar Rajasekaran (Connecticut, Storrs, US)
Jörg Rothe (Düsseldorf, DE)
Frank Ruskey (Victoria, CA)
Helmut Seidl (Munich Tech, DE)
Ayumi Shinohara (Tohoku, Sendai, JP)
Bernhard Steffen (Dortmund, DE)
Frank Stephan (National Singapore, SG)
Paul Tarau (North Texas, Denton, US)
Andrzej Tarlecki (Warsaw, PL)
Jacobo Torán (Ulm, DE)
Frits Vaandrager (Nijmegen, NL)
Jaco van de Pol (Twente, Enschede, NL)
Pierre Wolper (Liège, BE)
Zhilin Wu (Chinese Academy, Beijing, CN)
Slawomir Zadrozny (Polish Academy, Warsaw, PL)
Hans Zantema (Eindhoven Tech, NL)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Sébastien Autran (Nice)
Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)
Enrico Formenti (Nice, co-chair)
Sandrine Julia (Nice)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Christophe Papazian (Nice)
Julien Provillard (Nice)
Pierre-Alain Scribot (Nice)
Bianca Truthe (Giessen)
Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices, references, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Submissions have to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2015

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from July 21, 2014 to March 2, 2015. The registration form can be found at:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/lata2015/Registration.php

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: October 10, 2014 (23:59 CET)
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: November 18, 2014
Early registration: November 25, 2014
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: November 26, 2014
Late registration: February 16, 2015
Submission to the journal special issue: June 6, 2015

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

LATA 2015
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34 977 559 543
Fax: +34 977 558 386

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Nice Sophia Antipolis University
Rovira i Virgili University

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Joint Conference PEVOC & MAVEBA 2015:  August 31 - September 4, 2015, Palazzo degli Affari, Piazza Adua 1, Firenze, Italy
http://pevoc-maveba.dinfo.unifi.it/

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The Advisory Board of SProSIG, the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, invites bids from sites interested in hosting

 its flagship conference Speech Prosody in 2016.  

The bid process will proceed as follows:

(1) Optional: Groups interested in hosting a bid are invited to express interest in an e-mail to the current SProSIG Secretary

 and/or President (e.g., by replying to this e-mail).

(2) Optional: Each group interested in hosting the conference is invited to give a presentation on May 23, 2014 at the Speech 

Prosody 2014 conference in Dublin.

(3) Required: Each bid should then be formalized in a written document, mailed to the secretary of SProSIG by June 15, 2014.  

These documents will be posted at sprosig.isle.illinois.edu for all SProSIG members to read.

(4) Selection of the site for Speech Prosody 2016 will then be conducted using an on-line ballot at http://sprosig.isle.illinois.edu.  

Each current member of SProSIG will be allowed to vote.

Bids to host Speech Prosody 2016 should include the following information:

(a) Names and affiliations of members of the organizing committee.

(b) Information about institutional support for the conference if any.

(c) Tentative location of the conference (city and, if possible, venue).  Oral and written presentation of the bid should highlight 

attributes that make both city and site suitable for hosting an international conference, including transportation to/from and

 within the city, lodging and dining options near the proposed venue, facilities in the proposed venue for a 300-person oral

 session and a 40-poster poster session, and any other attributes likely to be of interest to the members of SProSIG.

(d) Tentative dates of the proposed conference (typically four days in late May 2016)

(e) Proposed theme of the conference and/or proposed new session topics that will be included, along with existing session

 topics of the Speech Prosody conference, in the Conference Call for Papers.

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Speech Prosody 2016 will be held in Boston, USA.  Congratulations to Dr. Veilleux, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Shattuck-Hufnagel 

and Alejna Brugos for presenting an outstanding bid, and we look forward to an outstanding conference in Boston in 2016!

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Carnegie Mellon University

degree designed for students who want to rapidly master advanced content-analysis, mining, and intelligent information technologies prior to beginning or resuming leadership careers in industry and government. Just over half of the curriculum consists of graduate courses. The remainder provides direct, hands-on, project-oriented experience working closely with CMU faculty to build systems and solve problems using state-of-the-art algorithms, techniques, tools, and datasets. A typical MIIS student completes the program in one year (12 months) of full-time study at the Pittsburgh campus.  Part-time and distance education options are available to students employed at affiliated companies. The application deadline for the Fall 2013 term is December 14, 2012. For more information about the program, please visit http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/education/msiis/overview.shtml

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The IEEE Signal Processing Society is accepting proposals for the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP®). SPS Members are invited to submit a proposal to host ICASSP. If you are interested in submitting a proposal please contact Nicole Allen to get the forms and guidelines.

ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing applications. The series is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has been held annually since 1976. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. ICASSP is a cooperative effort of the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Committees:

• Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing
• Bio Imaging and Signal Processing
• Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems
• Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
• Information Forensics and Security
• Machine Learning for Signal Processing
• Multimedia Signal Processing
• Sensor Array and Multichannel
• Signal Processing for Communications and Networking
• Signal Processing Theory and Methods
• Speech and Language Processing
• Standing Committee on Industry DSP Technology

To submit a proposal, send a notice of intent to bid to the Vice President – Conferences and the Conference Service Coordinator using the email addresses as shown below. Include in the notice your contact information and the proposed location. The Signal Processing Society Conference Services staff will issue the proposal submission form and guidlines upon receipt of the letter of intent. The form must be completed and the proposal submitted to the Conference Services staff by 21 March 2014. Proposals will be assessed by the Conference Board Executive Subcommittee. Accepted bidding teams [finalists] will be invited to present at the Conference Board meeting held at ICASSP 2014, May 4-9, 2014 in Florence, Italy.

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Master's in Linguistics (Aix-Marseille Université): Linguistic Theories, Field Linguistics and Experimentation TheLiTEx offers advanced training in Linguistics. This specialty focuses Linguistics is aimed at presenting in an original way the links between corpus linguistics and scientific experimentation on the one hand and laboratory and field methodologies on the other. On the basis of a common set of courses (offered within the first year), TheLiTEx offers two paths: Experimental Linguistics (LEx) and Language Contact & Typology (LCT) The goal of LEx is the study of language, speech and discourse on the basis of scientific experimentation, quantitative modeling of linguistic phenomena and behavior. It focuses on a multidisciplinary approach which borrows its methodologies to human physical and biological sciences and its tools to computer science, clinical approaches, engineering etc.. Among the courses offered: semantics, phonetics / phonology, morphology, syntax or pragmatics, prosody and intonation, and the interfaces between these linguistic levels, in their interactions with the real world and the individual, in a biological, cognitive and social perspective. Within the second year, a set of more specialized courses is offered such as Language and the Brain and Laboratory Phonology. LCT aims at understanding the world's linguistic diversity, focusing on language contact, language change and variation (European, Asian and African languages, Creoles, sign language, etc.).. This specialty focuses, from a a linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective, on issues of field linguistics and taking into account both the human and socio-cultural dimension of language (speakers, communities). It also focuses on documenting rare and endangered languages and to engage a reflection on linguistic minorities. This path also provides expertise and intervention models (language policy and planning) in order  to train students in the management of contact phenomena and their impact on the speakers, languages and societies More info at: http://thelitex.hypotheses.org/678

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NEW MASTER IN BRAIN AND COGNITION AT UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA, BARCELONA

A new, one-year Master in Brain and Cognition will begin its activities in the Academic Year 2014-15 in Barcelona, Spain, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (http://www.upf.edu/mbc/).

The core of the master's programme is composed of the research groups at UPF's Center for Brain and Cognition  (http://cbc.upf.edu). These groups are directed by renowned scientists in areas such as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, vision, multisensory perception, human development and comparative cognition. Students will  be exposed to the ongoing research projects at the Center for Brain and Cognition and will be integrated in one of its main research lines, where they will conduct original research for their final project.

Application period is now open. Please visit the Master web page or contact luca.bonatti@upf.edu for further information.

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REU Site: Research in Interactive Virtual Experiences

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The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) offers a 10-week summer research program for undergraduates in interactive virtual experiences. A multidisciplinary research institute affiliated with the University of Southern California, the ICT was established in 1999 to combine leading academic researchers in computing with the creative talents of Hollywood and the video game industry. Having grown to encompass a total of 170 faculty, staff, and students in a diverse array of fields, the ICT represents a unique interdisciplinary community brought together with a core unifying mission: advancing the state-of-the-art for creating virtual reality experiences so compelling that people will react as if they were real.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of ICT research, we welcome applications from students in computer science, as well as many other fields, such as psychology, art/animation, interactive media, linguistics, and communications. Undergraduates will join a team of students, research staff, and faculty in one of several labs focusing on different aspects of interactive virtual experiences. In addition to participating in seminars and social events, students will also prepare a final written report and present their projects to the rest of the institute at the end of summer research fair.

Students will receive $5000 over ten weeks, plus an additional $2800 stipend for housing and living expenses.  Non-local students can also be reimbursed for travel up to $600.  The ICT is located in West Los Angeles, just north of LAX and only 10 minutes from the beach.

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The site is expected to begin summer 2013, pending final award issuance.

Students can apply online at: http://ict.usc.edu/reu/

Application deadline: March 31, 2013

For more information, please contact Evan Suma at reu@ict.usc.edu.

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