Fall 2023 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter

Welcome to the Fall 2023 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter.  

We have collected several updates for this edition from the sub-committees covering the ICASSP area chairs, awards and membership honors, member elections, challenges, and workshops.

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Yifan Gong, Dong Yu

Based on analysis of ICASSP2023 submitted paper statistics and fast progress in LLM/NLP development, we have anticipated ICASSP2024 SLTC sub-area growth. Before the call for papers, we updated paper submission sub-areas with 

• Addition of sub-areas: Self-supervised learning for speech processing, Text-to-Speech generation, Text-based customization for speech-to-text, and Natural Language Processing for speech-to-text
• Update of some sub-areas titles: Speech emotion recognition and analysis, Speech and singing voice conversion/coding, Resource-constrained speech recognition and translation, Language modeling for speech processing,  Spoken document retrieval and summarization, Language resources/metrics and systems, Multimodal/cross-modal processing of language.

We also devoted significant effort to inviting Associate Members for the TC to ensure quality reviews, especially in the new sub-areas identified above.

ICASSP2024 paper submission statistics do confirm significant growth in several sub-areas, such as in language understanding and computational semantics and multimodal/cross-modal processing of language.

The ICASSP2024 paper review process has just completed the regular review, with 99% of papers receiving three or more reviews. We have entered the acceptance decision stage. 

I look forward to working with SLTC Members and Associate Members to complete the paper admission by 12-09-2023 and develop a high-quality  Speech and Language Technology ICASSP 2024 program!

Yifan Gong

Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee, IEEE SPS

==Awards and Membership Honors==

by Douglas O'Shaughnessy

The speech and language community has a new IEEE Fellow. 

Jonathan Le Roux MERL, for contributions to multi-source speech and audio processing

Congratulations!

==Member Election==

by Ebru Arisoy, Sadao Hiroya, Jan Skoglund, Yu Tsao, Gakuto Kurata, Bengt Borgstrom

IEEE SLTC 2023 Elections Results

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is announcing the results of the elections for members filling the 2024-2026 term. In this year's election, we had 20 openings in 10 areas that took into account retirements and recent ICASSP trends. In addition, on a biannual cycle, we needed to elect a new Vice Chair (who automatically takes over as Chair upon the conclusion of the current Chair's term). We received nominations from a total of 58 candidates.

Without further ado, the newly (re)elected members are:

Vice Chair — Shinji Watanabe

Natural Language Processing — Chenghua Lin, Murat Saraclar

NLP - Dialog Systems — Sakriani Sakti

Speaker Recognition — Jesus Villalba, Lei Wang, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera 

Speech Analysis — Douglas O'Shaughnessy

Speech Coding — Jan Skoglund

Speech Enhancement — Nobutaka Ito, Yu Tsao, Zheng-Hua Tan 

Speech Production and Perception — Siniscalchi Sabato Marco

Speech Recognition

     Modeling — Bo Li, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Yangyang Shi, Yongqiang Wang

     Other — Hung-yi Lee, Samuel Thomas

Speech/Voice Synthesis/Conversion — Zhenhua Ling, Zhizheng Wu

Congratulations to all (12 new members, as well as 9 re-elected members using alphabetic order in each category), and many thanks to all those who were willing to serve on the Committee and run in the election. We look forward to working with all of you.

The Member Election Subcommittee (Ebru Arisoy, Sadao Hiroya, Jan Skoglund, Yu Tsao, Gakuto Kurata, Bengt Borgstrom)

==Challenges==

by Jun Du, Jesus Villalba

Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) of ICASSP 2024 related to SLTC:

https://2024.ieeeicassp.org/sp-grand-challenges/

• In-Car Multi-Channel Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge (ICMC-ASR)
• LIMMITS'24: Multi-speaker, Multi-lingual Indic TTS with Voice Cloning
• Multimodal Information-Based Speech Processing (MISP) 2023 Challenge
• ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge

==Workshops==

by Zhijian Ou

Call for Proposals - ASRU 2025 

Following the success of the bi-annual ASRU workshop over the past decade, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) invites proposals to host the 2025 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2025). Past ASRU workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact and learn. 

The proposal should include the information outlined below. 

• Workshop location and practicalities 
• Geographical location
• Workshop venue (facilities, meeting rooms, network access during the workshop, audio/visual equipment) 
• Accommodation -- hotel availability and pricing 
• Meals 
• Transportation options -- major airports, logistics, visas 
• Climate 
• Information on the policy regarding online presentation and participation
• Approximate workshop dates
• Previous workshops have been held in the month of December
• Approximate total cost for participants to attend, including accommodation, meals, and registration fees.
• Estimated budget for 300-400+ participants and expected sponsorships, including venue costs, administration, banquet, coffee breaks, publication costs, etc. 
• Committee Personnel 
• General chair(s)
• Technical chair(s)
• Local arrangements chair(s)
• Other committee members and roles
• Tentative program 
• Dates for paper submission, notification of acceptance, proposals for demonstrations, early registration
• Reception, talks, posters, demo session, banquet, etc.
• Substantial program additions/changes vs. past instances of ASRU

The deadline for proposals is June 14, 2024.

Please send proposals and questions to the Workshop Sub-Committee: Zhijian Ou (ozj@tsinghua.edu.cn), Abdelrahman Mohamed (abdo@fb.com), Seokhwan Kim (seokhwk@amazon.com), Hagai Aronowitz (hagaia@il.ibm.com), Sibel Oyman (soyman@apple.com), Haitao Mi (haitaomi@global.tencent.com). In July 2024, the IEEE SLTC will review proposals and selection results are expected by August 15, 2024. 

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, we encourage you to contact the IEEE SLTC Workshops Sub-Committee in advance of submitting a proposal. They can provide an example of a past successful proposal and an example budget. Further, proposers who make contact before April 1, 2024, may be invited to briefly present in-person or virtually at the annual IEEE SLTC meeting at ICASSP 2024 (https://2024.ieeeicassp.org/) to obtain feedback from the SLTC. Presentations should be reasonably specific but need not be complete. Note that the SLTC does not have funding available for travel to ICASSP. 

The organizers of the ASRU workshop do not have to be SLTC members, and we encourage submissions from all potential organizers. IEEE SLTC members are welcome to participate in proposals, and the organizing committees of past ASRU events have included many SLTC members. To maintain the fairness of selection, SLTC members who are affiliated with any ASRU 2025 proposals will not participate in the proposal selection vote. Further, the members of the Workshops Sub-Committee may not be affiliated with any ASRU 2025 proposals. Please feel free to distribute this call for proposals far and wide, and invite members of the speech and language community at large to submit a proposal to organize the next ASRU workshop.

For more information on the most recent workshops, please see:

http://www.asru2023.org/ for information about ASRU 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan

And feel free to contact the Workshops Sub-committee with questions.

ICASSP Satellite Workshops 2024

• WS-2: Trustworthy Speech Processing (TSP) 
• WS-3: Self-supervision in Audio, Speech and Beyond (SASB)
• WS-4: XAI-SA: ICASSP 2024 Workshop on Explainable AI for Speech and Audio
• WS-14: Fearless Steps APOLLO: A Naturalistic Team based Speech Communications Community Resource (FS-APOLLO)
• WS-15: Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA 2024): Efficient and Personalized Speech Processing through Data Science

For more information, please visit https://2024.ieeeicassp.org/satellite-workshops/

Zhijian Ou, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Seokhwan Kim, Hagai Aronowitz, Sibel Oyman, Haitao Mi

IEEE SLTC Workshops Sub-committee

This newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements, and editorials which don't fit well with traditional journals. We welcome your contributions, as well as calls for papers, job announcements, comments, and suggestions. You can submit job postings here and contact the TC via this form or email speechnewseds@listserv.ieee.org to propose articles. To subscribe to the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv@listserv.ieee.org.

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From all of us: Stay safe and do good.

Engin Erzin, Editor

Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair