Speech & Language Technical Committee annual ICASSP meeting recap

The IEEE SPS Speech and Language Technical Committee (STLC) has 53 elected members to help manage the ICASSP review process and run various aspects of SLTC business; the committee convenes at every ICASSP meeting to discuss SLTC business items and new initiatives.  The meeting at ICASSP 2018 was full of information for members.
 
Nineteen new members, including twelve first-time members were welcomed to the SLTC.  This  year’s election saw 54 candidates vying for the 19 open positions on the committee.  SLTC members also sit on various subcommittees; subcommittee membership can be found at https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/speech-and-language-pr….
 
SLTC Chair Michiel Bacchiani discussed the ICASSP 2018 review process, in which a record number of speech and language technology submissions were received (634 of the conference’s 2830 submissions) as well as acceptances (310).  Reviewing such a large number of submissions is a significant undertaking.  The SLTC’s review process is a four stage procedure: first, a paper is reviewed by three associate reviewers, followed by a meta-review (and potential full review) by one of 46 TC members.  Seven area chairs then assess all of the reviews, producing a preliminary accept/reject decision.  These decisions are finalized in conference with the TC Chair and the other area chairs, who then form sessions based on the accepted papers.  The review process allows the SLTC to balance across areas while allowing for a thorough review of a consistently growing field.
 
Nancy Chen provided an update from the EDICS (Editors Information Classification Scheme) subcommittee (including Yifan Gong, Shinji Watanabe, and Tomohiro Nakatani), which is charged with updating the paper categorizations for ICASSP.  The subcommittee tracks trends in paper submissions to indicate when topics might need to be added to or removed from the EDICS categorization.  ICASSP 2018 saw an increase in number of submissions in emotion and prosody, while feature and pitch extraction submissions declined.   A number of areas in the current EDICS saw no submissions.  The EDICS subcommittee will continue to track submissions, and at the meeting were charged with constructing a revised EDICS categorization that also broadens coverage to emerging areas such as robotics, multimodal processing, and human-computer interfaces.
 
Richard Rose led a brief discussion about the IEEE Signal Processing Society awards process, with the goal of improving SLTC processes in the award nomination process.  The SLTC is working to promote its members by either recommending or supporting nominations for various society awards, and the awards committee was charged with developing a plan for improving our awards process.
 
The final part of the meeting was dedicated to reports on the workshops sponsored by the technical committee.  A final report on the successful ASRU 2017, held in Okinawa, was provided by Tomohiro Nakatani.  A total of 273 registered participants constituted a growth over previous ASRU workshops (252 in 2015, 203 in 2013).  Yannis Stylianou gave an update on SLT 2018, to be held this December in Athens; good progress was seen on sponsorship, and potential keynote and invited speakers were announced (confirmed speakers can be seen at http://slt2018.org, and updates can also be followed on Twitter at @SLT2018).   Presentations were also given for potential bids for ASRU 2019 in Doha (by Ahmed Ali) and Signapore (by Haizhou Li).
 
For those interested to participate in our community, various opportunities exist.   SLTC members are elected every November for a three year term.  The first step in the process is nomination, which can be either by a current committee member or self-nomination. Nominations should be proposed well in advance (as early as summer). For details of our last election nomination, please refer to https://goo.gl/D5vr2s.   As space on the technical committee is limited (we typically have a 3:1 candidate to electee ratio), we also offer an affiliate membership in our committee. Prospective applicants should refer to https://goo.gl/fCjQCz for details on how to apply for such a position.