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

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Yifan Gong, Dong Yu

IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee received nearly  5000 reviews from ~1300 reviewers. 100+ meta reviewers and 14 Senior Meta reviewers (AC) have created 66 presentation sessions. The TC has provided 30 recommendations on the review process and practice to IEEE SPS and ICASSP 2024 organization committee.

Accepted paper technical area evolution from 2022 to 2023:

Areas showing increasing percentage (out of total papers): Adaptation/fine tuning/ x2.5, key-word/event detection x1.9, Multimodal Processing of Language x4.1, speaker diarization x1.6, speech and text translation x2.37, self-supervised learning x1.7, resource-constrained speech recognition x1.3, and speech emotion recognition x1.6 (to 7.2%).

Areas with decreased percentage: speaker recognition x0.53, speech analysis x0.46, spoken language understanding x0.37, voice conversion x0.59, dialog system x0.57, language modeling x0.45, speech synthesis  x0.85 (still largest area at 10.5%).

Emerging session titles: ML for language (0 to 6.4%), NLP (0 to 6.2%).

2024 ICASSP review planning:

The organization committee of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024)  has announced the dates of ICASSP 24 --  14~19 April 2024, about 50 days earlier in the year than for ICASSP 2023. This change makes all the critical dates for the paper review process about 2 months earlier; for example, the submission deadline is September 6 (vs. October 26), and acceptance notification is December 13 (vs. February 15). This change requires earlier TC review preparation and anticipation of a significantly shorter review time.

Upcoming TC election:

This year, we plan to elect 19 new TC Members and a Vice TC Chair. We are in the nomination and election time.

One important duty of the new members is to serve in the paper review process within the area of the TC. To secure sufficient resources for ICASSP 2024 paper review, we, therefore, need the election to complete before the paper review starts. Vice Chair candidates should be TC members or have served TC as elected members. The elected (2024) Vice Chair automatically succeeds to the position of TC Chair in 2025.

Thank you for your continued support and service to the IEEE Speech and Language Processing community!

==Member Election==

by Ebru Arısoy Saraçlar

IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Nominations 2023

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is seeking nominations for new SLTC Members for a 3-year term (2024-2026). Nominations should be submitted by filling out the web form at https://forms.gle/fSTMEgFVuSncDBdm9. The form asks for a short bio, a list of professional volunteer work and leadership activities, and a position statement, as well as nominee information. The nomination deadline is August 21, 2023.

New member candidates can be self-nominated or nominated by current SLTC members. Members will serve a term of three years. Past SLTC members are eligible to be nominated for a second term. Current SLTC members may also be nominated for a second consecutive term but would then not be eligible to vote in this new member election for their nomination areas. Additional terms are allowed after leaving the SLTC, but at least a 3-year gap in service is required.

Additionally, nominees are sought for the position of Vice Chair of the SLTC. The Vice Chair serves a one-year term in 2024, followed by a two-year term as Chair in 2025-2026 and a one-year term as Past Chair in 2027. Vice Chair nominees must have previously been elected to the SLTC as a Member.

Each nominee must also submit a one-page position statement and/or vitae.

New members must be willing to review papers submitted to the Society's conferences within the area of the SLTC, review papers for workshops owned or co-owned by the SLTC, serve in the subcommittees established by the SLTC, and perform other duties as assigned. SLTC members will be elected by the members of the SLTC itself based on the needs of the SLTC. The election results will be finalized by August 30, 2023.

The rights and duties of an SLTC member are described here:

http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/sl-tc/

The following are the nominee requirements:

1. The candidate must be a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

2. The candidate should be willing to serve if elected. This means active participation, including prompt paper reviews for 4 ICASSPs (2024-2027), active participation in accomplishing SLTC sub-committee duties, and best efforts to attend meetings and respond appropriately to action items. While the formal term is 2024-2026, because of the timing of the ICASSP review cycle, ICASSP review duties will begin almost immediately upon election prior to the term (September-December 2023) and conclude after the formal term (January-February 2027).

==Challenges==

by Jun Du, Jesus Villalba

Special Sessions and Workshops @Interspeech 2023:

MERLion Challenge Special Session:

The inaugural MERLIon CCS Challenge focuses on developing robust language identification and language diarization systems that are reliable for non-standard, accented, spontaneous code-switched, child-directed speech collected via Zoom.  

https://sites.google.com/view/merlion-ccs-challenge/
 

CHiME 2023 Workshop:

The workshop will host the 7th CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge (CHiME-7) made up of two tasks:

• The first task (CHiME-7 DASR) focuses on distant automatic speech transcription and segmentation with multiple recording devices, especially on generalization across different array topologies.

• The second task (CHiME-7 UDASE) focuses on unsupervised domain adaptation for conversational speech enhancement. It involves learning to suppress noise in multi-speaker conversational speech recordings using out-of-domain labeled data and in-domain unlabeled data.

https://www.chimechallenge.org/current/workshop/index

Upcoming Challenges:

• DISPLACE: Diarization of Speaker and Language in Conversional Environments    https://displace2023.github.io/ @Interspeech 2023

• ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark    https://mlsuperb.netlify.app/    @ASRU2023

• M2MeT2.0: Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription Challenge 2.0 

https://alibaba-damo-academy.github.io/FunASR/m2met2_cn/index.html @ASRU2023

• AVSEC-2: 2nd COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge    https://challenge.cogmhear.org/ @ASRU2023

• QASR TTS 1.0: Broadcast News Text to Speech Challenge        https://arabicspeech.org/qasr_tts/ @ASRU2023

• MADASR: Model Adaptation for ASR in low-resource Indian Languages    https://sites.google.com/view/respinasrchallenge2023/home @ASRU2023

• SVCC2023: The Singing Voice Conversion Challenge 2023 

http://vc-challenge.org/ @ASRU2023

• The VoiceMOS Challenge 2023

https://voicemos-challenge-2023.github.io/ @ASRU2023

The deadline of the call for proposals for the Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) of ICASSP 2024 is approaching (Aug.13). More information:

https://cmsworkshops.com/ICASSP2024/challenge_session_proposals.php 

Accepted Satellite Workshops @ICASSP:

• SASB: Self-supervision in Audio, Speech and Beyond

https://sites.google.com/view/icasspsasb2024/description

• HSCMA 2024: Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA 2024)

CHiME-2024 challenge task proposals:

In line with our commitment to embracing a more open approach, the annual CHiME Challenge is seeking enthusiasts who can propose innovative tasks. These tasks will be organized by teams following a schedule set by the CHiME Steering Group. The teams will be responsible for managing the tasks, i.e., providing data and instructions, scoring submissions and results, etc.

https://www.chimechallenge.org/current/cfp

==External Relations==

​​by Hung-yi Lee

Upcoming Webinar Series: Advancements in Audio, Speech and Language Technology

In collaboration with the IEEE SPS Education Center and the IEEE AASP Technical Committees, the External Relations Subcommittee is proud to present a groundbreaking webinar series. This series will delve deep into the forefront of audio, speech, and language technology. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to learn about the latest research breakthroughs from esteemed specialists representing various fields. Mark your calendars: we plan to kick off the series in September 2023, with one or two webinars slated each month.

Distinguished Speakers Line-up! The external Relations subcommittee wants to acknowledge the following researchers for confirmation to contribute to the webinar series (sorted alphabetically): Danqi Chen, Nancy Chen, Marc Delcroix, Paola Garcia, Sharon Gannot, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Andrew Hines, Nobutaka Ito, Ann Lee, Hung-yi Lee, Kong Aik Lee, Jinyu Li, Karen Livescu, Vincent Lostanlen, Meinard Muller, Tomohiro Nakatani, Gaël Richard, Tara Sainath, Romain Serizel, Dan Stowell, Sakriani Sakti, Hiroshi Sawada, Xu Tan, Yu Tsao, William Wang, Shinji Watanabe, Scott Wisdom, Junichi Yamagishi, Takuya Yoshioka.