Welcome to the Summer 2024 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, challenges, member elections, and workshops.
==ICASSP Area Chairs==
by Yifan Gong
ICASSP 2024 took place during 14-19 April 2024. We observed a strong growing number of papers from many areas, including Large language models, Multi-language/modality, Speech emotion, End-to-end modeling, Speaker verification, and Self-supervised learning. Below is a word-cloud representation of the top frequent themes from the SLTC ICASSP2024 paper titles:
Accordingly, the Area Chair sub-committee has refined and split existing area subcategories (aka EDICS) to capture the SLTC submission theme trend so as to better represent the interests of potential authors and to accurately match submitted papers with the reviewers.
We increased the granularity of several SLTC areas, including Natural language processing, Speaker identification (recognition/verification), Speech generation, and Speech translation.
The updated area subcategories, compliant with the guidance from the Signal Processing Society Technical Direction Board, have been submitted to SPS/ICASSP-2025. We expect our update to be used by the upcoming ICASSP paper submission and review process.
==Workshops==
by Zhijian Ou, Zhizheng Wu
The 2024 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2024) is set to take place from December 2-5, 2024, in Macao, China. As a premier event organized by the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the SLT Workshop is conducted biennially. It provides a collaborative space for both academic and industrial researchers to address common challenges in spoken language processing. The paper submission deadline has passed.
The Organizing Committee would like to invite your organization to support this event. The sponsors will have the opportunity to interact with academic researchers, industrial developers, and top-notch postgraduate students in research fields. Your participation will increase your organization’s visibility in the spoken language processing community and also help the conference organizers to provide a more exciting program.
More information about the workshop is available on the workshop website: https://2024.ieeeslt.org/
==Challenges==
by Jun Du, Jesus Villalba
Here are the updates and announcements from the challenges subcommittee:
- A full-day workshop on the Emotion Recognition Challenge (https://www.odyssey2024.org/emotion-recognition-challenge) has been organized in Odyssey 2024.
- The Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing Challenge ASVSpoof 2024 Challenge (https://www.asvspoof.org/) is running now, with a deadline of July 17.
- The evaluation plan for NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2024 is now available at (https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/nist-2024-speaker-recognition-evaluation-sre24).
- The call for ICASSP 2025 Grand Challenge (GC) proposals has been drafted and is available at (https://2025.ieeeicassp.org/call-for-gc-proposals/).
- 9 challenges are accepted for SLT 2024 (https://2024.ieeeslt.org/challenges/).
by Ebru Arisoy, Marco Siniscalchi
IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Nominations 2024
The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is seeking nominations for new SLTC Members for a 3-year term (2025-2027). Nominations should be submitted by filling out the web form at https://forms.gle/VNQnPqCGhySGz4kk8. The form asks for a short bio, a list of professional volunteer work and leadership activities, and a position statement and/or vitae as well as nominee information. The nomination deadline is July 26, 2024.
The IEEE and the IEEE Signal Processing Society are committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all their activities. As part of IEEE’s mission to foster technological innovation and excellence to benefit humanity, we recognize that achieving this goal requires the talents and perspectives of people with different personal, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds. As the SLTC, we believe that a diverse and inclusive environment enriches our technical committee and promotes innovation, collaboration, and excellence. Consequently, we strongly encourage nominations of individuals from underrepresented groups, including but not limited to women, minorities, and individuals from geographically diverse regions.
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.
New members must be willing to review papers that are 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 20, 2024.
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 (2025-2028), 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 2025-2027, because of the timing of the ICASSP review cycle, ICASSP review duties will begin almost immediately upon election prior to the term (September-December 2024) and conclude after the formal term (January-February 2028).
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.
From all of us: Stay safe and do good.
Engin Erzin, Editor
Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair
