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

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

We have collected several updates for this edition from the SLTC Chair and sub-committees covering the ICASSP area chairs, workshops, and challenges.

==Chair’s Message==

Dear Speech and Language Processing Community,

ICASSP has been one of the most important international events in the speech and language processing community. It’s great for the community that the ICASSP 2023 meetings are being planned as in-person conference!

This year we received 1556 eligible ICASSP submissions in the areas of Speech Processing and Human Language Technologies, a 34% increase from ICASSP 2022. By February 15th, the SLTC has completed ICASSP 2023 review process and sent out the review outcome notification -- on time! 

To select interesting papers with good quality for presentation, 99.3% of eligible papers have received 3+ reviews. As for previous years, authors were given the opportunity to submit a rebuttal this year. A metareview was conducted for each paper by one of the 114 technical committee members and associate members, who carefully synthesized reviewers’ comments, authors’ rebuttals and, for papers with significant disagreement on assessment, sometimes coordinated discussion among reviewers, to make an initial recommendation. A team of 14 area chairs then worked together to bring a balanced program based on the parameters set by the ICASSP technical chairs. The area chairs are now working to create presentation sessions for the ICASSP 2023.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who submitted papers to ICASSP and who are working hard to make ICASSP successful, despite the pandemic impact that last peaked in some regions of the world in January 2023.

We refresh SLTC members at the end of each year. I am thankful to those who are retiring from the SLTC with their term ending in 2022: Abeer Alwan, Antonio Bonafonte, Fred Richardson, Helen Hastie, Heidi Christensen, Jasha Droppo, Mahnoosh Mehrabani, Panos Georgiou, and Takaaki Hori. They have dedicated their passion, time, and energy to help with at least four ICASSP review processes and to serve and promote our community through initiatives and activities. I would like to especially thank Dong Yu, who has just finished his term as SLTC Chair and will serve as Past Chair in 2023. Dong has done a tremendous amount of work during his tenure as Chair to position our technical committee to more effectively serve our community. I will continue working with Dong closely to get help and advice.

I would like to welcome newly elected SLTC members: Kyu Jeong Han, Joseph Keshet, Haitao Mi, Tara Sainath, Shinji Watanabe, Koichiro Yoshino, Bengt Jonas Borgstrom, Jing Huang, Penny Karanasou, Yong Xu, Yu Zhang, and re-elected members: Ebru Arisoy, Engin Erzin, Ming Li, Jun Du, Esther Klabbers, Arun Narayanan, and Zhijian Ou.

We also appointed 2023 associate members: Kartik  Audhkhasi, Samuel  Thomas, Catalin   Zorila, Ahmed      Hussen    Abdelaziz, Yossi Adi, Carlos  Busso, Milos  Cernak, Jianshu  Chen, Lei  Chen, Xie Chen, Erica  Cooper, Kevin  Duh, Hakan  Erdogan, Xing  Fan, Hao   Fang, Junlan Feng, Masakiyo  Fujimoto, Takashi  Fukuda, Boris   Ginsburg, David  Harwath, Ville Hautamäki, Naoyuki  Kanda, Jaebok   Kim, Javier  Latorre, Chi-Chun    Lee, Jing Li, Bo  Li, Chenghua  Lin, Bing   Liu, Erfan  Loweimi, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Bin   Ma, Alexis  Moinet, Shane   Moon, Niko  Moritz, David  Mortensen, Jan Niehues, Alex   Papangelis, Sree Hari Krishnan  Parthasarathi, Alexandros  Potamianos, Ryan  Price, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Yangyang  Shi, Yannis  Stylianou, Dan  Su, Shinnosuke  Takamichi, Xu  Tan, Jan   Trmal, Yongqiang  Wang, Wen  Wang, Felix   Weninger, Jason  Williams, Donald  Williamson, Hainan   Xu, Jian  Xue, Jiangyan Yi, Kai Yu, Dian Yu, Zhou Yu, Zixing   Zhang, Chunlei  Zhang, Shixiong Zhang, and Chao  Zhang. The number to 63, in response to the increase of submitted ICASSP 2023 papers.

The SLTC members and Associate members have been contributing to the ICASSP review process. 

Each year IEEE recognizes members with extraordinary accomplishments through a distinct grade – IEEE Fellow. I would like to congratulate the following speech and language processing researchers and engineers who were elevated to IEEE Fellow as of January 2023:

• Carlos Busso: for contributions to speech and multimodal affective signal processing and their technology applications

• Florian Metze: for contributions to end-to-end training of speech recognition systems

• Chunyan Miao: for contributions to multimodal signal processing and AI technologies for aging-at-home and population health

• Premkumar Natarajan: for contributions to conversational AI systems,  spoken language translation, and home voice-assistant systems

• Daniel Povey: for contributions to acoustic modeling for speech recognition

• Shinji Watanabe: for contributions to speech recognition technology

• Jason Williams: for contributions to the theory and practice of machine-learning based spoken dialog systems

• Chengqing Zong: for contributions to machine translation and natural language processing

IEEE SPS members’ accomplishments are also recognized by various IEEE Signal Processing Society prestigious awards. For the speech and language processing community, I would like to congratulate 2022 Amar G. Bose Industrial Leader Award recipient Xuedong Huang, for his contributions to speech recognition and industrial leadership in artificial intelligence. The Amar G. Bose Industrial Leader Award recognizes an industry business or technical leader whose leadership has resulted in major and outstanding advances or new directions using signal processing technologies within the scope of the Society.

I wish you all the best in 2023 and hope to see you face to face at the ICASSP!

Best,

Yifan Gong

Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Yifan Gong, Dong Yu

The Area Chair subcommittee completed ICASSP 2023 review process for the speech and language processing track.

This year, the track has received 30+% more submissions than last year, which raised the quality bar for final acceptance. ICASSP 2023 also adopted CMT tool to implement the paper review process, leading to additional learning for everyone in the process.

With remarkable diligence and tremendous effort,  our 14 Area Chairs, working with SLTC members and associate members, have ensured 3+ reviews for 99.3% of submitted and eligible papers. The committee delivered the review results compliant with the TPC acceptance rate guidance and enabled ICASSP 2023 TPC to send out the notifications on-time by the 15th of February.

Due to lower acceptance rate, we had a little more post-notification authors inquires than last year. However, thanks to the good work from meta reviewers and area chairs, we were able to handle the inquiries with few involvements from meta review and area chairs.

We are compiling a list of learnings and suggestions on the tool and process to share with TPC to improve the review process for future ICASSP.

==Workshops==

by Zhijian Ou, Abdelrahman Mohamed

ASRU 2023 Update

The ASRU 2023 Webpage (http://www.asru2023.org) and important dates are now available. You are welcome to visit the webpage and leave your email to get the workshop newsletter.

Call for Proposals - SLT 2024

Following the success of the bi-annual SLT workshop over the past decade, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee invites proposals to host the 2024 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2024). Past SLT 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 how the organizers would respond in facing the COVID-19 situation.

• 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 chairs

  • 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 SLT

The deadline for proposals is June 15, 2023.

Please send proposals and questions to the workshops 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, the IEEE SLTC will review proposals, and selection results are expected by August 15, 2023.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, we encourage you to contact the 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 May 31, 2023, may be invited to briefly present in-person or virtually at the annual IEEE SLTC meeting at ICASSP 2023 (https://2023.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 SLT 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 SLT events have included many SLTC members. To maintain the fairness of selection, SLTC members who are affiliated with any SLT 2024 proposals will not participate in the proposal selection vote. Further, the members of the workshops sub-committee may not be affiliated with any SLT 2024 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 SLT workshop.

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

https://slt2022.org/ for information about SLT 2022 in Doha, Qatar

http://2021.ieeeslt.org/ for information about SLT 2021 in Shenzhen, China

http://www.slt2018.org/ for information about SLT 2018 in Athens, Greece

And feel free to contact the workshops sub-committee with questions.

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

2023 IEEE SLTC Workshops Sub-Committee

==Challenges==

by Jun Du, Jesus Villalba

In the ICASSP 2023, there are 8 Grand Challenges announced in the area of SLTC. You are cordially invited to participate in challenges. More information about each challenge can be found by visiting the challenge website: 

(https://2023.ieeeicassp.org/signal-processing-grand-challenges/)

• Multimodal Information Based Speech Processing (MISP) 2022 Challenge 

• ICASSP SP Clarity Challenge: Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids

• Auditory EEG Decoding Challenge

• Spoken Language Understanding Challenge @ ICASSP 2023 

• The MADReSS Challenge: Multilingual Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech

• ICASSP 2023 General Meeting Understanding and Generation Challenge (MUG)

• LIMMITS’23 – Lightweight, Multi-Speaker, Multi-Lingual Indic Text-to-Speech

• ICASSP 2023 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge

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 send an email to 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.

If you want to stay connected to the IEEE SLTC between newsletters, we are on Twitter @IEEE_SLTC.

From all of us: Stay safe and do good.

Engin Erzin, Editor (new)

Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair (in-coming)