CALL FOR PROPOSALS 2018 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

2018 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

We are pleased to invite one page research proposals for a workshop on Machine Learning for Speech and Language Technology at Johns Hopkins University

June 25 to August 3, 2018 (Tentative)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: Monday, October 9th, 2017.

One-page proposals are invited for the annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Workshop in Speech and Language Technology. Proposals should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT) or related areas of Machine Intelligence, including Computer Vision and Healthcare. Proposals may address emerging topics or long-standing problems. Areas of interest in 2018 include but are not limited to:

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY: Any aspect of information extraction from speech signals; techniques that generalize in spite of very limited amounts of training data and/or which are robust to input signal variations; techniques for processing of speech in harsh environments, etc.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Knowledge discovery from text; new approaches to traditional problems such as syntactic/semantic/pragmatic analysis, machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, summarization, etc.; domain adaptation; integrated language and social analysis; etc.

* MULTIMODAL HLT: Joint models of text or speech with sensory data; grounded language learning; applications such as visual question-answering, video summarization, sign language technology, multimedia retrieval, analysis of printed or handwritten text.

* DIALOG AND LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING: Understanding human-to-human or human-to-computer conversation; dialog management; naturalness of dialog (e.g. sentiment analysis).

* LANGUAGE AND HEALTHCARE: information extraction from electronic health records; speech and language technology in health monitoring; healthcare delivery in hospitals or the home, public health, etc.

These workshops are a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series, and will be hosted by various partner universities on a rotating basis. The research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops should serve as good examples for prospective proposers: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/.

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated by October 13th, 2017. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on November 10-12th, 2017. Proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected at this meeting for the 2018 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue research on the selected topics. Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students. Authors of successful proposals typically lead these teams. Other senior participants come from academia, industry and government. Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, are rising star seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2018 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed. If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the topics to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available to participate in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith commitment that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week participation possible.

Proposals must be submitted to jsalt2018@clsp.jhu.edu by 5PM EDT on Monday, 10/09/2017.