Chair's Letter

Dear Speech and Language Processing Community,

Happy new year!  I hope that you all have had a successful conclusion to 2019 and that 2020 is an even brighter year.  Indeed, our community is vibrant and growing: as we are in the middle of the ICASSP review process as I am writing this, I can report that the papers submitted to SLTC areas (encompassing Speech Processing and Human Language Technologies) grew by over 25% from the previous ICASSP.  

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who make ICASSP (and particularly the SLTC portion of ICASSP) review process run. Since the review process is sometimes a bit opaque, one often doesn’t appreciate how much technical effort is used in the review process. Each paper in our area is reviewed by 3 reviewers (from a cadre of 904 reviewers), followed by a metareview by one of 62 technical committee members, who carefully reads the papers and reviewers’ comments to make an initial recommendation.  A team of 8 area chairs then works together to bring a balanced program based on the parameters set by the ICASSP technical chairs. I’d like to thank all of you who contribute to this process for your time and effort.

While I’m thanking people, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of those who are retiring from the SLTC with their term ending in 2019: Murat Akbacak, Srinivas Bangalore, Hakan Erdogan, Milica Gasic, Yifan Gong, John Hershey, Rick Rose, Tara Sainath, Olivier Siohan, Hagen Soltau, Andreas Stolcke, Yannis Stylianou, Shinji Watanabe, and Kai Yu.  These people have dedicated their time and energy to not only helping with at least four ICASSP review processes, but also working to advance initiatives within the SLTC and Signal Processing Society. I would also like to thank Michiel Bacchiani, who has just finished his term as Past Chair and has been a great mentor.

Elsewhere in this issue are the election results for new SLTC members; I look forward to working with the new members in the coming year.  In particular, I would like to congratulate Dong Yu, who was elected Vice Chair for 2020, and will succeed as chair starting in January 2021.  We’ll be working together to ensure a seamless transition at the year’s end.

SLTC is proud to have a number of speech and language researchers who were elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2020, including:

• Paavo Alku, for contributions to analysis, synthesis and quality improvement of speech signals 

• Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, for contributions to robustness of automatic speech recognition 

• Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, for contributions to speech processing of under-resourced languages 

• Patrick Naylor, for contributions to signal processing for speech dereverberation and analysis 

• Tanja Schultz, for contributions to multilingual speech recognition and biosignal processing 

• Gokhan Tur, for leadership in spoken language understanding and applications to virtual personal assistant products

• Bowen Zhou, for leadership in human language technologies 

Congratulations to these well-deserving researchers!

The 2019 Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2019) recently concluded in Sentosa Island, Singapore.  The workshop featured five keynote speakers (Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Julia Hirschberg, Tanja Schultz, Samy Bengio, and DeLiang Wang) and five invited speakers (Florian Metze, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yuxuan Wang, Lonce Wyse, and Nima Mesgerani), as well as a robust program of 144 papers.  450 participants enjoyed the hospitality of our Singapore hosts. ASRU was co-located with two other workshops: the NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2019, and Life-Long Learning for Spoken Language Systems workshop.

A number of special events also made ASRU 2019 memorable.  The Young Female Researchers Mentoring event brought together 20 young researchers and 12 mentors to discuss problems such as academia vs industry, woman in science, stress management, and professional development.  For the wider ASRU audience, Odette Scharenborg presented a talk entitled “Gender diversity in speech science and technology – Statistics, research findings, and my perspective,” providing attendees with excellent statistical and personal perspectives on gender issues.  The ASRU program also provided a panel session on “The future of speech technology education,” in which panelists and audience members discussed challenges and opportunities in education and academic research.  

The next SLTC workshop will be the 2020 Spoken Language Technology Workshop in Shenzhen, China; the website is at http://slt2020.org with paper submissions due in July.  The SLTC will be accepting bids shortly for ASRU 2021 (the call for bids can be found elsewhere in this newsletter).  We particularly invite proposers to submit before April 17th so that they can present at the SLTC business meeting at ICASSP in order to get feedback before a final submission in June 2020.

Finally, the SLTC and the Signal Processing Society have been working on changes to improve the operation of our technical committee and better connect to the community.  At the last ICASSP meeting, the SLTC approved changes to the subcommittee structure to improve areas such as communications and nominations for awards. We are also engaging with the SPS’s affiliate member campaign, which allows you to stay better connected with technical committee communications.   If you haven’t already, consider signing up as an affiliate member of the SLTC at https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/speech-and-language-processing/affiliate-members.

I wish you all the best in 2020 and hope to see you at ICASSP!

Best,
Eric Fosler-Lussier
Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee