News from the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC)

by Giuseppe (Pino) Di Fabbrizio -- SLTC Newsletter Editor

The Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) promotes and influences all the technical areas of speech and language processing. The main focus of the SLTC is the organization of the technical sessions in the related areas at the annual International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).  Other committee activities include the selection of proposals and the organization of technical workshops such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Spoken Language technologies (SLT), and Odyssey, the Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop.

As year-end approaches, we are getting ready for the eleventh biannual IEEE ASRU Workshop that will be held on December 13-17 in Merano, Italy. Researchers and scholars from the speech and language communities contributed with a remarkable submission of 225 papers. The ASRU technical chairs coordinated the peer review process and selected 96 high quality papers covering a broad range of topics from automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, spoken dialogue system, spoken document retrieval, and more. Workshop attendees will get the opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-art the latest trends in the field from prestigious keynote speakers such as Prof. Sadaoki Furui (Tokio Institute of Technology) and Prof. Aravind K. Joshi (University of Pennsylvania) among several other invited lectures. Visit the workshop web site for further information about the technical program.

Other TC activities in recent months included the election of 18 new members selected from a larger pool of recognized international experts and divided into the following area of expertise: speech recognition (6), speaker recognition (3), speech synthesis (1), natural language processing (1), dialogue systems (2), speech production (1), speech analysis (1), speech enhancement (1), speech perception (1), and speech coding (1). This new addition will replace the 13 exiting members and five newly created positions, bringing the total number of members to 50. The updated roster will be available at the SLTC web site.

The 10th Interspeech conference was held recently in Brighton, U.K. on 6-10 September 2009 under the sponsorship of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), together with the 10th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue held in London on  11-12 September 2009.  SIGDIAL has now been promoted to a full conference and serving as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the ISCA.

Finally, starting with the SLTC 2009 summer eNewsLetter edition, the editorial staff is experimenting with a new feature that will let readers add their own comments about the published articles. Readers’ contributions will be published at the end of the article after a preliminary screening by the editors. Additionally, new books announcements in the speech and language areas are now hosted in a special newsletter section where authors will be able to describe and publicize their work.

For more information, please visit the following links: SLTC web site, SLTC eNewsLetter, SLTC roster. To subscribe the SLTC Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.