Activity Update from the SLTC

by Dilek Hakkani-Tür (TC Liaison to eNews)

Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) is part of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, aiming to promote and influence technical areas related to speech and language processing, such as automatic speech recognition, spoken dialog systems, and (speech-to-speech) machine translation. SLTC is responsible for the organization of the speech and language related sessions at the annual International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), as well as two technical workshops: Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) workshop, and Spoken Language Technologies (SLT) workshop.

The IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU’11) was hosted in Hawaii, December 11-15, 2011. The technical program of ASRU 2011 included four keynote talks (Efficient Algorithms for Learning Sparse Models from Large Amounts of Data by Yoram Singer, More Words and Bigger Pictures by David Forsyth, Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project by Jennifer Chu-Carroll and The Neural Mechanisms of Speech Production: From computational modeling to neural prosthesis by Frank H. Guenther), six invited talks and six poster sessions. The videos and slides of the talks can be found here. The next ASRU workshop will take place in December 2013.

The 37th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'12) took place recently in Kyoto, Japan, March 25-30, 2012. For the speech and language processing community, ICASSP is the most attended IEEE Signal Processing Society international conference. Approximately 700 papers each year are submitted for publication in the speech and language processing areas (the largest of all the technical areas within signal processing by far), with typically 350 accepted for publication. This year, three SLTC members received major IEEE awards and recognitions at ICASSP: Mazin Gilbert (IEEE Fellow), James Baker and Janet Baker (The IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Technical Field Award for their outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech processing).

The next (fourth) IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT'12) will be held December 2-5, 2012, in Miami, Florida. The goal of this workshop is to allow the speech/language processing community to share and present recent advances in various areas of spoken language technology. The paper submission deadline is July 20, 2012.

Furthermore, SLTC publishes a quarterly newsletter, and maintains a list of speech and language related job opportunities and call for papers, which are monthly distributed to the SLTC newsletter mailing list members (which one can sign up for by sending an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org). The newsletter articles include the latest news (for example, announcement of toolkits and interviews with researchers), information on challenges (for example, the Interspeech 2011 Speaker State Challenge – a review, by Bjӧrn Schuller et al.) and workshops/conferences (for example, an overview of acoustic modeling techniques from ASRU 2011 by Tara Sainath) from the speech and language processing community, and for fresh information on the SLTC activities, we suggest subscribing to the newsletter mailing list.