SLTC Newsletter – Spring 2014

The Spring 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee’s Newsletter is now online. It includes a number of announcements from the TC chair, as well as a number of articles collated by the editorial boarded. Subscribe to the newsletter to be automatically notified of the new editions. We believe the newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials, and encourage interested individuals to send us their contributions.

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Editor-in-chief

William Campbell, Editor

Haizhou Li, Editor

Patrick Nguyen, Editor

ANNOUNCEMENTS

From the IEEE SLTC chair

Douglas O’Shaughnessy

ARTICLES

Call for Proposals - ASRU 2015

Geoffrey Zweig

Following on the tremendous success of ASRU 2013, the SPS-SLTC invites proposals to host the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop in 2015. Past ASRU workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact.

Speech Synthesis Perfects Everyone's Singing

Minghui Dong, Nancy Chen, and Haizhou Li

Singing is more expressive than speaking. While singing is popular, singing well is nontrivial. This is especially true for songs that require high vocal skills. A singer needs to overcome two challenges among others - to sing in the right tune and at the correct rhythm. Even professional singers need intensive practice to perfect their vocal skills and to proficiently present particular singing styles, such as vibrato and resonance tuning. Recently, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore has developed a technology called Speech2Singing, which converts the singing voice of non-professional singers (or even spoken utterances) into perfect singing.

1 Billion Word Language Modeling Benchmark

Ciprian Chelba

Ciprian Chelba and colleagues released a language model benchmark and would like to advertise it to the speech community. The purpose of the project is to make available a standard training and test setup for language modeling experiments.

An Overview of ASRU 2013

Tara N. Sainath and Jan (Honza) Cernocky

The Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) was recently hosted in Olomouc, Czech Republic from December 8-12, 2013. Each day of the workshop focused on a specific current theme that has become popular amongst ASR researchers. In this report, we highlight the 4 days of the workshop, and touch on some papers in more detail.

Speech and Audio Highlights from MediaEval 2013

Gareth J. F. Jones and Martha Larson

MediaEval is a benchmarking initiative dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. While it emphasizes the 'multi' in multimedia and focuses on human and social aspects of multimedia task, speech and audio processing is a key component of several MediaEval tasks each year. MediaEval 2013 featured a total of 12 tasks exploring aspects of multimedia indexing, search and interaction, five of which involved significant elements of speech and audio processing, which we will discuss in this article.

Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference 2013

Rafael E. Banchs, Min Zhang, and Ming Hui Dong

AIRS 2013, the ninth edition of the Asia Information Retrieval Societies conference, took place from 9th to 11th December 2014 in Singapore. The conference was attended by a total of 85 participants from more than 20 countries. The technical program comprised 45 papers, from which 27 were selected for oral presentations and 18 for poster presentations.