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

Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter

Welcome to the Fall 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 7 articles and announcements from 13 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions! This issue includes news about IEEE journals and recent workshops, SLTC call for nominations, and individual contributions.

We believe the newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials which don't fit well with traditional journals. We welcome your contributions, as well as calls for papers, job announcements, comments and suggestions. You can submit job postings here, and reach us at speechnewseds [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.

To subscribe to the SLTC Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.

Florian Metze,
Editor-in-chief

William Campbell, Editor

Haizhou Li, Editor

Patrick Nguyen, Editor

From the SLTC and IEEE

From the IEEE SLTC Chair

Douglas O'Shaughnessy

CFPs, Jobs, and Announcements

Calls for Papers, Proposals, and Participation

Edited by William Campbell

Job Advertisements

Edited by William Campbell

Articles

IEEE Spoken Language Technologies Workshop 2014

JULIA HIRSCHBERG AND AGUSTIN GRAVANO

The Fifth IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2014) will be held in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on Dec 7-10, 2014. The main theme of the workshop will be "machine learning in spoken language technologies". SLT 2014 will include tutorials and keynote speeches on the main workshop theme and emerging areas; online panel discussions before/ during the conference; miniSIGs -small discussion groups; and highlight sessions, where the 3-5 best papers will be presented orally.

IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop 2015

PINO DI FABBRIZIO AND JASON D. WILLIAMS

The 2015 edition of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2015) Workshop will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona (USA) from Sunday, December 13 to Thursday, December 17, 2015. Located in the beautiful Sonoran Desert, Scottsdale, Arizona is an ideal location to host ASRU 2014 providing a warm climate during December, spectacular natural scenery, and a vibrant downtown with easy access to the Phoenix metropolitan area.

ASRU 2015 - Call for Challenge Tasks

MICHIEL BACCHIANI

ASRU 2015 welcomes proposals for challenge tasks. In a challenge task, participants compete or collaborate to accomplish a common or shared task. The results of the challenge will be presented at the ASRU workshop event in the form of papers reporting the achievements of the participants, individually and/or as a whole. We invite organizers to concretely propose such challenge tasks in the form of a 1-2 page proposal.

Report from the 2014 UKSpeech Conference

KORIN RICHMOND

The third UKSpeech Conference was held recently in Edinburgh at the Informatics Forum, home of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (9-10th June 2014).

An Overview of New Small-Footprint Technology on Mobile Devices

TARA N. SAINATH

The popularity of mobile devices has resulted with increased interaction with mobile devices using voice. In this newsletter, we will discuss some of the newest voice search technology released at Google, particularly focused on small-footprint applications. We will show that the use of deep neural network (DNN) technology has made it possible to perform tasks on voice inputs within the confinement of portable devices.

Congratulations to the new IEEE Fellows

FLORIAN METZE

Each year, the IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of Fellow on up to one-tenth of one percent of the members.  The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in IEEE’s designated fields. We congratulate the following 6 speech and language processing colleagues who were recognized with the grade of Fellow as of 1 January 2014.

An Overview of the NIST i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge

CRAIG S. GREENBERG, DÉSIRÉ BANSÉ, GEORGE R. DODDINGTON, DANIEL GARCIA-ROMERO, JOHN J. GODFREY,
TOMI KINNUNEN, ALVIN F. MARTIN, ALAN MCCREE, MARK PRZYBOCKI, AND DOUGLAS A. REYNOLDS

In late 2013 and in 2014 the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) coordinated an open, online machine learning challenge for speaker recognition, using speech data represented as i-vectors. This challenge utilized fixed front-end processing in order to allow direct comparison of different back-ends, encourage exploration of new ideas in machine learning for speaker recognition, and to make the field accessible to participants from outside the audio processing community.

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