Published in TC News on 1 December 2015 by Florian Metze (Reposted from the SLTC Newsletter) Welcome to the Winter 2015 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 5 articles and announcements from 23 contributors, including SLTC own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your 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, submit Calls for Papers or Participation here, and send mail to speechnewseds@listserv.ieee.org to propose articles. To subscribe to the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv@listserv.ieee.org. Florian Metze, Editor-in-chief Haizhou Li, Editor Andrew Rosenberg, Editor Izhak Shafran, Editor

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From the SLTC and IEEE

From the IEEE SLTC Chair

Bhuvana Ramabhadran

CFPs, Jobs, and Announcements

Calls for Papers, Proposals, and Participation

Edited by Andrew Rosenberg

Job Advertisements

Edited by Andrew Rosenberg

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Articles

NIST 2015 Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge

Craig S. Greenberg, Désiré Bansé, John M. Howard, Alvin F. Martin, George R. Doddington, Audrey Tong, Daniel Garcia-Romero, Jaime Hernández-Cordero, Lisa P Mason, Alan McCree, Douglas A Reynolds, Elliot Singer

Modeled after the successful NIST Speaker Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge held in 2013-2014 [1], in 2015 NIST launched a Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge, which focused on open-set language identification. This Language Recognition Challenge used data from previous NIST Language Recognition Evaluations (LRE’s) and other LDC and IARPA corpora [2]. Rather than distributing audio data as in LREs, 400-dimensional i-vectors were distributed produced by a state-of-the-art system from MITLL and JHU HLT Center of Excellence. Using the i-vector representation made the evaluation more accessible to participants from outside the audio processing community and allowed for a more direct comparison of the different back-ends by removing the burden of audio processing and providing a common system front-end.  

Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) Election Results

Andreas Stolcke, Doug Reynolds, Larry Heck, Steve Renals, and Takehiro Moriya

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is announcing the results of the elections for members filling the 2016-2018 term.  

INTERSPEECH 2016: Important Announcements

Carlos Busso and Emily Mower Provost

Please take note of these upcoming December deadlines related to INTERSPEECH 2016  

Trends at INTERSPEECH 2015

Tara N Sainath

The 16h Interspeech Conference was recently hosted in Dresden, Germany from September 6th-10th, 2015. In this article, we highlight upward and downward trends in the speech community.  

ASVspoof 2015: The First Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge

Zhizheng Wu, Tomi Kinnunen, Nicholas Evans, and Junichi Yamagishi

Mounting evidence has exposed the potential vulnerability of biometric authentication systems to spoofing. Spoofing attacks are also known as presentation attacks in ISO nomenclature. In response, there has been a movement in the academic community over the last two decades to develop spoofing countermeasures. The research is now relatively mature, with several competitive evaluations having been organised for various modalities including face, fingerprint and iris recognition.