Spring 2024 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter

Welcome to the Spring 2024 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter.  

We have collected several updates for this edition from the sub-committees covering the ICASSP area chairs, challenges, and workshops.

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Yifan Gong

Dear IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Community,

As the ICASSP 2024 conference approaches, I take this opportunity to share some updates with you. The Area Chair sub-committee has been working on the presentation session planning based on the accepted 45.6% of the submitted papers - a slightly higher acceptance rate than last year.

The field of speech and language processing continues to evolve, and we’ve witnessed remarkable growth in several areas. Here are some highlights:

Natural Language Processing

Machine Learning Methods for Language Processing

Multi-lingual Speech-to-Text

Multimodal Processing of Speech, Vision, and Language

Text-Based Customization for Speech-to-Text

Speech Emotion Recognition and Analysis

Voice Clone and Conversion

Text-to-Speech Generation

The growth reflects the tremendous progress in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI and opens exciting opportunities for the community to push the boundaries of what is achievable in speech and language processing.

I extend my gratitude to our TC Members and Associate Members, and reviewers. Your commitment and effort have contributed to the high-quality sessions of the Speech and Language Processing Track of ICASSP 2024.

I look forward to meeting you in person at ICASSP 2024 in Seoul, Korea. Let’s come together to learn and inspire, celebrate the latest advancements, and foster collaborations.

Yifan Gong

Chair, Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, IEEE SPS

==Challenges==

by Jun Du, Jesus Villalba

• The Emotion Recognition Challenge for Odyssey 2024 is running close to submission with two tasks (https://www.odyssey2024.org/emotion-recognition-challenge):
  • Categorical emotion recognition (anger, happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, contempt, disgust, and neutral) and 
  • Emotional attribute prediction (arousal, valence, and dominance). 
• NIST announced that they will organize the Speaker Recognition Evaluation in the fall of 2024 (there is no online information yet).
• Displace 2024 Challenge on speaker and language diarization in Indian languages is happening now (https://displace2023.github.io/) for the Interspeech conference.
• CHiME Challenge 2024 (https://www.chimechallenge.org/), with three different far-field tasks, has already started and has a deadline of June 28. 
• The Dialogue System Technology Challenge and its special issue in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing has received 20 submissions and 11 were accepted finally.
• Call for SP Cup proposals: The SP Cup is an undergraduate-level challenge held annually at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). The deadline for submitting the proposal is 29th March 2024 for ICASSP 2025 Hyderabad, India. The details of the current SP Cup: https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/signal-process...

==Workshops==

by Zhijian Ou

ASRU 2023

IEEE ASRU 2023 took place at the Asia Pacific Hotel, Taipei, Taiwan, on 16-20 December 2023. A total of 370 delegates from 26 different regions from all over the world joined. The technical program includes 5 esteemed keynote speeches, 5 invited speeches, 6 poster sessions, 4 tutorials, 2 workshops, and 1 panel on fairness in speech processing to share the advancement and development in speech and language processing. To enhance networking opportunities, we have planned special social events: pre-dinner Night Market Fun with one of the most famous night markets in Taiwan, Ningxia Night Market, to provide Taiwanese delicacies; conference banquet was held at the iconic Grand Hotel, providing participants with an excellent opportunity to savor its unique charm and breathtaking views from the 12th floor, overlooking the city of Taipei; student party was held at the Boulevard Café, a highly sought-after place with fun games, vibrant atmosphere and plenty of food and drinks.

Call for Proposals - ASRU 2025

Following the success of the bi-annual ASRU workshop over the past decade, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee invites proposals to host the 2025 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2025). The call for proposals to host ASRU 2025 can be found here:

https://signalprocessingsociety.org/blog/call-proposals-ieee-asru-2025/ 

The deadline for proposals is June 14, 2024. Please send proposals and questions to the Workshop Sub-Committee.

SLT 2024 Call for papers

The 2024 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2024) is set to take place from December 2-5, 2024, in Macao, China. As a premier event organized by the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the SLT Workshop is conducted biennially. It provides a collaborative space for both academic and industrial researchers to address common challenges in spoken language processing. We strongly encourage submissions that aim to expand the frontiers of current knowledge and explore innovative directions in spoken language technologies. More information is available on the workshop website: http://2024.ieeeslt.org/

This 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 contact the TC via this form or email 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.

If you want to stay connected to the IEEE SLTC between newsletters, we are on Twitter @IEEE_SLTC.

From all of us: Stay safe and do good.

Engin Erzin, Editor

Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair