SLTC Newsletter - Spring 2013

The Spring 2013 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee’s Newsletter is now online. It includes a number of announcements from the current and past TC chairs, 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

IEEE Awards and Recognition

John H.L. Hansen

ARTICLES

In Pursuit of Situated Spoken Dialog and Interaction

Dan Bohus and Eric Horvitz

Advances over the last decade in speech recognition and NLP have fueled the widespread use of spoken dialog systems, including telephony-based applications, multimodal voice search, and voice-enabled smartphone services designed to serve as mobile personal assistants. Key limitations of the systems fielded to date frame opportunities for new research on physically situated and open-world spoken dialog and interaction. Such opportunities are made especially salient for such goals as supporting efficient communication at a distance with Xbox applications and avatars, collaborating with robots in a public space, and enlisting assistance from in-car information systems while driving a vehicle.

An Overview of Selected Talks at NIPS 2012 Conference/Workshop

Tara N. Sainath

The 26th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) took place in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, December 2012. The NIPS conference covers a wide variety of research topics discussing synthetic neural systems through machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms as well as the analysis of natural neural processing systems. This article is a summary of selected talks regarding recent developments on neural networks and deep learning algorithms presented in NIPS 2012.

Interview: Developing the Next Generation of In-Car Interfaces

Matthew Marge

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley Campus and Honda Research Institute have brought together many of today’s visual and audio technologies to build a cutting-edge in-car interface. Ian Lane, Research Assistant Professor at CMU Silicon Valley, and Antoine Raux, Senior Scientist at Honda Research Institute, spoke to us regarding the latest news surrounding AIDAS: An Intelligent Driver Assistive System.

The "Spoken Web Search" Task at Mediaeval 2012

Xavier Anguera, Florian Metze, Andi Buzo, Igor Szoke and Luis J. Rodriguez-Fuentes

In this article we describe the "Spoken Web Search" task within Mediaeval, which tries to foster research on language-independent search of "real-world" speech data, with a special emphasis on low-resourced languages. In addition, we review the main approaches proposed in 2012 and make a call for participation for the 2013 evaluation.

Speaker Verification Makes Its Debut in Smartphone

Kong Aik Lee, Bin Ma, and Haizhou Li

My voice tells who I am. No two individuals sound identical because their vocal tract shapes and other parts of their voice production organs are different. With speaker verification technology, we extract speaker traits, or voiceprint, from speech samples to establish speaker's identity. Among different forms of biometrics, voice is believed to be the most straightforward for telephone-based applications because telephone is built for voice communication. The recent release of Baidu-Lenovo A586 marks an important milestone of mass market adoption of speaker verification technology in mobile applications. The voice-unlock featured in the smartphone allows users to unlock their phone screens using spoken passphrases.

Spoken language disorders: from screening to analysis

Tobias Bocklet, Elmar Nöth

Cleft Lip and Palate (CLP) is among the most frequent congenital abnormalities; the facial development is abnormal during gestation. This leads to insufficient closure of lip, palate and jaw with affected articulation. Due to the huge variety of malformations speech production is affected inhomogeneously for different patients. Previous research in our group focused mostly on text-wide scores like speech intelligibility. In current projects we focus on a more detailed automatic analysis. The goal is to provide an in-depth diagnosis with direct feedback on articulation deficits.

Overview of the 8th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing

Helen Meng

This article gives a brief overview of the 8th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), that was held in Hong Kong during 5-8 December 2012. ISCSLP is a major scientific conference for scientists, researchers, and practitioners to report and discuss the latest progress in all theoretical and technological aspects of Chinese spoken language processing. The working language of ISCSLP is English.

Read the whole SLTC newsletter.