News from the SLTC

Published in TC News on 1 January 2015

by Florian Metze (Reposted from the SLTC Newsletter)

Welcome to the Winter 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 8 articles and announcements from 10 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 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 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.

2014 Spoken Language Technology Workshop

JOHN H. L. HANSEN AND MURAT AKBACAK

On behalf of the IEEE SLT-2014 organizing committee, we welcome you to the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada December 7-10, 2014. This is the fifth biannual SLT workshop – which first began in Aruba (2006), then Goa, India (2008), Berkeley, California (USA) (2010), and most recently Miami, Florida (USA) (2012). This year we will be hosting the IEEE SLT in South Lake Tahoe at the Harvey’s Lake Tahoe Resort, with beautiful views of Lake Tahoe and minutes from Heavenly Valley Ski area. The SLT-2014 Organizing Committee has worked extensively on all aspects of the technical and social programs, and we promise this to be a memorable experience with an outstanding collection of quality papers and talks, along with the breathtaking location of Lake Tahoe.

Interesting Papers from INTERSPEECH 2014

TARA N. SAINATH

The 15th Interspeech Conference was recently hosted in Singapore from September 14-18th, 2014. In this article, we highlight a few interesting papers and themes from the conference.

Personalizing Cortana: a close-up view of the speech technology powering Cortana

FIL ALLEVA AND MICHAEL TJALVE

Cortana is the most personal assistant who learns about her user to provide a truly personalized experience. Behind the scenes, there's a wide range of speech and language technology components which make the natural interaction with Cortana possible. Personalization of the speech experience happens seamlessly while the user simply experiences better speech recognition accuracy and a more natural interface. Here are a few examples of recent research from our labs.

Spectrogram Inversion Toolbox for Matlab

MALCOLM SLANEY

The Spectrogram Inversion Toolbox allows one to create spectrograms from audio, and, more importantly, estimate the audio that generates any given spectrogram.  This is useful because often one wants to think about, and modify sounds in the spectrogram domain.

Call for Papers - Dialogue & Discourse Special Issue on Dialogue State Tracking

JASON D. WILLIAMS

The aim of this special issue is to provide a forum for in-depth, journal-level work on dialogue state tracking.  

This issue welcomes papers covering any topic relevant to dialogue state tracking.

Invitation to workshop on Assistive Speech and Signal Processing

HUGO VAN HAMME

We would like to invite you to attend our one-day workshop on "assistive speech and signal processing" which we are organising on Monday 24 November 2014 in Leuven, Belgium. Information about program and registration can be found here.

Automatic Speech recognition In Reverberant Environments (ASpIRE)

MARY HARPER

The development of automatic speech recognition able to perform well across a variety of acoustic environments and recording scenarios on natural conversational speech is a holy grail of the speech research community. Previous work in the literature has shown that automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance degrades on microphone recordings especially when data used for training is mismatched with data used in testing. IARPA is announcing a challenge, with monetary awards, to develop approaches to mitigate the effects of these conditions. Participants will have the opportunity to evaluate their techniques on a common set of challenging data that includes significant room noise and reverberation.

Call for Task Proposals - MediaEval 2015

MARTHA LARSON

MediaEval is a benchmarking initiative dedicated to developing and evaluating new algorithms and technologies for multimedia access and retrieval. It offers tasks to the research community that related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval is now calling for proposals for tasks to run in the 2015 benchmarking season. The proposal consists of a description of the motivation for the task, and challenges that task participants must address, as well as information on the data and evaluation methodology to be used. The proposal also includes a statement of how the task is related to MediaEval (i.e., its human or social component), and how it extends the state of the art in an area related to multimedia indexing, search or other technologies that support users in access multimedia collections.