News from the SLTC

Published in TC News on 1 August 2015

by Florian Metze (Reposted from the SLTC Newsletter)

Welcome to the Summer 2015 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 11 articles and announcements from 19 contributors, including our 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, and send mail to speechnewseds [at] listserv [dot] ieee [dot] org to submit CfPs and propose articles.

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.

Please consider the Call for Proposals - SLT 2016.

Florian Metze, Editor-in-chief
Haizhou Li, Editor
Andrew Rosenberg, Editor
Izhak Shafran, Editor 

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

Articles

ASRU 2015: Demonstration & Toolkit Call for Proposals

THOMAS SCHAAF, PATRICK NGUYEN, AND MARSAL GAVALDÀ

The program committee for the 14th biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding is accepting proposals for the Demo & Toolkit session that will be held during the workshop. The demonstration session has become an exciting highlight of the ASRU workshops. The event will include demonstrations of latest innovations by research groups in industry, academia, and government. Demonstrations can be related to any of the topics defined by ASRU.

SEAME: Mandarin-English code-switching speech database

HO THI NGA, CHNG ENG SIONG, HAIZHOU LI

SEAME (South-East Asia Mandarin-English) is the first publicly released Mandarin-English code-switching speech database for automatic speech recognition (ASR) research in LDC. The database was jointly developed by the Speech Groups in Temasek Laboratories@Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia, and will be released by LDC (LDC2015S04) in Q2, 2015. SEAME includes 192 hours of Mandarin-English code-switching and mono-lingual utterances in conversation and interview settings.

Unconference Style SIG Meetings in SLT 2014 Workshop

OZLEM KALINLI

The 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2014) was held at Harvey’s South Lake Tahoe Hotel located on the California-Nevada state line on Dec 7-10, 2014. One of the workshop goals was to increase interaction in the community. This year we proposed unconference style special interest group (SIG) meetings as a new initiative to effectively serve this goal. SIG meetings took place on Dec 7th and 8th evenings. Conference style SIG topics were proposed before the workshop, while the unconference style mini SIG meetings were proposed on the spot.

IEEE 2014 Spoken Language Technology Workshop Summary Report

MURAT AKBACAK AND JOHN H. L. HANSEN

The 2014 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) took place in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada on December 7-10, 2014 at the Harvey’s Lake Tahoe Resort, with beautiful views of Lake Tahoe and minutes from Heavenly Valley Ski area. This was the fifth biannual IEEE SLT workshop – which first began in Aruba (2006), then Goa, India (2008), Berkeley, California (USA) (2010), and most recently Miami, Florida (USA) (2012).

Trends at ICASSP 2015

TARA N. SAINATH

The 40th International Conference on Speech and Audio Processing was recently hosted in Brisbane, Australia from April 19-24th, 2015. In this article, we highlight upward and downward trends in the speech community.

INTERSPEECH 2015 - Welcome to Dresden

SEBASTIAN MÖLLER AND OLIVER JOKISCH

Thanks to your contributions, we have received a possibly record-breaking number of 1,458 submissions to INTERSPEECH 2015, organized in Dresden on September 6-10. The TPC headed by Bernd Möbius and Elmar Nöth, together with our 40 area chairs and nearly 1,000 reviewers, are currently finalizing the review process, but we are already quite sure that INTERSPEECH 2015 will provide an exciting program of special sessions and special events, keynote speakers, show & tell demos, as well as a strong scientific oral and poster backbone program. INTERSPEECH 2015 will feature eight tutorials on Sunday September 6, ranging in topics from biosignals to deep learning techniques and speech signal processing. In addition, there will be ten satellite workshops, a Doctoral Workshop organized by the ISCA Student Advisory Committee, as well as two other co-located events, making your journey to Dresden really worthwhile.

A View from Dresden onto the History of Speech Communication (Parts 3-5)

RÜDIGER HOFFMANN AND PETER BIRKHOLZ

• Part 3: Voices for toys – First commercial spin-offs in speech synthesis
• Part 4: Helmholtz Resonators
• Part 5: Artificial vocal fold models – The investigation of phonation

Call for Proposals - SLT 2016

GEORGE SAON, ISRAEL COHEN, JASHA DROPPO, JASON WILLIAMS, AND RAUL FERNANDEZ

Following on the tremendous success of SLT 2014, the SPS-SLTC invites proposals to host the 2016 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT-2016). Past SLT workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact and learn.