December, 2005

INTRODUCTION:

Welcome to the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech Technical Committee (STC) newsletter.  Contributions of events, publications, workshops, and career information to the newsletter are welcome.  Please send to the new STC Newsletter Editor Mike Seltzer (mseltzer_@_microsoft_com) or Rick Rose (rose_@_ece_mcgill_ca).   Archives of recent STC Newsletters can be found on the STC website. 

LINKS TO WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES:
Links to conferences and workshops organized by date  (Rick Rose)

ICASSP2006 Paper Review Process

Speech and Language Technical Committee received a record high of 668 papers for ICASSP 2006 not including the special session papers. This is a historical record high in the speech and language area for this conference, and amounts to over 18% increase from last year. The majority of this increase is attributed to more papers on Robustness, Speech Recognition and Synthesis, and Language Processing. Nearly all papers received three reviews from experts in this community. The review committee involved 10 Area Chairs, 48 Technical Committee members and 180 external reviewers. A list of the reviewers can be found below. We would like to thank all those who made contribution to the review process in the tight schedule.

• List of Area Chairs
• List of STC Team Members
• List of All Reviewers

The accept rate for this year is about 46% which is less than the 50% we had last year. We will be having 13 lecture sessions and 21 poster sessions, in addition to 3 special sessions and 3 other tutorials in the areas of speech and language processing. See the ICASSP 2006 website for more details, and the notification of individual paper acceptance will be delivered on January 9th.
We are look forward to seeing you in Toulouse!
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Call for Papers

Special Issue of
The IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing
Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio

Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio is an interdisciplinary research area to build computational models that aim to achieve human performance in quality estimation of speech and audio. The estimation of quality is becoming more important especially in telecommunication applications, where Quality of Service is one of the key considerations.

The goal of this special issue is to present recent progress and advances in this area as well as remaining challenges. We invite original, previously unpublished research works in all areas relevant to the field. In particular, paper submissions are encouraged on the following topics:

• Subjective basis for objective quality assessment
• Waveform models - based on waveforms of speech and audio
• Parametric models - based on telecommunication or broadcast network parameters
• Intrusive models
• Non-intrusive (single-ended or output-based) models
• Objective diagnosis of quality impairment
• Objective and subjective assessment of conversational quality
• Issues and applications relevant to real-world problems

Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in any recent issue of the Transactions and as available on the web at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/sp/infotsa.html. Note that all rules will apply with regard to submission lengths, mandatory overlength page charges, and color charges.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at http://sps-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/. When selecting a manuscript type, authors must click on "Special Issue of T-SA on Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio." Authors should follow the instructions for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing and indicate in the Comments to the Editor-in-Chief that the manuscript is submitted for publication in the Special Issue on Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio. We require a completed copyright form to be signed and faxed to 1-732-562-8905 at the time of submission. Please indicate the manuscript number on the top of the page.

Schedule:

Submission deadline:	February 1, 2006
Notification of acceptance:	July 31, 2006
Final manuscript due:	September 30, 2006
Tentative publication date:	January 2007

Call for papers

ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech Recognition and Intrinsic Variation

May 20, 2006 - Toulouse (France)

Introduction

The goal of this workshop is to strengthen common understanding and research trends that deal with these topics. Original studies and algorithms related to ASR sensitivity, genericity, user-independence, robustness or adaptation to variations in speech should be covered. Besides, original contributions from the fields of phonetic science, as well as human speech perception and recognition are warmly encouraged. Finally, we also invite submission of papers about application and services scenarios involving specific speech variations.

Topics

• Speech variability, including foreign and/or regional accented speech modeling and recognition,
• Children and/or elderly speech modeling and recognition,
• Speech non-stationarity and relevant analysis methods,
• Speech spectral (e.g. vocal tract length) and temporal (e.g. speaking rate) variations,
• Spontaneous speech modeling and recognition,
• Speech variation due to emotions, fatigue, frustration,...
• Speech corpora covering sources of variation,
• Modeling of speech variability,
• Acoustic-phonetic correlates of variations,
• Impact and characterization of speech variations on ASR analysis, models and performance,
• Speaker adaptation and normalization (e.g., VTLN); Speaker adapted training methods,
• Novel general or specific compensation and adaptation algorithms,
• Novel analysis and modeling structures and algorithms for handling speech variations,
• Alternative Statistical and Machine Learning Methods for General ASR (e.g., no-HMM methods),
• Man/machine confrontation; ASR and HSR (human speech recognition) interdisciplinary views,
• Experiments making use of the OLLO speech corpus (http://www.divines-project.org/),
• Intrinsic variations in multimodal recognition,
• Review papers on these topics are also welcome.

Submission

The proceedings will be available via the workshop web site.

Structure

Venue

Important Dates

Commitee

HLT-NAACL 2006 continues the combination of the Human Language Technology Conferences (HLT) and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Meetings begun in 2003. Human language technology incorporates a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling computers to interact with humans using natural language, and providing services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction.

HLT-NAACL 2006 will run from Sunday June 4 through Friday June 9. The schedule will include full papers, late-breaking (short) papers, demonstrations, as well as pre- and post-conference tutorials and workshops. The conference organization is overseen by a board representing the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), HLT funding agencies in North America, as well as the SIGIR and ISCA communities.

Topics of Interest

The conference invites the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of human language processing, with special interest in synergistic combinations of language technologies (e.g., Speech with Information Retrieval, Machine Translation with Speech, Question Answering with Natural Language Processing, etc.). Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Speech processing, including:
  
  • Speech recognition and speech generation
  • Rich transcription: automatic annotation of information structure and sources in speech
• Information extraction, text summarization, and question answering
• Information retrieval
• Computational analysis of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, style
• Statistical and learning techniques for language processing, including
  • Corpus-based language modeling
  • Lexical and knowledge acquisition
• Language generation and text planning
• Multilingual processing, including
  • Machine translation of speech and text
  • Cross-language information retrieval
  • Multi-lingual speech recognition and language identification
• Multimodal representations and processing
• Evaluation, including
  • Glass-box evaluation of HLT systems and system components
  • Black-box evaluation of HLT systems in application settings
• Development of language resources, including
  • Lexicons and ontologies
  • Treebanks, proposition banks, and frame banks
• Understanding of human communication, including
  • Natural language interfaces
  • Dialogue structure and dialogue systems
  • Message and narrative understanding system
  
  

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SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Full Papers

Requirements: Submissions must describe original, completed, unpublished work, and include concrete evaluation results when appropriate. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees. As reviewing will be blind, no information identifying the authors should be in the paper: this includes not only the authors' names and affiliations, but also self-references that reveal authors' identities; for example, "We have previously shown (Smith 1999)" should be changed to "Smith (1999) has previously shown". Separate identification information is required, and will be part of the web submission process.

Format: Submissions must be electronic in PDF, should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available on the conference website.

Reviewing: The reviewing of the papers will be blind. Reviewing will be managed by a Conference Program Committee consisting of senior Program Committee Members and associated Program Committee Members. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.

Submission procedure: A PDF file of the paper must be uploaded onto the system by 11:59pm EST of the deadline. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program co-chairs
(, , or ) before the due date to work out alternate arrangements.

Late-Breaking (Short) Papers

The procedure for Short Papers submissions is identical to that of the Full Papers, with the following differences:

1. They may be accepted for oral presentation in plenary OR for presentation in a poster session;
2. The deadlines are later for short papers and posters than for full papers;
3. Short papers are restricted to four (4) pages in length, using the two-column ACL format;
4. Only two reviews per submission are guaranteed.

General Conference Chair: Robert Moore (Microsoft Research)
Program Co-Chairs:
Jeff Bilmes (University of Washington)
Jennifer Chu-Carroll (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Mark Sanderson (Sheffield University)
Senior Program Committee Members:
Johan Bos (University of Edinburgh)	Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan)
Jamie Callan (CMU)	Owen Rambow (Columbia University)
Joyce Chai (Michigan State University)	Steve Renals (University of Edinburgh)
Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University)	Stefan Riezler (PARC)
Mark Gales (University of Cambridge)	Amanda Stent (SUNY Stony Brook)
Fred Gey (Berkeley)	Rohini Srihari (SUNY Buffalo)
Roxana Girju (UIUC)	Michael Strube (EML Research)
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (UIUC)	Christoph Tillmann (IBM Watson)
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University)	Peter Turney (National Research Council Canada)
Alon Lavie (CMU)	Ellen Voorhees (NIST)
Wei Ying Ma (Microsoft Beijing)	Ralph Weischedel (BBN)
Mehryar Mohri (NYU)	Fei Xia (University of Washington)
Marius Pasca (Google)	ChengXiang Zhai (UIUC)
Gerald Penn (University of Toronto)	Ming Zhou (Microsoft Beijing)
Local Arrangements Chair: Satoshi Sekine (New York University)

Important Dates

All submissions or camera-ready copies are due by 11:59pm EST on the date specified above.

Conference Venue

Third IASTED International Conference on
Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Applications
~SPPRA 2006~

February 15– 17, 2006
Innsbruck, Austria

PURPOSE
This conference is an international forum for researchers and practitioners interested in the advances in, and applications of, signal processing and pattern recognition. It is an opportunity to present and observe the latest research, results, and ideas in these areas. All papers submitted to this conference will be peer reviewed by at least two members of the International Program Committee. Acceptance will be based primarily on originality and contribution.

SPPRA 2006 will be held in conjunction with the IASTED International Conference on:
Biomedical Engineering (BioMED 2006)

LOCATION
Innsbruck is nestled in the valley of the Inn River and tucked between the Austrian Alps and the Tuxer mountain range. It has twice hosted the Winter Olympics and is surrounded by the eight ski regions of the Olympic Ski World, including the Stubai Glacier, which offers skiing year round. Climbing the 14th century Stadtturm on Herzog Friedrich Strasse provides a stunning view of the town and the breathtaking scenery that surrounds it. Concerts at Ambras Castle provide listening pleasure in a beautiful renaissance setting. The sturdy medieval houses and sidewalk cafés of Old Town Innsbruck beckon you to sit for a while and watch people stroll by.

Innsbruck, with its unique blend of historical, intellectual, and recreational pursuits, offers something for every visitor. SPPRA 2006 will be held at the world-famous Congress Innsbruck, located in the heart of the city, near the historical quarter. This facility won the prestigious 'Best Conference Center in Europe Award’ in 2000.

SPONSORS

The International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED)
Technical Committee on Signal Processing
Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition

To find out more about the conference and the International Program Committee visit the website at:
http://www.iasted.org/conferences/2006/Innsbruck/sppra.htm?spp

SCOPE
Topics will include, but are not limited to:

For more information, please contact:
IASTED
#80 4500 - 16th Avenue N.W.
Calgary, Alberta
Canada T3B 0M6
Tel: 403-288-1195
Fax: 403-247-6851
E-mail: calgary@iasted.org
Website: http://www.iasted.org
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5th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

In the Information Society, the pervasive character of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and their relevance to practically all fields of Information Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised. Two issues are considered particularly relevant : the availability of Language Resources (LRs) and the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies, products and applications. Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues through international cooperation.

The term language resources refers to sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, such as written or spoken corpora and lexica, annotated or not, multimodal resources, grammars, terminology or domain specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic software tools for their acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use. LRs are used in many types of components/systems/applications, such as software localisation and language services, language enabled information and communication services, knowledge management, e-commerce, e-publishing, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, linguistic studies, etc. This large range of usages makes the LRs infrastructure a strategic part of the e-society, where the creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages must be ensured in order to bring all languages to the same level of usability and availability. The relevance of the evaluation for language technologies development is increasingly recognised. This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for a given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a programme, comparing different approaches to a given problem, assessing the availability of technologies for a given application, product benchmarking, and assessing system usability and user satisfaction.

The aim of the LREC conference is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones. LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation in the areas mentioned above, in support to investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications.

ASR Researchers Take New Positions

• In August of 2005, Giusseppi Riccardi left AT&T Labs - Research and joined the Engineering Faculty of University of Trento Italy with appointmentto the Department of Information and Communications (www.dit.unitn.it). He will be heading the speech and language laboratory. 

  Department of Information and Communication Technology
  University of Trento
  Room D11, via Sommarive 14
  38050 Povo di Trento, Italy
  tel : +39-0461 882087
  email: riccardi AT dit.unitn.it

Links to Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

IEEE ASRU2005 Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop
Cancun, Mexico, November 27 - December 1, 2005
http://www.asru2005.org

ICASSP2006
Toulouse, France May 15-19, 2006
http://www.icassp2006.org

Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Recognition and Intrinsic Variation
Toulouse, France May 20, 2006
http://www.divines-project.org/workshop/call.html

INTERSPEECH 2006 - ICSLP  
Pittsburgh, PA, USA September 17-21, 2006
http://www.interspeech2006.org/

MMSP-2006
Victoria, BC Canada  October 3-6, 2006
http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/MMSP06

IEEE/ACL Workshop on SLT
Aruba, Deccember 10-13, 2006
http://www.slt2006.org/CallForPapers.asp

ICASSP2007
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2007, April 17-20

INTERSPEECH 2007
Antwerp, Belgium, August 27-31, 2007
http://www.interspeech2007.org/