foNETiks
A network newsletter
for the International Phonetic Association
and for the Phonetic Sciences
May 2001
*********************************************
Editors:
Linda Shockey, University of Reading, UK
<[log in to unmask]>
Gerry Docherty, University of Newcastle, UK
<[log in to unmask]>
Paul Foulkes, University of York, UK
<[log in to unmask]>
Lisa Lim, National University of Singapore
<[log in to unmask]>
E-mail address:
[log in to unmask]
The foNETiks archive can be found on the WWW at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists-f-j/fonetiks/
Visit the IPA web page at:
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html
************************************
ANNOUNCEMENTS
(New ones marked **)
(date of first appearance follows)
************************************
18 - 20 May 2001. TAPS 2001: Workshop on Typology of African
Prosodic Systems, University of Bielefeld, Germany (01/01)
30 May - 1 June 2001. 3rd INTERNATIONAL PHONOLOGY
MEETING OF THE GDR 195=4. Nantes, France.
[log in to unmask] (03/01)
4 - 8 June 2001. 141st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of
America. Chicago, Illinois.
http://asa.aip.org/meetings.html; [log in to unmask]
(12/00)
3 - 16 June 2001. 4th International Speech Motor Conference.
Nijmegen, Netherlands. http://www.nici.kun.nl/speechmotconf/
(09/00)
18 - 22 June 2001. ORAGE 2001: ORAlity and GEstuality. Aix-en-
Provence, France. [log in to unmask];
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~gevoix/ORAGE2001 (08/00)
18 - 22 June 2001. 2001, A Speaker Odyssey - The Speaker
Recognition Workshop. An ISCA Tutorial and Research
Workshop. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
http://www.odyssey.westhost.com/ (08/00)
21 - 23 June 2001. TENNET XII. Montreal, Canada.
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/tennet
30 June - 2 July, 2001, 'Forensic Linguistics Ten years On - What
Future?' University of Malta.
http://home.um.edu.mt/litru/IAFL%20main.htm/ (2/01)
5 - 6 July 2001. Prosody in Processing (PiP). The Utrecht Institute
of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University.
http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/conferences/pip/ (12/00)
6 - 7 July 2001. Fifth Computational Natural Language Learning
Workshop. Toulouse, France.
http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2001/ (03/01)
9 - 11 July, 2001, The Neurological Basis of Language, Gronigen.
http://www.let.rug.nl/nbl/ [log in to unmask] (2/01)
** 16 - 27 July, 2001. 9th ELSNET European Summer School on
Language and Speech Communication. TEXT AND SPEECH
CORPORA. Prague, Czech Republic.
http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001/ (05/01)
19 - 21 July 2001. 3rd UK Language Variation Conference.
University of York, UK. (11/00, 2/01)
30 July - 1 August 2001. EUROLAN'01 WORKSHOP ON MULTI-
LAYER CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS. Iasi, Romania.
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/Eurolan01-ws.html (03/01)
12 - 16 August 2001. 5th International Congress of Voice Teachers
(ICVT): Voice and Identity - Singing the Music of the World.
Helsinki, Finland.
http://www.siba.fi/5ICVT/ (12/00)
23 - 26 August 2001. PEVOC IV: 4th Pan European Voice
Conference. Stockholm, Sweden.
http://www.speech.kth.se/voice/pevoc4/ (12/00)
29 - 30 August 2001. Adaptation methods in Automatic Speech
Recognition. An ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop. Sophia
Antipolis, France. http://www.eurecom.fr/ITRW/ (12/00)
29 - 31 August 2001. DiSS'01: Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech.
An ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop. University of
Edinburgh, Scotland.
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/DISS-01/ (12/00)
3 - 7 September 2001. EUROSPEECH2001 - 7th European
Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. Aalborg,
Denmark.
http://eurospeech2001.org (04/00)
10 - 13 September, 2001, TSD 2001, International Conference on
Text, Speech, Dialogue, Zelezna Ruda, Czech Republic.
http://www-kiv.zcu.cz/events/tsd2001 (2/01)
13 - 15 September 2001. 2nd International Workshop on Models
and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications.
Firenze, Italy.
http://www.die.unifi.it/Conferences/maveba2001/home.htm
(12/00)
3 - 5 October 2001. 2001 International Workshop on Multimedia
Signal Processing. Cannes, France.
http://mmsp01.eurecom.fr/ (08/00)
** 6 - 8 October 2001. Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition
Carry-le-Rouet (Marseilles), France.
http://www.lscp.net/persons/peperkamp/workshop.html (05/01)
7 - 10 October 2001. XXVII Deutscher Romanistentag, Muenchen.
[log in to unmask] (10/00)
11 - 14 October 2001. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 30.
Raleigh, North Carolina.
http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/nwav
Email: [log in to unmask] (03/01)
3 - 7 December 2001. 142nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of
America. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
http://asa.aip.org/meetings.html;
[log in to unmask] (12/00)
**11 - 13 December, 2001. IRCS WORKSHOP ON LINGUISTIC
DATABASES University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, USA.
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/ (05/01)
3 - 7 June 2002. 143rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of
America. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
http://asa.aip.org/meetings.html;
[log in to unmask] (12/00)
2 - 6 December 2002. Joint Meeting: 144nd Meeting of the
Acoustica Society of America, 3rd Iberoamerican Congress of
Acoustics and 9th Mexican Congress on Acoustics. Cancun,
Mexico.
http://asa.aip.org/cancun.html (12/00)
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CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS & MEETINGS
***********************************
9th ELSNET EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL ON LANGUAGE
AND SPEECH COMMUNICATION
TEXT AND SPEECH CORPORA
Prague, Czech Republic, 16-27 July 2001
Homepage: http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001/
Organized by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics and
Center for Computational Linguistics at Charles University in Prague
PROGRAMME
============
* Steven Bird (UPENN)- Annotation graphs in theory and practice
* Lou Burnard (Oxford) - Text encoding initiative
* Henk van den Heuvel & Eric Sanders (Nijmegen) - Validation of
speech databases * Amy Isard (Edinburgh) & Ole Bernsen
(Odense) - Dialogue corpora (MATE) + practical * Jan Odijk
(Lernout & Hauspie) - Speech resources & industrial applications *
Uli Türk (Munich) - Speech tools for database processing *
Chalapathy Neti (IBM) - Multimodal resources (including speech
etc.) + practical * Geoffrey Sampson (Sussex) - Annotation at the
grammatical level * Esther Grabe (Oxford) - Prosodic
annotation - IVIE extensions to ToBI + practical * Jan Hajic
(Prague) - Linguistic annotation of a large corpus: from morphology
to syntax
The ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech
Communication is one of the most successful annual training
courses in Europe. For the year 2001 the topic of Text and Speech
Corpora has been selected. The school provides courses on the
collection of data (text, speech, dialogue, multimodal), validation,
annotation, and use. State of the art techniques and tools (hands-
on experience included) will be presented by eminent teachers.
The target audience of the Summer School are advanced
undergraduate students, PhD students, postdocs and academic
and industrial researchers and developers.
GRANTS will be available from the EU Improving Human Potential
programme and will cover a substantial part of total costs for young
European researchers. Check the summer school homepage for
the application details. The ISCA grant scheme is open for
applications related to this summer school as well.
IMPORTANT DATES
================
Deadline for pre-registration & grant application: April 15, 2001
Notification of registration and grants: May 1, 2001
Payment deadline: June 1, 2001
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
======================
Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, DE)
Christoph Draxler (Munich University, DE)
Gerrit Bloothooft (Utrecht University, NL)
Koenraad de Smedt (University of Bergen, NO)
Eva Hajicova (Charles University, Prague, CZ, local organiser)
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
==============================
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistic (UFAL)
Charles University
118 00 Praha 1, Malostranske nam. 25, Czech Republic
Phone: +420 - 2 - 2191 4278 Fax: +420 - 2 - 2191 4309
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Homepage: http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~ess2001
-------------------------------------------------
IRCS WORKSHOP ON LINGUISTIC DATABASES
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, USA
11-13 December 2001
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation
and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
Organized by:
Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman
Department of Computer and Information Science,
Department of Linguistics, and the Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania
Linguistic databases are digital repositories of structured
information intended to document natural language and natural
communicative interaction. Over the last decade, linguistic
databases have come to stand at the center of empirical research
in the language sciences, and in the development of new human
language technologies. Like genomic databases, linguistic
databases are complex, evolving and richly annotated repositories,
and pose interesting challenges for efficient representation,
indexing and query. And like most scientific databases, linguistic
databases have made little use of standard database technology.
The goals of the workshop are to take stock of existing research in
linguistic databases, to identify the key problems, and to explore
applications of current database research to these problems. More
broadly, the workshop will help define the research questions of a
new "linguistic database community" and initiate the ongoing
interchange of relevant problems and results between this
community and the database community at large.
The workshop will address a selection of the following topics:
MODELS:
* models for text databases, speech databases, multimodal
databases, typological databases, geographical databases
(language maps), and metadata repositories
* relational, object-oriented and semi-structured models for
representing linguistic annotations
* representations for specific linguistic datatypes (e.g. databases of
aligned parallel text)
* modelling temporal and (geo)spatial structure
* critical analysis of existing linguistic databases
LANGUAGES:
* query of multilayer annotations
* linguistic applications/extensions of XML query languages
* analysis of existing ad hoc query languages
* queries over temporal and (geo)spatial structure
OTHER TOPICS:
* database support (e.g. what standard database technology has
proven worthwhile for linguistic databases?)
* appropriate indexing methods for linguistic strings and structures
* archiving and preservation
* metadata standards serving as finding aids for linguistic
databases
* data provenance / data lineage
* annotation servers
Provisional Timetable
Call for papers: posted in May
Extended abstracts: due in August
Final papers: due in November
Website and Mailing List
Subsequent announcements will be posted to this list, and on the
workshop
website: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/
Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition
October 6-8, 2001
Carry-le-Rouet (Marseilles), France
Invited speakers:
Michael Brent, Washington University
Emmanuel Dupoux, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
Psycholinguistique
Mark Hale, Concordia University
Bruce Hayes, UCLA
Peter Jusczyk, Johns Hopkins University
John Kingston, University of Massachusetts
Jim Morgan, Brown University
Marina Nespor, University of Ferrara
Joe Pater, University of Massachusetts
Janet Pierrehumbert, Northwestern University
Douglas Pulleyblank, University of British Columbia
Jim Scobbie, Queen Margaret University College
Dan Swingley, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Bruce Tesar, Rutgers University
Call for Posters
Phonological acquisition has been a research topic in both
theoretical linguistics and experimental psychology. Much
progress has been made on either side, and researchers from
these disciplines can undoubtedly benefit from each other's
findings.
On the one hand, phonologists typically gather early production
data to describe the various stages in the acquisition process.
They have provided much evidence that children's productions
evolve from universally unmarked structures to the marked
structures present in their ambient language. However,
experimental research with infants shows that phonological
acquisition begins right after birth and develops considerably during
the first year of life, i.e. before the first words are uttered. Although
the development in production resembles the one in perception in
certain respects, there are also many divergences. A valid theory of
phonological acquisition should contain a description of the initial
state and hence take into consideration the earliest perception
data.
Phonologists have also proposed models of how phonological
systems might be acquired by young children. These models
contain concrete algorithms by which children could derive parts of
the phonological grammar of their language, but they are based
upon the assumption that children have access to individual word
forms, often coupled with their meaning. This latter assumption is
highly unrealistic for the same reason that much of the native
phonology appears to be acquired before word segmentation is in
place and before lexical acquisition has started altogether.
Experimental psychologists, on the other hand, have gathered data
concerning the perceptual capacities of infants from birth to 18
months of life. They have thus provided evidence that during this
period, infants build a phonological representation of their ambient
language, and, consequently, come to perceive speech sounds in
a language-specific fashion, much the same way as adults do.
However, these data pertain to a relatively small number of
languages, and hence to only a small amount of variation that is
attested in the phonological systems of human language.
Moreover, although experimental psychologists have started to
propose models concerning the acquisition of basic phonological
parameters such as the segmental inventory and surface syllable
structure, they typically are not concerned with the acquisition of
phonological rules.
Besides phonology and experimental psychology, phonetics and
diachrony are equally relevant to the study of early phonological
acquisition. As to phonetics, it is often assumed that infants build
a phonological representation of their native language by passing
through a stage of a universal phonetic representation. It is thus
important to carry out detailed phonetic analyses of the incoming
speech signal. As to diachrony, under the common assumption
that language change is induced by children acquiring their native
language, diachronic data may provide insight into the acquisition
process.
Abstracts are being solicited for POSTER presentations.
Please send 2 copies of an anonymous 2-page abstract plus one
copy with your name, affiliation, and e-mail address to:
Sharon Peperkamp
Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
EHESS - CNRS
54, Bd. Raspail
75270 Paris cedex 7
France
or to:
[log in to unmask]
For electronic submissions, please attach the abstract in Rich Text
Format or as a PDF file to your e-mail.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS: July 1st
Notification of acceptance: July 25
For questions concerning the workshop, please visit the web site:
http://www.lscp.net/persons/peperkamp/workshop.html
or contact Sharon Peperkamp at [log in to unmask]
******************
POSITIONS VACANT
******************
Morphology/Speech Production: Research Associate/ Leipzig,
Germany
The Department of Linguistics of the University of Leipzig is
expecting an opening for a
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
(half time)
starting summer 2001. The associate will work with Dr
Janssen and Prof Pechmann on a project concerning the role
of morphology in speech production. The successful
candidate should
- be a (near)native speaker of German, with good English skills
- have experience or affinity with experimental research
- have some experience with statistical software and computer
programming
- have completed a university degree (but not a PhD)
- be able to work independently and to supervise student
assistants
Duties include: Designing experiments from theoretical
questions, creating materials for experiments, running
subjects and helping student assistants run subjects,
data analysis, examining and scoring (sound)data.
The research associate will work in a active group of
psycholinguistic researchers here at the university and at
the Graduiertenkolleg (PhD school). Next to that, we have
many contacts with other departments, and with two of the
local Max Planck Institutes (Cognitive Neuroscience and
Evolutionary Anthropology).
Funding will be provided by the German Science Foundation
DFG, in the framework of the 'Schwerpunktprogramm
Sprachproduktion'. The position is half-time, is open for
two years, and will be paid according to BAT IIa/Ost halbe.
More information can be obtained by writing to Dirk Janssen,
Institut für Linguistik, Brühl 34-50, 04109 Leipzig,
+49.341.9737863, or [log in to unmask]
A PDF version of this text can be found at
www.uni-leipzig.de/~gksprach/homepages/dirkj/english-ad.pdf
--------------------------------------------------
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
From January 1, 2002, the Department of Linguistics at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU,
Trondheim) offers a vacant position in phonetics for applicants with
specialisations in
acoustic phonetics/digital signal processing
and/or
physiological phonetics
The vacancy is an associate professorship, but the selected
candidate meeting the requirements for a professorship will be
appointed professor. Though knowledge of Norwegian is not strictly
required, native competence in Norwegian or one of the other
Scandinavian languages is considered highly desirable. The
deadline for applications is May 25, 2001. The full text of the
announcement (in Norwegian) can be found at
http://innsida.ntnu.no/nettopp_lesmer.php?kategori=nyheter&dokid=
3ae5 bb80481 1a3.99157757
For further information, contact
Wim van Dommelen
Department of Linguistics
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
N-7491 Trondheim
Norway
email: [log in to unmask]
tel: +47 73 596527
fax: +47 73 596119
******************
STUDENTSHIPS
******************
EPSRC Studentship: Speech and Language Processing
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL
Applications are invited for an EPSRC funded research studentship
leading to a Ph. D. to commence in October 2001. This award
would be held full-time over 3 years. The research studentship can
be held in any area of speech or language processing that falls
within the general remit of EPSRC funding and is related to our
current research activities. These include: Models of computational
phonology in speech synthesis Modelling the use of lexical,
syntactic, and semantic knowledge in speech recognition Phonetic
perception in bilinguals and L2 learners Speech processing for
cochlear implants Phonetic perception and word recognition by
cochlear implant users Individual differences in speech perception
Auditory-visual speech perception, including the use of facial
animation
Applicants should have a class I or II:1 Honours degree in a
relevant subject area. A Masters degree or relevant research
experience would be an advantage.
One full studentship including a maintenance award of GBP9,000
pa (increasing annually) is available to applicants with 3 years
qualifying residence in the UK (excluding full-time education).
Tuition fee only studentships without a maintenance allowance
would be available to EU and EEA residents.
Candidates may also wish to consult our Departmental Web site
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/, and reports of Work in Progress
at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/shl)
Applications should include a CV, an outline of your relevant
training and experience, and a brief statement of the research
areas that interest you, plus the names and addresses of two
academic referees. Closing date for applications will be June 1
2001.
***************************
NEW MAILING LIST
****************************
Dear colleagues,
As those of you who attended the ATLAS conference in Tunis back
in 1999 may recall, ELSNET offered to set up an electronic
mailing list, to host a special interest group, and to look
into the possibility of organising events dedicated to Arabic
language and speech processing (in a very broad sense, e.g.
including other semitic languages such as Maltese).
Due to competing priorities in our work programme, we had to
postpone this a little bit, but I am now happy to announce that
the mailing list has been set up. The email address is
[log in to unmask]
If you are interested, visit our subscriptions page
http://www.elsnet.org/subscriptions.html
and subscribe to the list.
At this moment I would suggest that the subscribers of the list
together constitute ELSNET's Special Interest Group in Arabic
Language and Speech Processing. Although our home base is
European, participation is open to everybody with an interest in
this topic.
This SIG will operate under the auspices of ELSNET, and you
should all feel invited to contribute to the activities of the
group. If there is enough interest and activity, we will create a
special compartment for this group on the ELSNET website to
collect and disseminate information in a more permanent form.
Best regards,
Steven Krauwer
ELSNET coordinator, UiL-OTS, Trans 10, 3512JK Utrecht, NL
phone: +31 30 253 6039, fax: +31 30 253 6000, email:
[log in to unmask]
http://www.elsnet.org
*******************************************
Material for the June 2001 issue of foNETiks should reach us
by 30 May 2001
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