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Call for papers:

Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

ACM SIGIR 2007 Workshop - 27 July 2007

http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/sscs
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Background

Nearly a decade ago, we learned from the TREC Spoken Document Retrieval
(SDR) track that searching speech was a "solved problem." Three factors 
were key to this success: (1) broadcast news has a "story" structure that
resembled written documents, (2) the redundancy present in human language
meant that search effectiveness held up well over a reasonable range of
transcription accuracy, and (3) sufficiently accurate Large-Vocabulary
Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems could be built for the 
planned speech of news announcers.

The long-term trend in speech recognition research has been toward
transcription of progressively more challenging sources. Over the last few
years, LVCSR for spontaneous conversational speech has improved to a degree
where transcription accuracy comparable to what was previously found to be
effective for broadcast news can now be achieved for a diverse range of
sources. This has inspired a renaissance in research on search and browse
technology for spoken word collections in communities focused on: (1)
archived cultural heritage materials (e.g., interviews and parliamentary
debates), (2) discussion venues (e.g., business meetings and classroom
instruction), and (3) broadcast conversations (e.g., in-studio talk shows
and call-in programs). Test collections are being developed in individual
projects around the world, and some comparative evaluation activity for
speech search technology has developed over this period. The time seems now
right to look more broadly across these research communities for potential
synergies that can help to shape the information retrieval research agenda
of each of these communities by sharing ideas and resources.

Context

This workshop is part of ACM SIGIR 2007, 23-27 July, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands (http://www.sigir2007.org/).

Workshop Organization

Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Douglas Oard, University of Maryland, USA
Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Stephan Raaijmakers, TNO ICT, The Netherlands

Format

We plan to organize the workshop as a mix of oral presentations, panel
discussions and a poster session. Workshop Proceedings will be available at
the workshop. Possibilities for a special journal issue with a selection of
workshop contributions are under negotiation.

Workshop Topics

We welcome contributions on a range of cross-cutting issues, including:

* Segmentation (e.g., speaker turns, topic shifts)
* Content characterization (e.g., LVCSR, word lattice search, spoken term
  detection on phone lattice)
* Classification (e.g., speaker, topic, decision, non-speech acoustic event)
* Exploiting multimodality (integrating features from associated non-speech
  content)
* Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, expansion)
* Interaction design (e.g., query formulation, result presentation, search
  strategies)
* Evaluation (content sources, measures, test collection design, user study
  design)
* Broader issues (applications, intellectual property, privacy)

Submission Types

Two types of submissions are invited: research papers for oral or poster
presentation, and position papers for the selection of discussants and
panelists.

Submission Guidelines

Information on how to submit can be found in the submission guidelines
(http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/sscs/submissions).

Important Dates

Call for papers:         April 18, 2007
Papers due:              May 21, 2007
Acceptance notification: June 13, 2007
Final versions due:      July 1, 2007

Program Committee

Samy Bengio (Google)
Laurence Devillers (LIMSI)
Sadaoki Furui (TITECH)
Marcello Federico (FBK-IRST)
Jon Fiscus (NIST)
John Garofolo (NIST)
Sam Gustman (USC)
Thomas Hain (Sheffield)
John Hansen (UT Dallas)
Alex Hauptmann (CMU)
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia)
Diana Inkpen (Ottawa)
Gareth Jones (DCU)
David van Leeuwen (TNO)
Lori Lamel (LIMSI)
Christian Mueller (ICSI)
Steve Renals (Edinburgh)
Salim Roukos (IBM Research)
Liz Shriberg (SRI and ICSI)