foNETiks
a Network Newsletter
for the International Phonetic Association
and for the Phonetic Sciences
August 1999
Editors:
Linda Shockey, University of Reading, U.K.
Gerry Docherty, Newcastle University, U.K.
Paul Foulkes, Leeds University, U.K.
Lisa Lim, National University of Singapore
E-mail address:
[log in to unmask]
The foNETiks archive can be found on the WWW at:
http://www.mailbase.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)
*****************************************
1 - 7 August 1999. ICPhS99: XIVth International Congress of Phonetic
Sciences. San Francisco, USA. http://trill.berkeley.edu/ICPhS
(11/97)
7 - 9 August 1999. AVSP '99: 4th Annual Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
Conference. University of California at Santa Cruz. Satellite
event of ICPhS99. More information: http://mambo.ucsc.edu/avsp99;
email: [log in to unmask] (04/99)
18 - 20 August 1999. International Conference on Speech Processing, Seoul,
Korea. http://assp.soongsil.ac.kr/icsp99.html (05/99)
** 22 - 25 August 1999. ISSPA99: Fifth International Symposium on Signal
Processing and its Applications. Brisbane, Australia.
http://www.sprc.qut.edu.au/isspa99/ (08/99)
** 23 - 25 August 1999. TMI-99: 8th International Conference on
Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation.
Chester, UK. e-mail: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask];
http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/tmi99/ (08/99)
1 - 3 September 1999. ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Dialogue and
Prosody. Eindhoven, The Netherlands. (Satellite event of
Eurospeech'99) http://www.tue.nl/ipo/sli/etrw.html (11/98)
5 - 10 September 1999. Eurospeech'99. 6th European Conference on Speech
Communication and Technology. Budapest, Hungary.
[log in to unmask]; http://tel.ttt.bme.hu/Eurospeech99 (12/98)
10 - 12 September 1999. Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition
(GALA) 1999. Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam,
Germany http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/gala99/ (07/99)
13 - 14 September 1999. ESCA-NATO Tutorial and Research Workshop on MIST:
Multi-lingual Interoperability in Speech Technology. Satellite event
of Eurospeech'99. Leusden, The Netherlands.
http://lands.let.kun.nl/mist (12/98)
13 - 17 September 1999. Workshop on Text, Speech, Dialogue. Plzen, Czech
Republic. email: [log in to unmask];
http://www-kiv.zcu.cz/events/tsd99/ (02/99)
** 13 - 17 September 1999. Machine Translation Summit VII: "MT in the
Great Translation Era". Kent Ridge Digital Labs, National
University of Singapore. E-mail: [log in to unmask]
(Japan); [log in to unmask] (Singapore);
http://www.krdl.org.sg/mts99/ (08/99)
** 14 - 17 September 1999. CFP AI*IA99: Sixth Congress of the Italian
Association for Artificial Intelligence. Bologna, Italy. Further
info: Email: [log in to unmask]; URL:
http://www.deis.unibo.it/Events/AIIA99 (08/99)
** 14 - 19 September 1999. ICHoLS VIII: 8th International Conference on
History of Language Sciences. Ecole Normale Superieure de
Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, Fontenay Aux Roses, France.
http://www.ens-fcl.fr/neuf/colloques/ichols.htm (08/99)
15 - 18 September 1999. EUROCALL'99 (European Association for
Computer-Assisted Language Learning): Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) in varied language learning
environments. Universit de Franche-Comt, Besanon, France.
http://eurocall99.univ-fcomte.fr
http://lib.univ-fcomte.fr/RECHERCHE/P7/EUROCALL/EUROCAL L.html (08/98)
15 September 1999. Speech Technology in Language Learning. Besancon,
France.
http://www.tay.ac.uk/div_lang/capital/Deuxieme_Seminaire_InSTIL.html
(06/99)
4 - 7 October 1999. SPECOM'99 International Workshop. Moscow Linguistic
University. email: [log in to unmask]; http://www.spiiras.nw.ru/speech
(01/99)
7 - 9 October 1999. Distinctive Feature Theory. Zentrum fur Allgemeine
Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin. [log in to unmask] (06/99)
8 - 9 October 1999. Recent Developments in Generative Metrics. University
of Toronto, Canada. (04/99) More info: [log in to unmask],
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
14 - 17 October 1999. NWAVE Conference. University of Toronto.
http://momiji.arts-dlll.yorku.ca/linguistics/NWAVE/NWAVE-28.html
(06/99)
** 15 - 17 October 1999. Fifth Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology
(McWOP99). Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
[log in to unmask] (08/99)
1 - 5 November 1999. 138th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
Columbus, Ohio. http://asa.aip.org/columbus/columbus.html (08/98)
5 - 7 November 1999. The 24th Annual Boston University Conference on
Language Development. Boston University.
http://web.bu.edu/LINGUISTICS/APPLIED/conference.html (03/99)
** 18 November 1999. University of Southern California Speech Production
Conference. [log in to unmask] (08/99)
** 12 - 15 December 1999. ASRU'99: 1999 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech
Recognition and Understanding. Keystone, Colorado.
http://asru99.research.att.com/asru99_index.shtml (06/99)
** 7 - 8 January 2000. 2000 Conference on Pidgin and Creole Languages.
Chicago. [log in to unmask] (08/99) (See below under Conferences
for more information.)
1 - 3 March 2000. The Word in Phonology. German Society of Linguistics,
Marburg, Germany. [log in to unmask] (06/99)
** April 2000. RIAO (Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur =
Computer-Assisted Information Retrieval) International Conference:
Content-Based Multimedia Information Access. Paris, France. Email:
[log in to unmask]; Web: http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO. (08/99) (See
below under Conferences for more information.)
** 3 - 6 April 2000. The Evolution of Language. Ecole Nationale Superieure
des Telecommunications, Paris, France.
http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/ (08/99) (See below
under Conferences for more information.)
** 1 - 4 May 2000. 5th Speech Production Seminar: Models and Data. Kloster
Seeon, Bavaria, Germany. Email: [log in to unmask];
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~sps5 (08/99) (See below under
Conferences for more information.)
** 29 - 31 May 2000. Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP). Jonkerbosch
Conference Centre. Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
http://www.mpi.nl/world/swap (08/99) (See below under Conferences
for more information.)
** 31 May - 2 June 2000. LREC2000: The 2nd International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation. Athens, Greece.
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html) (08/99) (See below
under Conferences for more information.)
29 June - 1 July 2000. LabPhon7. Max Planck Institute/University of
Nijmegen, The Netherlands. [log in to unmask];
http://www.let.kun.nl/labphon7/ (02/99)
** 29 June - 1 July 2000. ICLaVE 1 (Barcelona 2000): First International
Conference on Language Variation in Europe. Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. e-mail: [log in to unmask]
(08/99) (See below under Conferences for more information.)
16 - 19 August 2000. VIIIth meeting of the International Clinical
Phonetics and Linguistics Asociation. John MacIntyre Centre,
Edinburgh, Scotland. http://sls.qmced.ac.uk/ICPLA2000/index.htm
(07/99)
**************************
CONFERENCES
**************************
Reminder: Abstracts for the 2000 Conference on Pidgin and Creole Languages
(Jan 7-8, 200) to be held in Chicago in conjunction with the LSA Meeting
will be accepted until August 9, 1999. Abstracts on the phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, social aspects of language,
history of the discipline or any pertinent issue involving pidgin and
creole languages and other contact languages are invited for anonymous
review.
Send a single-spaced one-page version of the abstract, and a short
abstract form (to be published in the LSA Meeting Handbook) to:
Genevieve Escure
President of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
Department of English
207 Church Street, S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455, USA
Tel: 612 625 6095; Fax: 612 624 8228
[log in to unmask]
NOTE: Abstracts can be e-mailed or faxed to meet the deadline, but
please mail hard copies of both abstracts. short abstracts forms will
be mailed to you on request
**********
CALL FOR PAPERS [deadline: November 8, 1999]
=================================================
conference: T H E E V O L U T I O N O F L A N G U A G E
=================================================
Paris April 3-6, 2000
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications
Paris - France
http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/
ORGANISED BY: Professor Jean Aitchison (Oxford University), Dr. Jean-Louis
Dessalles (ENST Paris), Professor Jim Hurford (Department of Linguistics,
University of Edinburgh), Dr. Chris Knight (Department of Sociology,
University of East London), Professor Luc Steels (Sony CSL and Vrije
Universiteit Brussel).
LOCAL ORGANISATION: Jean-Louis Dessalles (ENST), Laleh Ghadakpour (CREA),
Frederic Kaplan (Sony CSL), Luc Steels (Sony CSL), Francois Yvon (ENST).
This will be the third conference in a series concerned with the
evolutionary emergence of speech. From a wide range of disciplines,
we seek to attract researchers willing to integrate their
perspectives with those of modern Darwinism.
The aim is to bring together linguists, computer scientists,
anthropologists, palaeontologists, ethologists, geneticists,
neuroscientists, and other scientists who are concerned with
the question of the origin and evolution of language.
CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS:
- -------------------------
Frans B. M. de Waal (Emory University), Bernd Heine (Universitat zu Koln),
Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis University), Paul A. Mellars (University of
Cambridge), Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (Georgia State University), Michael
Tomasello (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology).
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
- ------------------
Jean Aitchison (Worcester College), Robert C. Berwick (M.I.T.), Derek
Bickerton (Univ. Hawai), Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory), Rene Carre (ENST), Bernard Comrie (University of Southern
California), Jean-Louis Dessalles (ENST), Jean-Marie Hombert (MSH
Rhone-Alpes), James R. Hurford (University of Edinburgh), Michel Imbert
(Universite de Toulouse), Judy Kegl (University of Southern Maine), Simon
Kirby (University of Edinburgh), Chris Knight (University of East London),
Andre Langaney (Musee de l'Homme), Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of
Washington), Michael Studdert-Kennedy (Haskins Laboratories), Luc Steels
(Sony CSL & Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Bernard Victorri (Ecole Normale
Superieure, Paris).
Some of the issues that will be discussed are:
origin of language
----------------
. origin of phonetic abilities
. origin of syntax
. origin of symbolic representation semantic abilities
. evolutionary significance of language, compatibility with natural selection
. language and the origin of culture
. chronology of the spread of mankind, and its relationship to language
. the continuity/discontinuity of the language faculty with nonhuman
communication systems.
dynamics of language evolution
----------------------------
. evolution of phonetic systems
. evolution of the lexicon
. evolution of grammar structures
Submission Instructions
=======================
Prospective authors are invited to submit extended abstracts or short
papers (from 1 to 4 pages, max. 2000 words). Submitted papers will be
refereed and selected for oral presentation (25/30 min) on the basis of
quality and relevance to the Conference topics.
Accepted abstracts and papers will be included in the Conference
Proceedings and will be made accessible through the web. Copies of the
proceedings will be available at the Conference. Authors of accepted
contributions will be asked to submit full length papers for a volume to
be published after the Conference by an international publisher.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The deadline for submission is November 8th, 1999.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Authors are strongly encouraged to submit their papers electronically (MS
Word preferred, but most formats will be recognised).
Please email your submission to [log in to unmask] Don't forget to
include the submission form (see below) in your message.
If you are planning to submit a paper or abstract, or if you simply plan
to attend the Conference, please send a mail to
[log in to unmask]
You will be kept informed through e-mail of further useful information.
If you cannot send your submission through email, please send four copies
(and the submission form) to:
J-L Dessalles
ENST / Dep. InfRes
46 rue Barrault
F-75013 Paris - France
Submission Form
===============
[The first author should fill in the submission form and e-mail it to
[log in to unmask]]
Last NAME :
First Name :
Laboratory :
Organization/Affiliation :
Street Address :
City :
Postal code:
State/Province :
Country :
E-mail address for correspondence :
Fax :
Paper title :
Conference web site: http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/
Call for papers: http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/cfp.html
EMAIL: [log in to unmask]
**********
RIAO 2000
Content-Based Multimedia Information Access
Paris, France
April 2000
Preliminary Announcement
Organized by:
Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire
(C.I.D., France) & Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems,
Inc (C.A.S.I.S., USA)
With the collaboration of AII, ASIS, ELRA, Elsnet, ESCA, Francil (preliminary
list)
__________
Introduction
The RIAO (Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur =
Computer-Assisted Information Retrieval) International Conference is held
every 3 years. Sites for the conference have been Grenoble (1985), Boston
(1988), Barcelona (1991), New York (1994) and Montreal (1997). Paris will
host the next RIAO conference in Spring 2000. The conference is organized
by the Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire
(C.I.D.) and the Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems
(C.A.S.I.S.).
The theme of the conference is "Content-Based Multimedia Information
Access". The conference scope will range from the traditional processing
of text documents to the rapidly growing field of automatic indexing and
retrieval of images and speech and, more generally, to all processing of
audio-visual and multimedia information on various supports, including the
net. The conference is of interest for several scientific communities,
including Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Spoken
Language Processing, Computer Vision, Human-Computer Interaction and
Digital Libraries. RIAO 2000 will, thereby, serve as a forum for
synergetic initiatives and forward-looking applications.
The Scientific Committee will select the papers and the Application
Committee will select the innovative applications and products to be
presented at the conference. In order to support the multi-disciplinary
goals of the conference, these international committees include
representatives of different scientific communities.
RIAO 2000 will present recent scientific research advances, demonstrations
of prototypes resulting from this research as well as the most innovative
products now appearing on the market. A worldwide Call for Papers is
addressed to researchers engaged in academic or industrial research. The
associated Call for Applications is addressed to companies and public
organizations developing or marketing hardware or software related to the
conference topics.
RIAO 2000 Conference Topics:
Under the theme "Content-Based Multimedia Information Access", the following
topics are among those included for the Communications and for Innovative
Application Demonstrations:
Document processing:
Hypertextual and Hypermedia documents
Human-Computer Interaction for document handling
Textual and voice-based annotation creation and retrieval
Digital libraries
AI techniques for document generation and consultation
Multimodal and transmodal human-machine communication
Information Retrieval:
Information retrieval systems and methods
Document search over the internet
Text Mining
Information and document routing/profiling/alerting
Document classification
Spoken Language Processing:
Voice-based document segmentation and transcription
Voice-based document indexing and retrieval
Identification of language of speaker
Speaker recognition
Audio Mining
Non-verbal sound processing (music, noise...)
Natural Language Processing:
Information extraction
NLP techniques for document processing
Terminology extraction and analysis
Automatic thesaurus construction
Multilingual and crosslingual document handling
Machine translation of documents
Automatic summarization
Identification of language of text
Image processing:
Automatic indexing and retrieval of visual documents
Computer graphics for document generation and consultation
Segmentation and indexing of visual data
Face, gaze and expression recognition
Character recognition in visual documents
Image Mining
Video indexing and retrieval
System architecture:
Multi-agent architecture, search agents
Intelligent agents, Androids and Avatars
Usage and best practice:
Socio-economics of information retrieval
Quantitative, qualitative and comparative evaluation
Coding standards and Quality of Services
Security and privacy
Cognitive aspects, Human Factors and Ergonomics
Legal aspects of multimedia document handling
Multimedia and multimodal resources
Applications:
Computer-aided information access for the handicapped
Multimedia systems for medical applications
Image Guided Surgery and Augmented Reality
Medical documents archiving and retrieval
Transmodal information access systems
Telephone-based, nomad and in-vehicle systems
Intelligent systems for call-center reporting
Customized customer support (Aerospace product manuals...)
Strategic and technology watch & Business Intelligence
Real-Time information access for financial markets
Information access for decision aid systems
Multimodal Geographical Information Systems
Television and Radio Broadcast Archiving and Browsing...
Call for Papers
The papers will be reviewed by the International Scientific Committee.
RIAO 2000 International Scientific Committee (preliminary list, as of July 15,
1999):
Co-Chairs : Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France) and Donna Harman (NIST, USA)
Jean-Claude Bassano (University of Orleans, France)
Alain Berthoz (LPPA, College de France, France)
Patrick Bouthemy (IRISA, France)
George Carayannis (ILSP, Greece)
Francine Chen (Xerox, USA)
Bruce Croft (University of Massachusets, USA)
Franciska de Jong (University of Twente,The Netherlands)
Susan Dumais (Microsoft, USA)
David Evans (CMU and Claritech, USA)
Christian Fluhr (CEA, France)
Hiroya Fujisaki (Science University of Tokyo, Japan)
Pascale Fung (University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)
Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Edouard Geoffrois (DGA/CTA, France)
Jean-Paul Haton (LORIA, France)
Alex Hauptman (CMU, USA)
Ulrich Heid (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Roland Hjerppe (Mid Sweden University, Sweden)
Christian Jacquemin (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Mun Kew Leong ( Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore)
Judith Klavans (Columbia University, USA)
Wessel Kraaij (TNO-TPD, The Netherlands)
Francis Kubala (BBN, USA)
Gianni Lazzari (IRST, Italy)
Alain Leger (CNET- France Telecom, France)
R. Manmatha (University of Massachusetts, USA)
Richard Marcus (MIT, USA)
Mark Maybury (MITRE, USA)
Franck Nack (GMD IPSI, Germany)
Klaus Netter (DFKI, Germany)
Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montreal, Canada)
Douglas Oard (University of Maryland, USA)
Georges Quenot (CLIPS, France)
Dragutin Petkovic (IBM, USA)
K. J. Ray Liu (University of Maryland, USA)
Ze'ev Rivlin (Natural Speech Communication, Israel)
Arnold Smeulders (ISIS, UvA, The Netherlands)
Karen Spark-Jones (CUED, UK)
Evelyne Tzoukermann (Lucent technologies, USA)
Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Australia)
Phil Woodland (CUED, UK)
Call for Applications
Tools and products related to the conference topics are sought for
demonstration at special conference sessions. Applications and products
will be selected by the International Application Committee, on the basis
of their innovation, utility, and present and future marketability.
RIAO 2000 International Application Committee (preliminary list, as of
July 15, 1999) :
Chair: Gregory Grefenstette (Xerox, France)
Marie-Francoise Clergeau (College de France, France)
Daniel Confland (Jouve, France)
Max Copperman (Kanisa, USA)
Giorgio Dimino (RAI, Italy)
Pascal Faudemay (LIP6, France)
Michael Horowitz (Claritech, USA)
Hitoshi Iida (Sony Speech & Language Laboratory, Japan)
Hans-Joachim Novak (IBM, Germany)
Norbert Paquel (Canope, France)
Sylvie Regnier-Prost (Aerospatiale-Matra, France)
Remi Ronfard (INA, France)
Antonio Sanfilippo (EC, Luxembourg)
Laurent Schmitt (INIST-CNRS, France)
Vera Semenova (Sciper/Analit, Russia)
Joop Van Gent (TNO-TPD, The Netherlands)
The RIAO 2000 Conference is organized by:
Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaires (C.I.D.)
36 bis rue Ballu
75009 Paris France
Tel: (33 / 0) 1 42 85 04 75
Fax: (33 / 0) 1 48 78 49 61 or 1 45 26 84 45
and
Center for the Advanced Study of Information Systems, Inc (C.A.S.I.S.)
Co / C. Constantin
575 Madison Avenue
25th floor
New York N.Y. 10022 USA
Contacts:
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO
Organizing and Coordinating Committee:
Agnes Beriot (CID, France)
Peter Brodnitz (CASIS, USA)
Jean-Louis Darc (France-Pologne, France)
Jean-Jacques Guilbart (College de France, France)
Nicolas Masson (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Jean Perriere (CID, France)
Sharyn Rozart (CASIS, USA)
Anne Tabutiaux (Recherche et Diffusion Scientifique, France)
Tony Venables (ECAS, Belgium)
Calendar:
* Preliminary announcement: July 1999
* Call for Papers & Demonstrations: September 15, 1999
* Submission deadline: November 1st, 1999
* Notification of acceptance: December 15, 1999
* Submission of complete papers: January 15, 2000
* Final Program: January 25, 2000
* Conference: April 2000 (exact final dates to be announced)
If you're interested in participating in the conference, or if you intend
to submit a paper, a prototype or an application demo, or if you wish to
know more about the conference when the information will be available,
please fill in the Attendance Intention Form below, and send it to
"[log in to unmask]" ASAP.
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
Attendance Intention Form:
Name :
Position:
Organization:
Mail address:
Telephone:
Fax:
EMAIL:
Web site:
I wish to participate in the RIAO 2000 Conference:
I wish to submit a paper (topic):
I wish to submit a prototype demo (topic):
I wish to submit an innovative product or application demo (topic):
I would like to have more information about RIAO 2000, when it will be
available:
Please, email this Attendance Intention Form to "[log in to unmask]" ASAP.
**********
5TH SEMINAR ON SPEECH PRODUCTION:
MODELS AND DATA
1st CREST WORKSHOP ON MODELS OF SPEECH PRODUCTION:
MOTOR PLANNING AND ARTICULATORY MODELLING
FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT
The fifth in the series of Speech Production Seminars will be held in
Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany on May 1st to 4th, 2000. We look foward to
continuing the tradition established at the previous meetings in Grenoble,
Leeds, Old Saybrook and Autrans of providing a congenial forum for
presentation and discussion of current research into all aspects of speech
production. Following the link at Autrans in 1996 with an ESCA workshop,
the forthcoming Speech Production Seminar will also be a double-barrelled
effort through cooperation with the Japanese CREST initiative ("Core
Research for Evolutional Science and Technology"). In the speech field
this programme is funding projects on computational and mechanical
modelling, and motor planning
(http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/cs/speech/crest.html).
TOPICS
The meeting will maintain the customary focus of the Speech Production
Seminars on the analysis and modelling of all aspects of articulatory
processes. Results of the earlier meetings are documented in special
issues of J. Phonetics (Vols. 19, 20, 23) and Speech Communication (Vol.
22). The following list of themes is not meant to be exhaustive:
o Articulatory-acoustic relations
o Articulatory synthesis
o Acoustic to articulatory inversion
o Connected speech processes
o Coarticulation
o Biomechanical modelling
o Models of motor control
o Audiovisual synthesis
o Aerodynamic models
o Cerebral organization of speech
o Disorders of speech motor control
o Instrumental techniques
In addition, the following special topics are currently being planned:
o Evolution of speech
Further details from Kiyoshi Honda ([log in to unmask])
or Shinji Maeda ([log in to unmask])
o Motor expression of the language faculty: non-speech perspectives
Parallels and differences between the organization of
speech and other language-related motor activity such as
handwriting and sign-language.=20
Further details from Phil Hoole at
[log in to unmask]
In order to achieve maximum flexibility in the arrangement of sessions we
will for the first time be using both oral and poster sessions. As in the
past, there will, however, be no parallel sessions.
REGISTRATION AND DEADLINES
To be placed on the mailing list for further information please send an
email giving your current preferred email address to
[log in to unmask]
The deadline for submission of abstracts will be October 31st, 1999.
Further details of deadlines will be announced mid-August, 1999.=20 A
conference web-site (including this announcement) is being constructed at
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~sps5
VENUE
The conference venue can be inspected at
http://www.kloster-seeon.de (or here for a quick birds-eye
view:
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~sps5/kloster_seeon.gif
Kloster Seeon is a former Benedictine monastery now used
for educational and cultural purposes. It is attractively
located in a small lake about halfway between Munich and
Salzburg, and close to the much larger lake Chiemsee and
to the Bavarian Alps. It provides the element of monastic
seclusion conducive to intensive discussions, but be
reassured that it also follows the strong Bavarian
tradition of locating monasteries and beer gardens in
close proximity to one another.=20
**********
Phil Hoole (on behalf of the organizing committee)
Institut f=FCr Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit=E4t M=FCnchen
Schellingstr. 3
D-80799 Munich
Germany
Tel: + 49 89 2180 3149
Fax: + 49 89 2800362
Email: [log in to unmask]
**********
-----------------------------------------------------------------
---------- Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers ------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
SPOKEN WORD ACCESS PROCESSES
(SWAP)
Monday 29th May -- Jonkerbosch Conference Centre
Wednesday 31st May 2000 Nijmegen, The Netherlands
http://www.mpi.nl/world/swap
Organisers: James McQueen and Anne Cutler
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics
Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
[log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
SWAP is supported by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung
der Wissenschaften, and is a European Speech Communication
Association (ESCA) Tutorial and Research Workshop
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
The SWAP workshop will focus on the process by which the speech signal is
mapped onto the mental lexicon during spoken word recognition. Central
themes will be the nature of prelexical representations, the nature of
lexical representations, the mapping of the speech signal onto the
lexicon, the process of phonemic decision-making, and whether there is
feedback from lexical to prelexical levels of processing.
The workshop will consist of talks by invited speakers and poster
presentations. The invited speakers are:
Ellen Bard Paul Luce Janet Pierrehumbert
Cynthia Connine William Marslen-Wilson Mark Pitt
Alain Content Dominic Massaro Peter Roach
Jeff Elman Joanne Miller Arthur Samuel
Carol Fowler Terry Nearey Richard Shillcock
Uli Frauenfelder Sieb Nooteboom Michael Tanenhaus
Gareth Gaskell Dennis Norris Jean Vroomen
Steve Goldinger Christophe Pallier Doug Whalen
John Kingston Pienie Zwitserlood
This call is to solicit submissions for poster presentations. Authors
should prepare abstracts (no more than 400 words) on a SWAP theme, and
submit one copy, by mail or e-mail (plain ASCII text only), by 26th
November 1999. Paper or electronic submissions received after 26th
November will not be considered. Each abstract should have a title, and a
full list of authors, with affiliations. The corresponding author should
provide their full name and address, their email address, and their fax
and phone numbers.
Please send abstracts to:
Rian Zondervan
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics
Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
[log in to unmask]
Places at the SWAP workshop are limited. Abstracts will be reviewed by
the organizers and the Scientific Committee (Ellen Bard, Joanne Miller,
Dennis Norris, Arthur Samuel, Jean Vroomen and Pienie Zwitserlood).
Notification of acceptance for poster presentation will be sent out before
the end of this millenium.
Written versions of all contributions (both talks and posters) will be
published in Conference Proceedings, which will be made available at the
workshop. Authors whose posters are accepted will be required to submit a
four-page proceedings paper by March 31st, 2000. A paper copy (four pages
of double-column text, including tables, figures and references, on A4 or
US-letter) and an electronic copy will be required by this date. Further
details of paper presentation format (and poster presentation format) will
be sent out with the notification of acceptance.
All contributors will be required to register for SWAP by March 31st,
2000. A registration form will accompany the notification of acceptance.
The registration fee will cover accommodation on the nights of Monday 29th
and Tuesday 30th May, and full board (Monday lunch and dinner; Tuesday
breakfast, lunch and dinner; Wednesday breakfast and lunch).
Registration fees will depend on choice of accommodation.
Per person:
Full Student
Room with en-suite bathroom (single occupancy): NLG 525 NLG 430
Room with en-suite bathroom (2 people sharing): NLG 475 NLG 380
Room without en-suite bathroom (single occupancy): NLG 485 NLG 390
Room without en-suite bathroom (2 people sharing): NLG 435 NLG 340
[NLG 1 = 2.203 Euros]
ESCA members will receive a discount of NLG 100 on their fee,
ESCA student members will receive a discount of NLG 35.
Additional accommodation will also be available on the nights of Saturday
27th, Sunday 28th and Wednesday 31st May. Prices (including breakfast),
per person, per night:
Room with en-suite bathroom (single occupancy): NLG 95
Room with en-suite bathroom (2 people sharing): NLG 70
Room without en-suite bathroom (single occupancy): NLG 75
Room without en-suite bathroom (2 people sharing): NLG 50
Further Information: http://www.mpi.nl/world/swap
The SWAP website contains this call for papers, and will be regularly
updated, to include the registration form, information on paper and poster
presentation, information on travelling to and from Nijmegen and the
conference site, and provisional and final programs as they come
available. Further enquiries may be made to Rian Zondervan,
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen,
The Netherlands; [log in to unmask]
Important Dates:
Deadline for Receipt of Abstracts: 26th November 1999
Notification of Receipt of Abstracts: 3rd December 1999
Notification of Acceptance: 31st December 1999
Deadline for Receipt of Papers and for Registration: 31st March 2000
SWAP Workshop: 29th-31st May 2000
**********
***** CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS *******
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA), the Institute
for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP, Athens, Greece), and
the National Technical University of Athens, Greece are pleased to
announce:
The 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC2000)
(The detailed announcement is available on the web at:
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html)
Location: Athens, Greece
Dates: 31 May - 2 June 2000
The Second International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation has been initiated by ELRA and is organised in cooperation
with other Associations and Consortia, including ACL, ALLC, COCOSDA,
ORIENTAL COCOSDA, EAFT, EAGLES, EDR, ELSNET, ESCA,
EURALEX, FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with major
national and international organisations, including the European
Commission - DG XIII, ARPA, NSF, the IC/863 HTRDP Project (China),
the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the ICSP
Permanent Committee (Korea), The Natural Language Technical
committee of JEIDA (Japan), and the Japanese Project for
International Coordination in Corpora, Assessment and Labelling.
Cooperation and support from other institutions is currently being
sought.
CONFERENCE AIMS
In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character
of human language technologies (HLT) and their relevance to all
the fields of Information Society Technologies (IST) has been
widely recognised.
Two issues are currently considered to be particularly relevant:
1) the availability of language resources and
2) the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies and
products.
Substantial mutual benefits can be expected from addressing
these issues through international cooperation.
The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language
data and descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically
for building and evaluating natural language and speech algorithms
or systems, for software localisation industries and language
services, for language enabled information and communication
services, for electronic commerce, electronic publishing, language
studies, subject-area specialists and end users.
Examples of language resources are written and spoken corpora,
computational lexica, grammars, terminology databases, and
basic software tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection,
management, customisation and use of these and other resources.
The relevance of evaluation for Language Engineering is increasingly
recognised. This involves assessment of the state of the art for a
given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a
programme, comparing different approaches to a given problem and
choosing the best solution, knowing its advantages and drawbacks,
assessment of the availability of technologies for a given application,
product benchmarking, and assessment of user satisfaction.
Language engineering and R&D in language technologies have
made important advances in the recent past in various aspects of
both written and spoken language processing. Although the evaluation
paradigm has been studied and used in large national and international
programmes, including the US ARPA HLT programme, the EU LE
programme Francophone Aupelf-Uref programme and others, and in the
localisation industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to substantial
unresolved basic research problems.
The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the state of
the art, to discuss problems and opportunities, and to exchange
information regarding ongoing and planned activities, language
resources and their applications. We also intend to discuss
evaluation methodologies and demonstrate evaluation tools, and
explore possibilities and promote initiatives for international
cooperation in the areas mentioned above.
CONFERENCE TOPICS
The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics
which could be addressed by papers submitted to LREC2000:
I. Issues in the design, construction and use of Languages
Resources (LR) (theoretical & best practice):
* Guidelines, standards, specifications, and models for LR
* Organisational issues in the construction, distribution, and
use of LR
* Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation,
annotation, management, access, distribution, and use of LR
* Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access, and
use of LR
* Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LR
* Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
(e.g. terms, lexical information, language modelling) from LR
* Monolingual and multilingual LR
* Multimodal and multimedia LR
* LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia
cultural industry
* Industrial production and use of LR
* Integration of various modalities in LR (spoken, visual, gestual,
textual)
* Exploitation of LR in different types of applications (language
technology, information retrieval, vocal interfaces, electronic
commerce, etc.)
* Industrial LR requirements and the community's response
* Analysis of user needs for LR
* Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing
* Economics of LR
* Customisation and use of LR
* Research issues relevant for LR
II. Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation:
* Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR
* Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for
benchmarking and evaluation
* Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval,
terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment,
machine translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing,
semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding,
summarisation, localisation, etc.)
* Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition
and understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis,
speech coding, speaker and language recognition, etc.)
* Evaluation of document processing (document recognition, on-line
and off-line machine and hand-written character recognition, etc.)
* Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search systems
* Evaluation of multimodal systems
* Qualitative and perceptive evaluation
* Evaluation of products and applications
* Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems
* Situated evaluation of applications
* Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
* From evaluation to standardisation of LR
* Research issues relevant to evaluation
III. General issues:
* National and international activities and projects
* LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia
cultural industry
* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR national
and international policies
* Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, presentations of
accepted papers, poster sessions, referenced demonstrations and panels.
Pre-Conference Workshops will be organized on the 29th and 30th of
May and post-Conference Workshops on the 3rd and 4th of June 2000.
Please consult the conference Web site
(http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html) for complete
information about submission guidelines, contact people, submission
dates, various conference committees and members, and other
general information.
IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER
* 20 NOVEMBER 1999:
Submission of proposals for papers, posters, referenced demos,
panels and workshops
* 10 DECEMBER 1999:
Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals
* 2 FEBRUARY 2000:
Notification of acceptance of papers, posters, referenced demos
* 2 APRIL 2000:
Final version of the articles for the proceedings
* 31 MAY - 2 JUNE 2000:
Conference
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy
George Carayannis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing,
Athens, Greece
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Harald H\246ge, Siemens, Munich, Germany
Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy (Conference chair)
For general information about the conference, please contact:
LREC Secretariat: Ms. Despina Scutari
Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP)
6, Artemidos & Epidavrou Str.
15125 Marousi, Athens, GREECE
Tel: +301 6800959 ; Fax: +301 6854270
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
LREC2000 website:
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html
For general information about ELRA, please contact:
Khalid CHOUKRI
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris FRANCE
Tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33 - Fax. +33 1 43 13 33 30
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html
**********
FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE VARIATION IN EUROPE
ICLaVE 1 (Barcelona 2000)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
June 29-30/July 1, 2000
The International Conference on Language Variation in Europe ICLaVE) has
been set up as a regular, biennial meeting which aims at addressing any
aspect of linguistic variation observed in languages spoken in present-day
Europe. The idea of setting up this conference originated in the
Coordination Committee of the European Science Foundation Network on the
Convergence and Divergence of Dialects in a Changing Europe, which was
funded from 1995 to 1998
(http://www.esf.org/human/hn/old/DIAL/dial.htm)
ICLaVE will continue work in this and other areas related to language
variation. The first ICLaVE will take place in Barcelona June 29-30/July
1, 2000, and will be organized by M. Teresa Turell (U. Pompeu Fabra). The
scientific program will consist of regular papers (selected on the basis
of abstracts), invited papers and poster presentations.
Scientific Committee:
Frans Hinskens (U. of Leipzig); Paul Kerswill (U. of Reading); Maria-Rosa
Lloret (U. of Barcelona); Inge Lise Pedersen (U. of Copenhagen); M. Teresa
Turell (U. Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)); Juan A. Villena (U. of Malaga).
Local Committee (U. Pompeu Fabra):
Josep M. Fontana, Montserrat Forcadell, Montserrat Gonzalez, Louise
McNally, Montserrat Ribas, Enric Vallduvi.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Peter Auer (U. of Freiburg (Germany)) Humberto Lopez Morales (Real
Academia de la Lengua Espa\241ola) (and others to be confirmed).
1ST CALL FOR PAPERS
The Scientific Committee invites abstracts for papers in any area of
language variation in European languages. The abstracts should indicate
clearly whether they are for a regular 30-minute slot for a Paper
(20-minute presentation; 10-minute discussion) or for a Poster, in which
case specified display space and time slot will be offered.
The criteria for abstract selection will be: conceptual and methodological
relevance to the study of language variation, specifically in European
languages; empirical and conceptual substance; quality of argumentation;
originality. The abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by members of the
Scientific Committee during January and February 2000.
CONFERENCE LANGUAGE
The conference language will be English. Papers should be presented, and
abstracts submitted, in English.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Participants wishing to present a paper or a poster should send ONE
camera-ready copy of their abstract (150-200 words), indicating the title
of the paper/poster, author's full name, and name and address of
institution; and THREE copies of their abstract with an indication of the
title only. All submissions should be sent directly via surface mail to
the Conference Chairperson (M. Teresa Turell) at the Conference Office
address listed below.
Deadline for abstracts: December 15, 1999.
CONFERENCE OFFICE:
ICLaVE 1 (Barcelona 2000)
Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada
Unitat de Recerca de Variacio Linguistica
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
c/ La Rambla 30-32
E-08002 BARCELONA (Spain)
Tel: +34-93-542 2322
Fax: +34-93-542 2321
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
**********
****************************************
POSITIONS VACANT
& RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES
****************************************
Boston University seeks part-time instructors to teach
THREE courses (mixed undergraduate and graduate level)
for spring semester of 2000:
1) CAS LX 513 introduction to phonology
2) CAS LX 521 introduction to morphology
3) CAS LX 523 intermediate-level syntax
Further information about these courses is available at
http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/jobs.html.
Please send letter of application, clearly indicating
which course(s) you would be interested in teaching,
along with cv and 3 representative publications, to:
Prof. Carol Neidle
Chair, Linguistics Search Committee
Boston University
Department of Modern Foreign Languages
718 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
Please also have three letters of recommendation sent
to the same address. Deadline for receipt of materials:
October 10, 1999. Ph.D. (in hand) required at time
of application. For further information about these
positions, please contact [log in to unmask]
Carol Neidle Boston University, MFLL
[log in to unmask] 718 Commonwealth Ave.
http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/carol.html Boston, MA 02215
phone and fax: 617-353-6218
**********
(Applied) Speech Recognition Engineer
www.nuance.com
We just Launched the World's Largest Speaker Verification System for the
Home Shopping Network
Summary:
This is a tremendous opportunity for you to use your speech
recognition research background to develop and deploy exciting state-of-the-art
applications. As a key team member you will be challenged with analyzing
advanced applications, optimiziing recognition system performance , and
project leadership. This is an excellent chance to gain hands-on
experience in the full life-cycle of speech application development
including design, customer interactions, and dialog design.
Responsibilities:
Analyze speech data from fielded applications.
Run experiments for optimiziing speech recognition performance.
Run advanced experiments for proof of concept of speech applications and
demo's.
Be involved with a variety of tasks including application and dialog design
Interact with customers.
Requirements:
Speech recognition background or education
Experience developing or tuning algorithms
Fluent C and shell/perl scripts programmer
Experience running speech recognition performance evaluations.
Desire to be working in applied technology
Ability to be detailed and organized
Ability to be self-directed
Strong problem-solving skills
Ideal:
HMM background
Post-degree industrial/academic experience
Ability to interact and communicate with customers
C++ or Java programming
Project leadership skills
Good language or linguistics skills
Exposure to dialog design, interface design
Education:
MS/PhD with Speech Recognition or Speaker Verification research.
Brion Wikes, Staffing Specialist
Nuance Communications (USA)
Direct Phone: 650-847-7799
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
**********
A LECTURESHIP IN LINGUISTICS (PHONOLOGY)
Programme in Linguistics
Department of English
Vacancy 1106
The University invites applications for this position. Applicants should
have a PhD degree in Linguistics (or equivalent) and some experience of
university teaching. Applicants should be able to contribute to the
teaching of phonology at undergraduate and advanced levels, and should
have an interest in one or more of the following: phonetics, morphology,
and language acquisition. The ability to contribute to areas other than
those specified may also be an advantage.
Salary will be within the range $NZ47,036 to $NZ56,187. The successful
person should be able to take up his or her duties by or before 28
February 2000.
Further information and Conditions of Appointment should be obtained from
the Academic Appointments Office, Telephone 373 7599, Extn 5788, Fax
64-9-373 7023, Email: appointments@ auckland.ac.nz. Three copies of
applications must reach the address below by 1 September 1999. Please
quote Vacancy 1106 in all correspondence.
The University has an EEO policy and welcomes applications from all
qualified persons.
Academic Appointments
Human Resources Registry
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
NEW ZEALAND
**********
The department of English at the University of Lille 3, France, is
urgently seeking to fill a 1 year temporary position (ATER or "maitre de
langue" status) in English phonetics and phonology starting in October
1999. There is a strong possibility that this will become a tenure track
position in the future. A PhD is in principle required. However advanced
PhD students finishing a doctorate and with relevant competence and
experience may be considered.
Teaching duties will involve mainly teaching basic English phonetics and
phonology in a practically oriented way to 1st and 2nd year students of
English. Various teaching materials are available and will be provided by
the Phonetics/Phonology team, with which the candidate is expected to
collaborate closely. The teaching load is 7.5 hours per week over 26
weeks. Teaching starts in early October 99.
Salary is between 9500 and 10000FF per month net, depending on precise
status.
Lille 3 has a very good local linguistics research environment including
the CNRS funded research group SILEX (Syntaxe, Interpretation, Lexique)
and a phonetics laboratory. Lille is also one hour from Paris and two
hours from London by high speed train. Belgium and the Netherlands are
also easy to get to by rail or road.
Some knowledge of French is necessary, though teaching can be done in
English.
Please write to Philip Miller ([log in to unmask]) and Bernard
Escarbelt ([log in to unmask]) for more information on the nature of
the positions, the research environment, and the application procedure.
**********
The University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich invite
applications for
1 postdoc opening, 9 funded PhD positions
in their joint postgraduate program on spoken language, facial expression,
gesture, and their processing (which combines phonetics,
psycholinguistics, German linguistics, German as a foreign language,
philosophy, electrical engineering, and computer science).
Mind the short period for application: 10 September, 1999.
Proficiency in German is essential.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Graduiertenkolleg "Sprache, Mimik und Gestik
im Kontext technischer Informationssysteme"
Ab 1. Oktober 1999 (Studienbeginn 1. November) werden im neuen
Graduiertenkolleg
9 Doktorandenstipendien und
1 Postdoktorandenstipendium
vergeben. Von den Bewerber/innen fuer die Doktorandenstipendien wird
erwartet, dass sie ein Promotionsprojekt in einem der nachfolgenden
Faecher (mit dem jeweils genannten Schwerpunkt) durchfuehren:
Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation (Mimik und Sprachproduktion;
Gebaerdensprache)
Sprechwissenschaft und Psycholinguistik (Zeitverarbeitung, Textorganisation,
innere Sprache)
Germanistische Linguistik (Variation in der Standardaussprache)
Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Nonverbale Kommunikation - Kontrastive Aspekte)
Philosophie (Sprachphilosophie und Philosophie der Kognitionswissenschaft)
Elektro- und Informationstechnik, Lehrstuhl Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation
(Sprachsignalverarbeitung und inhaltliche Interpretation)
Informatik, Lehrstuhl Bildverstehen und Wissensbasierte Systeme
(Interpretation der Gesichtsdynamik)
Vom Bewerber fuer das Postdoktorandenstipendium wird erwartet, dass er
in einem der Gebiete bereits ausgewiesen ist und bei der Durchfuehrung
des Studienprogramms mitwirkt. Die Laufzeit betraegt maximal 3
Jahre. Bewerbungsfrist ist der 10.09.99. Bewerbungen sind mit den
ueblichen Unterlagen (einschliesslich einer Skizze des geplanten
Promotionsprojektes) sowie 2 Referenzen zu richten:
An den Sprecher des Graduiertenkollegs "Sprache, Mimik, Gestik"
Prof. Dr. H.G. Tillmann
Institut fuer Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation
Schellingstr. 3/II, D - 80799 Muenchen
Tel: 089-2180 2758, Fax: 089-280 0362
Ausfuehrlichere Informationen (mit Vorschlaegen fuer moegliche
Promotionsprojekte in den beteiligten Faechern) finden sich unter
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/GradKoll/
**********
Our client in Boston, MA has job openings for a Chinese
(Mandarin)-speaking Speech Scientist and a Korean-speaking Speech
Scientist. The client is a leading provider of speech recognition
technology and products for customer service solutions. They develop tools
and technology to deliver advanced speech solutions to a wide range of
customers. These include major customers in the brokerage, banking,
travel, and telecommunication industries.
The person who fills the Speech Scientist role will be based in Boston and
will be responsible for:
* Creating a Chinese/Korean version of the products including the core
recognition engine and DialogModule application building blocks.
* Working with their solution services team and Chinese/Korean
partners to deploy high-quality speech systems using this
Chinese/Korean version of the product.
* Continued improvement of accuracy and computation of the
Chinese/Korean product.
* Working with team of US and international speech scientists to
improve the core technology across all languages.
Requirements:
* 4+ years research experience with state-of-the-art speech
recognition technology
* Knowledge of all components (signal processing, feature extraction,
statistical modeling, search, natural language processing) of
state-of-the-art speech recognition technology
* Strong C programming skills
* Fluency in UNIX or NT (ideally both)
* Excellent oral and written communications skills (in both English
and Chinese/Korean)
* Be able to work with a minimum amount of direct supervision
* Work well with other members of team
To apply for this position, please call or e-mail to:
Kiyomi Kaneko
Globalization Recruiter
InfoTech Contract Services
mailto:[log in to unmask]
Phone: 781-370-3053
800-890-7002 ext. 3053
Fax: 781-890-4433
http://www.infotechcs.com
**********
Aculab PLC has a vacancy for a linguist to work on its text-to-speech
synthesis project. The position involves the development of linguistic
processing modules for text-to-speech synthesis. Applicants should have a
masters degree or higher in a linguistics related field, although those
with a good first degree and relevant commercial experience will be
considered. Candidates' area of expertise should be based in
phonetics/phonology/prosody.
Applicants must be natively fluent in a romance language (preferably
French, Italian or Spanish), and will ideally have a good knowledge of the
linguistic structure of the other major romance languages. They should be
able to make practical decisions based on existing knowledge, as a short
time to market is envisaged for the product. Any knowledge of procedural
programming languages (such as C, C++) would be advantageous, but is not
essential.
Applicants should contact Eve Jesson with a CV and a covering letter;
e-mail.
[log in to unmask]
fax.
+44 1908 273 801
post.
Aculab PLC,
Lakeside,
Bramley Road,
Mount Farm,
Milton Keynes,
MK1 1PT
UK
**********
*********************
BOOKS & JOURNALS
*********************
*** SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT ***
SPEECH COMMUNICATION
CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue on SPEECH ANNOTATION AND CORPUS TOOLS
[http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/specom.html]
Submission Deadline: 30 August 1999
Guest editors: Steven Bird and Jonathan Harrington
Aims and Scope of Speech Communication (from the journal homepage)
Speech Communication is an interdisciplinary journal whose primary
objective is to fulfil the need for the rapid dissemination and thorough
discussion of basic and applied research results. In order to establish
frameworks to inter-relate results from the various areas of the field,
emphasis will be placed on viewpoints and topics of a transdisciplinary
nature. ... The journal's primary objectives are: to present a forum for
the advancement of human and human-machine speech communication science;
to stimulate cross-fertilization between different fields of this domain;
to contribute towards the rapid and wide diffusion of scientifically sound
contributions in this domain. General information about Speech
Communication, the official journal of the European Speech Communication
Association, can be found at [www.elsevier.com/locate/specom].
Scope of the Special Issue
Submissions are invited for a special issue of Speech Communication on
Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools. The aim of the special issue is to
make speech scientists aware of recent developments in the representation
and management of annotated speech corpora, i.e. collections of speech
signal data with time-aligned transcriptions. (Signal data may be audio
or physiological, natural or artificial, in basic or derived form.) The
primary focus is the structure of annotations and of annotated corpora, as
used within and across a wide range of disciplines concerned with spoken
human communication.
Annotated speech corpora have been a critical component of research in the
speech sciences for some years. Today, these corpora are being created
and deployed for a rapidly expanding set of languages, disciplines and
technologies. A wealth of formats and tools have sprung up around this
enterprise, a diversity which at once facilitates and frustrates progress.
The linguistic annotation page [www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/] has drawn
attention to the scale of ongoing activity, to the existence of diverse
approaches to similar problems and of similar approaches to diverse
problems. Despite the explicit formats and well-documented user
interfaces, insights about the structure of the annotations themselves are
often buried in coding manuals and internal data structures. There is a
pressing need for papers which document the corpora and tools, which
identify notational and functional equivalences among different
approaches, and which report on new approaches to core representational
problems.
The special issue will consider papers which address theoretical and
practical issues concerning the representation of annotations, the
structure of annotated corpora, and the design, analysis and
implementation of tools for creating, browsing, searching, manipulating
and transforming annotations and annotated corpora. In each case, the
description of annotation structures or tools should be accessible to
readers outside the particular community in which the system originated.
A broad sampling of relevant issues is given below:
+ representational issues:
- sequence, overlap, hierarchy
- simultaneous cross-cutting hierarchies
- the nature of labels
- pointers and cross-references
- temporal structure, instants and periods
- atemporal information (e.g. demographic data)
+ relationships between annotations and signals:
- multiple independent annotations of a single signal
- single annotations which reference multiple signals
- annotations which reference other annotations
+ database issues:
- structuring annotations, signals and atemporal data into a corpus
- indexing for efficient access of large corpora
- high and low level query languages, cross-level query
- validation, update, provenance
- data transformation and integration
- file formats, storage, transfer; the place of XML
+ implementation issues:
- design philosophies and functionalities for annotation toolkits
- approaches to creation, browsing, navigation, display
- reusability, interoperability, platform independence
- integration with independent tools (e.g. statistical analysis)
- techniques for working with multiple corpus formats
+ wider issues:
- methodologies for research and development involving annotated corpora
- the cycle of refining annotations and refining theoretical models
- the role of annotated corpora in evaluating theories and systems
- necessary steps towards general purpose tools and formats
Important Dates
* 400 Word Abstracts: any time in May-July
* Advance Notification: Monday August 16th, 1999
* Submission Deadline: Monday August 30th, 1999
* Acceptance Decision: late October, 1999
* Final Version Due: late January, 2000
* Publication Date: mid 2000
Advance Notifications
1. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a 400 word abstract of
their paper so that the editors can comment on its suitability for the
special issue. These abstracts should be formatted as ASCII text and
submitted by email to both editors.
2. To facilitate a rapid review process, authors are required to give
notification of their submission two weeks in advance of the
submission deadline. Notification should consist of the title and (a
draft of) the final abstract, formatted as ASCII and emailed to both
editors.
Submissions
All submissions must consist of original unpublished work that is not
being submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should be approximately
30 pages double spaced. Electronic submission is encouraged. Details
about preparation of electronic and paper submissions, and any updates to
the CFP, will be posted on the web at
[http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/specom.html]. Please register at
this site to receive email notification of any subsequent announcements
concerning the special issue.
--
Dr Jonathan Harrington
Director, Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre,
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Tel: +61 2 9850-8740 Fax: +61 2 9850-9199
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/dbase/person.phtml?oid=19084
Dr Steven Bird
Associate Director, Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania, 3615 Market St, Suite 200
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608, USA
Tel: +1 215 573-3352 Fax: +1 215 573-2175
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb
**********
***SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS***
Natural Language Engineering
Special Issue on
Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering
NLE SPECIAL ISSUE AS A DISC INITIATIVE
A special issue on Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems
Engineering will be published by the journal of Natural Language
Engineering (NLE; Cambridge University Press) in the beginning of 2000.
This issue is an initiative of the European Esprit project DISC.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
The interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems (SLDSs) has increased
enormously over the last few years and has led to a situation in which
there is a great need, shared by developers, deployers and customers
alike, for effective guidelines, which will enable them to make
well-formed design and implementation decisions, in accordance with broad
consensus of what must be 'best practice' in this particular engineering
domain. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together leading
views on what might be considered to be best practice in the development
and evaluation of SLDSs.
THEME
In agreement with the main goal of DISC, the general theme for the special
issue is what could be taken as best practice in SLDS engineering, given
the availability of different technological options with their inherent
merits and limitations which are subject to different constraints on
system (component) realization.
We are interested in new, high quality papers which address, along the
lines of the objectives above, one or more of the following issues: (i)
best practice in the development and evaluation of SLDSs as a whole or
(ii) best practice in the development and evaluation of one or more of the
following system aspects: speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural
language understanding and generation, dialogue management, human factors,
and system integration.
All papers should fall within the scope of NLE, as described in the
instructions for contributors to the journal. This mainly implies that the
research views, comparative discussions, etc. described in the papers must
have a clear potential for practical application, in this particular case
meaning that they contribute to guidelines for SLDSs best practice (see
also the NLE web site, the reference of which is given below).
SUBMISSIONS
The length of a paper should be 10-12 journal pages. Electronic
submissions should be sent as a postscript file by e-mail to the
(co-ordinating) special issue editor.
In order to get a better impression of the full range of submissions,
authors are asked to e-mail a short statement of their intention to submit
a paper to the co-ordinating special issue editor as soon as possible.
REVIEW PROCEDURE
All papers, both those submitted by members of DISC and from outside the
project, will be double reviewed and triple reviewed if necessary.
The review committee consists of seven members of the DISC consortium, one
member of the DISC Advisory Panel, three members of the NLE editorial
board and a group of ten external referees. In case of a very large number
of submissions the review committee will be extended accordingly.
Referees (not including DISC members) are:
James Allen (University of Rochester, USA)
Peter Bosch (IBM Scientific Centre Heidelberg, Germany)
Phil Cohen (OGIST, USA)
Robin Cooper (University of Goeteborg, Sweden)
James Glass (MIT, USA)
Julia Hirschberg (ATT Labs Research, USA)
Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California, USA)
Stephen Isard (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Lauri Karttunen (Rank Xerox Research, France)
Susann Luperfoy (IET, USA)
Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge University, UK)
David Traum (University of Maryland, USA)
Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs Research, USA)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)
IMPORTANT DATES
* Intention to Submit Due Date: as soon as possible
* Paper Due Date: September 1, 1999
* Revision Due Date: December 15, 1999
* Acceptance Date: January 2000
* Publication Date: February/March 2000
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS
The special issue editors are the IMS group participating in the DISC
project:
Jan van Kuppevelt (co-ordinating editor) [log in to unmask]
Ulrich Heid [log in to unmask]
Hans Kamp [log in to unmask]
Editorial Address: NLE Special Issue, c/o Jan van Kuppevelt,
Institute for Computational Linguistics (IMS),
Azenbergstrasse 12, D-70174 Stuttgart - Germany.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Special issue web site: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/NLE_Special_Issue/
NLE web site: http://www.cup.org/journals/jnlscat/nle/nle.html
DISC web site: http://www.elsnet.org/disc/
**********
A DICTIONARY OF PHONETICS
Articulatory, Acoustic, Auditory
English - Arabic
Solomon I. Sara, S.J., Georgetown University
The aim of this dictionary is to provide the Arabic students and scholars
a comprehensive set of English technical vocabulary that is currently used
in phonetics with the corresponding set in Arabic.
Phonetics is a vast field of study with branches reaching out into many
speech and language sciences. Thus, a dictionary of phonetics can not be
limited only to the field of linguistics. It must include articulatory
phonetics and technical terms from the anatomy, physiology, and neurology
of speech; acoustic phonetics and the technical terms from speech encoding
and transmission processes; and auditory phonetics and technical terms
from speech reception, decoding, and perception. In addition, a
dictionary of phonetics must include all other relevant terms occurring in
the neighboring sub-fields of linguistics that touch upon phonetics, in
particular instrumental phonetics and phonology. The proposed dictionary
is such a dictionary of phonetics.
Even though this dictionary accounts for all of the phonetic terminology
in use in the study and teaching of phonetics, it is arranged
alphabetically rather than by the many sub-disciplines of phonetics.
This alphabetical arrangement makes the dictionary accessible not only to
the beginner but to the specialist as well. Furthermore, the cross
classificatory arrangement of its entries makes it more user friendly.
ISBN 3 89586 631 8.
LINCOM Handbooks in Linguistics 08.
Ca. 340 pp. USD 60 / DM 90 / pound sterling 33. July 1999.
Ordering information for individuals: Please give us your creditcard
no. / expiry date or send us a cheque. Prices in this information
include shipment worldwide by airmail. A standing order for this
series is available with special discounts offered to individual
subscribers.
LINCOM EUROPA, Paul-Preuss-Str. 25, D-80995 Muenchen, Germany; FAX +4989
3148909;
New titles: http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA/new1.htm;
[log in to unmask]
**********
As a follow-up to the review on LINGUIST 10.1039 of Mike Davenport & S.J.
Hannahs (1998) Introducing Phonetics and Phonology, London: Arnold; New
York: Oxford University Press, we've put together an errata sheet for the
first printing. These typos and infelicities have been corrected in the
second printing, July 1999. (You can tell if you have a first or second
printing by the line of numbers on the copyright page beneath the ISBN
number--if it begins with 2 it's a second printing.) The URL for the
errata sheet is:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/Linguistics/errata.html
We'd be happy to hear of any further typos found in the book.
S.J. Hannahs <[log in to unmask]>
Mike Davenport <[log in to unmask]>
**********
****************
RESOURCES
****************
The LDC is pleased to announce the beta release of the American English
Spoken Lexicon via LDC-Online. The American English Spoken Lexicon
contains pronunciations captured in individual audio files for 53,611 of
the most common words in English. These words were extracted from the LDC
CallHome American English Lexicon (aka PRONLEX) with frequency determined
from a variety of media sources.
All words were recorded in a quiet sound-proof room by a female graduate
student who is a native speaker of American English.
The files are in NIST Sphere format. They have the words as their
filenames, and are stored in 110 encyclopedia-style subdirectories. The
maximum recording levels of most files range from 6.0 to 7.1dB.
LDC-Online provides a CGI interface to these speech files. This interface
allows keyword searching and alphabetical browsing. The interface displays
the words with phonetic transcriptions and frequency counts, and also
plays them in different audio formats such as AU, WAV, AIFF, LDC wave, and
JAVA WaveView applet.
LDC plans to release a CD-ROM version of this spoken lexicon later in
Membership Year 1999, which will be available at no cost for 1999 members.
The current online beta version is available free of charge for research
purposes to LDC members and others.
LDC-Online, as well as information about LDC and its available resources,
can be accessed on the LDC WWW Home Page at URL:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/
If you need further information please call (215) 898-0464 or send email
to [log in to unmask]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: (215) 898-0464
3615 Market Street Fax: (215) 573-2175
Suite 200 email: [log in to unmask]
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608 www: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu
**********
We would like to announce Epos, a language independent TTS system
primarily designed to serve as a research tool. Epos is available for
download under the General Public License at http://epos.ure.cas.cz/
including documentation and the full source code.
The present version includes configuration files for Czech and Slovak
languages only, but we are planning to support some other languages in a
medium-distant future using the MBROLA speech synthesizer, and we shall be
glad to provide the necessary support for preparing a rule-driven
configuration for other languages, or a speech segment inventory
compatible with one of our synthesizers.
In theory, Epos can be compiled using any C++ compiler (e.g. a reasonably
recent version of GNU C++, MS Visual C++, Watcom C++, or Borland C++
Builder), and should run on most UNIX-like operating systems and Windows
NT (the NT port is somewhat less stable due to still inadequate testing).
Epos speaks using the /dev/dsp device on UNIX platforms, and it generates
Microsoft RIFF wave files (.wav) under Windows NT. Its hardware
requirements are modest.
You can send any additional questions or bug reports to the Epos developer
mailing list: [log in to unmask] or have a look at the documentation
at http://epos.ure.cas.cz/epos.html
The Epos team
**********
Dear Speech and Language Professional,
Speech Studio is a new tool for real time speech display, acquisition and
analysis. Please see the website at http://www.laryngograph.com for more
details. Speech Studio is the only tool for quantitative analysis of
connected speech, not just sustained vowels.
If you have a website, we would be happy if you could place a link to this
site.
Thank you for reading this message. We trust the information is useful to
you. If you would like further details, don't hesitate to contact us at
[log in to unmask]
Many thanks,
Laryngograph Ltd
--
Laryngograph
1 Foundry Mews
London NW1 2PE
U.K.
Tel: +44.171.387.7793
Fax: +44.171.383.2039
**********
Material for the September 1999 issue of foNETiks should reach the
editors by 30 August.
Lisa Lim
*************************************************************************
Department of English Language & Literature
National University of Singapore tel +65 8746037
Block AS5, 7 Arts Link fax +65 7732981
Singapore 117570 [log in to unmask]
*************************************************************************
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