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foNETiks
A network newsletter for
the International Phonetic Association
and for the Phonetic Sciences
September 2006
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Editors:
Linda Shockey, University of Reading, UK Gerry Docherty, University of Newcastle, UK Paul Foulkes, University of York, UK Lisa Lim, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail address: [log in to unmask]
The foNETiks archive can be found on the WWW at:
<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fonetiks.html>
Visit the IPA web page at: <http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html>
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
[new ones marked ++]
[date of first appearance follows]
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7-9 September 2006. 2nd TIE Conference on the Typology of Tone and Intonation (TTI). Berlin, Germany. <http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1263.html>; http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html? events_tie2> (05/05)
8-10 September 2006. Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology. Toronto, Canada. <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/spanish_portuguese/phonology/> (11/05)
16 September 2006. SAPA 2006. ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Statistical and Perceptual Audition. (A satellite workshop of Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP.) Pittsburgh, PA, USA. <http://www.sapa2006.org/> (12/05)
17-22 September 2006. Interspeech'2006 - ICSLP (International Conference on Spoken Language Processing). Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. <http://www.interspeech2006.org/> (12/04)
27-29 September 2006. Conference on Forensic Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Law: Law, Language and Society. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. <www.lingualegis.amu.edu.pl> (03/06)
8-10 November 2006. IV JTH2006. IV Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla/ 4th Workshop on Speech Technology. Zaragoza, Spain. <http://jth2006.unizar.es>; jth2006.unizar.es (04/06)
9-12 November 2006. 48th Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Chicago, Illinois, USA. <http://www.uiowa.edu/~mmla/call_2006.html> (03/06)
17-18 November 2006. International Symposium on Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech (LPSS 2006). Taipei, Taiwan. <http://www.lpss.sinica.edu.tw> (08/06)
30 Nov - 1 Dec 2006. IWSLT: 3rd International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation. Kyoto, Japan. <http://www.slt.atr.jp/IWSLT2006/> (04/06)
6 - 8 December 2006. 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2006). Auckland, New Zealand. <http://www.assta.org/> (05/06)
9 - 11 December 2006. 9th Oriental COCOSDA Workshop on Speech Databases and Assessment. Penang, Malaysia. <http://www.usm.my/cocosda2006/> (05/06)
13-15 December 2006. 7th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP). Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, Brazil. <http://cefala.org/issp2006 > (03/06)
13-16 December 2006. ISCSLP 2006: 5th International symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing. Singapore. <http://www.iscslp2006.org/> (12/05)
10 January 2007. Word Accents and Tones in Sentence Perspective. Lund, Sweden. <http://www.ling.lu.se/conference/waatisp/>; [log in to unmask] (07/06)
28 February - 2 March 2007. Standard Prosody or Prosody of Linguistic Standards? Prosodic Variation and Grammar Writing. Workshop of the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). University of Siegen, Germany. <http://www.let.ru.nl/gep/jp/dgfs2007/main.html> (08/06)
28 February - 2 March 2007. Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations. Phonology Workshop (Arbeitsgruppe 12) at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). University of Siegen, Germany. <http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/dgfs2007/index.htm> (08/06)
** 18-20 May 2007. Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. http://www.ling.lsa.umich.edu/expot/ (further details below) (09/06)
22-25 May 2007. NOLISP 2007. An ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Non LInear Speech Processing. The Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris, France. <http://www.congres.upmc.fr/nolisp2007/>; <http://www.congres.upmc.fr/nolisp2007/Call%20NOLISP%2007.pdf> (04/06)
2-4 August 2007. Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech International Workshop (DiSS'07). Edinburgh, UK. http://www.disfluency.org (08/06)
6-10 August 2007. 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS2007). Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. <http://www.icphs2007.de> (04/06, 08/06)
** - 24 August 2007. 2007SSW-6: 6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop, Bonn, Germany. (09/06)
27-31 August 2007. Interspeech 2007. Antwerp, Belgium. <http://www.interspeech2007.org/> (08/06)
**22-26 September 2008. Inerspeech 2008. Brisbane, Australia. <http://www.interspeech2008.org/> (09/06)
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CONFERENCES & WORKSHOPS
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Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory
18-20-May-2007
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
http://www.ling.lsa.umich.edu/expot/
Call Deadline: 07-Jan-2007
Invited speakers: René Kager (Utrecht) and Joe Pater (UMass)
Over the past few decades, experimental data have been used increasingly as evidence in phonological theorizing. This is no less true of Optimality Theory (OT) as is evidenced by the growing body of OT literature that uses experimental data. The purpose of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, we want to investigate the extent to which experimental data can be used to fine-tune OT analyses. On the other hand, we want to consider the challenges that non-categorical experimental data may pose to OT.
We invite abstracts for 30 minute talks (with 10 minutes discussion) on any topic that combines experimental approaches with OT. For the purpose of this workshop, we give a broad interpretation to ''experimental approaches'', so that it includes experiments as diverse as psycholinguistic/processing tasks (word-likeness, phoneme identification, lexical decision, etc.), as well acoustic/articulatory experiments. We also do not want to limit contributions to papers that argue for OT. Papers that use experimental evidence to point out shortcomings of OT are equally welcome. Lastly, it is not required that a submission contributes new experimental data. Papers that deal with the general challenges posed to OT by non-categorical experimental data can also be submitted.
The following are examples of specific topics, but certainly do not exhaust the possibilities:
(1) Testing analyses through experimentation. It sometimes happens that more than one analysis is possible for some phenomenon, and that more traditional data cannot distinguish the analyses. In such cases, it is often possible to tease apart the analyses with psycholinguistic experiments. For instance, in her analysis of onset clusters, Fleischhacker (2005) uses several kinds of psycholinguistic experiments to argue for an account using faithfulness constraints based on perceptual similarity, and against an account based on sonority driven syllable structure.
(2) Finding experimental evidence for constraints. Experimental data can also help in determining what the constraints are. Kawahara (to appear) uses several perceptual experiments to argue for the existence of different kinds of Ident[voice]-constraints. Zsiga et al. (2006) uses acoustic data from Tswana to argue against the existence of the constraint *ND.
(3) Testing hypotheses on the architecture of the grammar. There are certain aspects of the architecture of an OT grammar that allow testing with experimental data. Davidson et al. (2004) uses both articulatory and perceptual experiments to test such basic principles as richness of the base and the initial-sate ranking of M >> F.
There is also research that points to potential problems in the architecture of OT grammars. Coleman and Pierrehumbert (1997), for instance, show that contrary to what is expected under the assumption of strictness of constraint domination, a nonce form with a single severe constraint violation is not necessarily rated as very bad in word-likeness rating tasks.
(4) Accounting for gradience in experimental data. Data collected through experiments are non-categorical. Since classic OT is a categorical model of grammar, experimental data pose a problem to classic OT. There have been several proposals for how classic OT can be expanded in order to account for these kinds of non-categorical data (Hayes 2000, Boersma and Hayes 2001, etc.)
References
Boersma, Paul and Bruce Hayes. 2001. Empirical tests for the Gradual Learning Algorithm. Linguistic Inquiry, 32.
Coleman, John and Janet Pierrehumbert. 1997. Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability. In 3rd Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology: Proceedings of the Workshop, 12 July 1997. Somerset: Association for Computational Linguistics. p. 49-56
Fleischhacker, Heidi. 2005. Similarity in Phonology: Evidence from Reduplication and Loan Adaptation. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA.
Hayes, Bruce. 2000. Gradient well-formedness in Optimality Theory. In Joost Dekkers, Frank van der Leeuw, and Jeroen van de Weijer, eds. Optimality Theory: Phonology, Syntax and Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kawahara, Shigeto. to appear. A faithfulness scale projected from a perceptibility scale: The case of [+voice] in Japanese. Language, 82(3).
Zsiga, Elizabeth, Maria Gouskova, and One Tlale. On the Status of Voiced Stops in Tswana: Against *ND. In C. Davis, A. Deal, Y. Zabbal, eds. Proceedings of NELS 36. Amherst: GLSA.
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STUDENTSHIPS
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Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, anticipates the availability of up to three doctoral scholarships within the Partnership International for Research and Education (PIRE)
Meaning Representations for Natural Language Processing =======================================================
The partnership for research and education (PIRE), established in 2005, is a collaborative PhD programme between
* Saarland University, Germany
* the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing headed by Eugene Charniak
* The Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing
(CLSP) headed by Frederick Jelinek
* Charles University (Jan Hajic), Czech Republic.
PIRE is also affiliated with our existing International Graduate College
(IGK) co-operation with Edinburgh University.
Each scholarship is funded for two years in the first instance, normally extendable for a third year. Doctoral degrees may be obtained in computational linguistics, phonetics, engineering or informatics, from Saarland University. The official language of the programme is English, and dissertations may be written in English or German.
The nature of the cooperation includes:
* Joint supervision of dissertations by lecturers from Saarbruecken and the US
* A six to twelve months research stay at Brown or Johns Hopkins University
* An intensive research exchange programme between all four participating sites (including, for example, an annual two-week forum attended by PhD students and lecturers from all four centres)
Academic staff in Saarbruecken are William Barry, Matthew Crocker, Martin Kay, Dietrich Klakow, Valia Kordoni, Jonas Kuhn, Manfred Pinkal, Hans Uszkoreit, and Wolfgang Wahlster
In Prague Jan Hajic is the coordinator
At Brown University Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson participate.
Academic staff at Johns Hopkins University are Frederick Jelinek, Jason Eisner, Bob Frank, Keith Hall, Sanjeev Khudanpur and Paul Smolensky.
The scholarship currently provides EURO 1468 per month (approximately USD 1835). Additional compensation includes family allowance (where applicable), travel funding, support for carrying out experiments, and an additional monthly allowance for the duration of the stay in the US.
Applicants should hold a strong university degree equivalent to the German Diplom or Magister (e.g. Master's level), in a relevant discipline. Applicants should not be more than 28 years of age. Female scientists and international students are particularly encouraged to apply.
Applications should include:
* a curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, disciplines covered (e.g. list of courses or transcript), publications, and other relevant experience
* a sample of written work (e.g. research paper, or dissertation, preferably in English)
* copies of high school and university
certificates
* two references (to be sent directly to the PIRE office)
* an informal cover letter specifying interests, previous knowledge and activities in any of the relevant research areas. Where possible it should include a brief outline of research interests to be pursued within the scholarship.
Up to three scholarships will be available from October 2006. Your application should be sent by ordinary mail to
PIRE office
Claudia Verburg
Department of Computational Linguistics
Saarland University
P.O. Box 15 11 50
D-66041 Saarbruecken
Germany
to by e-mail to [log in to unmask]
by 15. August 2006. Later applications may be considered subject to availability of scholarships.
For additional information please contact
Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow ([log in to unmask]) PD Dr. Valia Kordoni ([log in to unmask]) or Prof. Dr. Matthew Crocker ([log in to unmask])
See also:
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/igk/
http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/research/pire/
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/
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Scolarships at the University of Western Sydney
Dear colleagues: I am writing to let you and your undergraduate/MA students know that 10 scholarships are available for International Higher Degree Students (PhD, MA-Research) at University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia, for commencing studies in the next academic year. The scholarships include tuition plus stipend. Closing date for applications is 31 October 2006.
We at MARCS Auditory Laboratories would like to encourage international students who are interested in doing PhD study in any of a broad range of auditory and inter-modal research topics, to consider applying for one of these scholarships. MARCS is a flagship research centre at UWS. It has a wide range of research areas and PhD supervisors in auditory and related processes, including language (speech perception and production, reading), music and dance cognition, hearing and hearing impairment, and basic and applied auditory processes.
To learn more about us and our ongoing research projects, see http://marcs.uws.edu.au
Please pass this message along to recently-graduated or soon-to-graduate research oriented undergraduate (or MA) students who might be interested in PhD study at MARCS beginning in 2007.
I have attached the scholarship application form, which includes additional details about these international scholarships. Please have interested students contact me if they have questions about our research areas and/or ongoing research projects. If they have general questions about MARCS or the scholarship application, please contact Mel Gallagher, the MARCS Liaison Officer and Coordinator of Graduate Research Training.
Thank you!
Catherine Best
Director of Graduate Studies
Professor and Chair in Psycholinguistic Research MARCS Auditory Laboratories University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797 Penrith South DC, NSW 1797 Australia Ph +61 2 9772 6760 Fx +61 2 9772 6040 Mob +61 4 432 248 682
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Announcement: Official Release of a Formant-Trajectory Database
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The speech group at Microsoft Research (Redmond, Washington, US) and IPAM at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA, US) have recently jointly developed a database for manually labeled vocal-tract-resonance or formant trajectories, for research in speech processing including analysis, synthesis, and recognition. The database contains a representative subset of the TIMIT corpus with respect to speaker, gender, dialect and phonetic context, with a total of 538 sentences. A site has been set up for researchers to download the data (the download section of http://research.microsoft.com/~deng).
The download consists of data and USER MANUAL, as well as an ICASSP-2006 paper describing technical details of the database. Feedback will be greatly appreciated and can be sent to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
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The deadline for material for the October issue of foNETiks is 28 September 2006.
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