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foNETiks
A newsletter for
The International Phonetic Association
and for the Phonetic Sciences
January 2012
**Best wishes for 2012 to all our readers**
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Linda Shockey, University of Reading, UK.
Gerry Docherty, Newcastle University, UK.
Shira Katseff, University of Canterbury, NZ.
Lisa Lim, The University of Hong Kong.
E-mail address: fonetiks-request at jiscmail.ac.uk
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.langsci.ucl.ac.uk
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
[new ones marked ##]
[date of first appearance follows]
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18-21 January 2012. 9th Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP9). Berlin, Germany. http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_ocp9.html (03/11)
## 26-27 January 2012. Workshop on Tone and Intonation - WTI-2012.Guwahati, Assam, India. http://www.iitg.ernet.in/hss/WTI2012/ (1/12)
1-2 March 2012. The Phonology of Contemporary English: Variation and Change (PAC 2012). Toulouse, France. http://w3.pac.univ-tlse2.fr (07/11)
23-24 March 2012. 3rd Belgrade International Meeting of English Phoneticians (BIMEP 2012). Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia. (12/11)
## 26-28 March 2012. Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Leeds. http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~lnpbaap/ (1/12) [further information below]
27 March 2012. GLOW workshop on Prosodically-Coded Information Structure, Potsdam, Germany http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~glow (10/11)
29 March 2012. L2 Prosody Workshop, Bangor, Wales, United Kingdom. http://www.bilingualism.bangor.ac.uk/events/L2_Prosody_Workshop.php.en (11/11)
22-24 April 2012. 2nd International Phonetics & Phonology Conference Shanghai. Shanghai, China. (07/11)
2-3 May 2012. The Listening Talker: An interdisciplinary workshop on natural and synthetic modification of speech in response to listening conditions. University of Edinburgh, UK. http://listening-talker.org/workshop (11/11, 12/11)
2-4 May 2012. 2nd Workshop on Sound Change, Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany. http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/institut/veranstaltungen/soundchange/ (12/11)
4-5 May 2012. 7th North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC7). Montreal, Quebec, Canada. http://linguistics.concordia.ca/naphc7/ (12/11)
22-25 May 2012. 6th International Conference, Speech Prosody 2012. Prosody in the real world: Understanding and approaching human prosodic performance. Shanghai, China. http://www.speechprosody2012.org/ (12/11)
27-29 May 2012. International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL). Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. http://www.TAL2012.org (11/11, 12/11)
29 May 2012, Discourse Coherence and Prosody (CDP2012). Lille, France. http://evenements.univ-lille3.fr/je-cdp (12/11)
4-6 June 2012. International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC) 2012. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~munso005/ChildPhonology (12/11)
25-28 June 2012. Odyssey 2012: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop. An ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop. Singapore. http://www.odyssey2012.org/ (12/11)
## 27 - 30 June 2012. 14th International Clinical Phonetics & Linguistics Association (ICPLA) Conference, Cork, Ireland. http://www.icpla2012.com/ (1/12) [further information below]
2 July 2012. Teaching and Learning Pronunciation: Local and global perspectives on research and practice. Cairns, Australia. http://www.astmanagement.com.au/acta12/index.html (12/10)
19-21 July 2012. Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing (PoRT). Glasgow, United Kingdom. http://www.gla.ac.uk/rhythmsinscotland/ (12/11)
27-29 July 2012. 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon13). Stuttgart, Germany. http://www.labphon13.labphon.org/ (12/11)
15-17 August 2012. Nordic Prosody XI. Tartu, Estonia. http://www.nordicprosody.ut.ee/ (07/11)
## 3 - 5 September 2012. International Symposium on Imitation and Convergence in Speech - ISICS 2012. Aix-en-Provence, France. http://spim.risc.cnrs.fr/ISICS.htm (1/12)[further information below]
## 5 - 7 September 2012. Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics - AVML. York, United Kingdom. http://avml2012.wordpress.com/ (1/12) [further information below]
9 - 13 September 2012. InterSpeech 2012, Portland, Oregon, USA. http://interspeech2012.org (11/11)
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CONFERENCES
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Call for Participation
INTERSPEECH 2012 (9-13 September 2012)
Speaker Trait Challenge
Personality, Likability, Pathology
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge
The Challenge
Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more "conventional" phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last instalment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and intoxication. Consequently, we now focus on speaker traits. The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain.
In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results.
Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:
. In the Personality Sub-Challenge, the personality of a speaker has to be determined based on acoustics potentially including linguistics for the OCEAN five personality dimensions, each mapped onto two classes.
. In the Likability Sub-Challenge, the likability of a speaker's voice has to be determined by a learning algorithm and acoustic features. While the annotation provides likability in multiple levels, the classification task is binarised.
. In the Pathology Sub-Challenge, the intelligibility of a speaker has to be determined by a classification algorithm and acoustic features.
The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Recall of the two classes. Transcription of the train and development sets will be known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature set will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have to stick to the definition of training, development, and test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but have only five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes peer-review and has to be accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge. The organisers preserve the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves in the Challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in all Sub-Challenges.
Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:
. Participation in the Personality Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Likability Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Pathology Sub-Challenge
. Novel features and algorithms for the analysis of speaker traits
. Unsupervised learning methods for speaker trait analysis
. Perception studies, additional annotation and feature analysis on the given sets
. Context exploitation in speaker trait assessment
The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in the Speaker Trait Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage:
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge
Organisers:
Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Rob van Son (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands)
If you want to participate, please find the License Agreement at:
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS12-STC-Agreement.pdf
Thank you for excusing cross-postings.
All the best,
Björn Schuller
On behalf of the Organisers
[log in to unmask]
www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch
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International Symposium on Imitation and Convergence in Speech - ISICS 2012
Aix-en-Provence, France
3-5 September 2012
In the course of a conversational interaction, the behavior of each talker often tends to become more similar to that of the conversational partner. Such convergence effects have been shown to manifest themselves under many different forms, which include posture, body movements, facial expressions, and speech. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate their conversational exchange. It occurs, by definition, within a social interaction, but has consequences for language that extend well beyond the temporal limits of that interaction. It has been suggested that imitation plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. The behavioral tendency shown by humans to imitate others may be connected at the brain level with the presence of mirror neurons, whose discovery has raised important issues about the role that these neurons may fulfill in many different domains, from sensorimotor integration to the understanding of others' behavior.
The focus of this international symposium will be the fast-growing body of research on convergence phenomena between speakers in speech. The symposium will also aim to assess current research on the brain and cognitive underpinnings of imitative behavior. Our main goal will be to bring together researchers with a large variety of scientific backgrounds (linguistics, speech sciences, psycholinguistics, experimental sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences) with a view to improving our understanding of the role of imitation in the production, comprehension and acquisition of spoken language.
The symposium is organized by the laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France (www.lpl.univ-aix.fr). It will be chaired by Noël Nguyen (LPL) and Marc Sato (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), and will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines.
Invited Speakers:
Luciano Fadiga, University of Ferrara, Italy
Maëva Garnier, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Beatrice Szczepek Reed, University of York, United Kingdom
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Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics
York, United Kingdom
5-7 September 2012
http://www.avml2012.wordpress.com
Linguistics, like many other scientific disciplines, is centrally reliant upon visual images for the elicitation, analysis and presentation of data. It is difficult to imagine how linguistics could have developed, and how it could be done today, without visual representations such as syntactic trees, psychoperceptual models, vocal tract diagrams, dialect maps, or spectrograms. Complex multidimensional data can be condensed into forms that can be easily and immediately grasped in a way that would be considerably more taxing, even impossible, through textual means. Transforming our numerical results into graphical formats, according to Cleveland (1993: 1), 'provides a front line of attack, revealing intricate structure in data that cannot be absorbed in any other way. We discover unimagined effects, and we challenge imagined ones.' Or, as Keith Johnson succinctly puts it, 'Nothing beats a picture' (2008: 6).
So embedded are the ways we visualize linguistic data and linguistic phenomena in our research and teaching that it is easy to overlook the design and function of these graphical techniques. Yet the availability of powerful freeware and shareware packages which can produce easily customised publication-quality images means that we can create visual enhancements to our research output more quickly and more cheaply than ever before. Crucially, it is very much easier now than at any time in the past to experiment with imaginative and innovative ideas in visual methods. The potential for the inclusion of enriched content (animations, films, colour illustrations, interactive figures, etc.) in the ever-increasing quantities of research literature, resource materials and new textbooks being published, especially online, is enormous. There is clearly a growing appetite among the academic community for the sharing of inventive graphical methods, to judge from the contributions made by researchers to the websites and blogs that have proliferated in recent years (e.g. Infosthetics, Information is Beautiful, Cool Infographics, BBC Dimensions, or Visual Complexity).
In spite of the ubiquity and indispensability of graphical methods in linguistics it does not appear that a conference dedicated to sharing techniques and best practices in this domain has taken place before. This is less surprising when one considers that virtually nothing has been published specifically on the subject (an exception is Stewart, 1976). We think it is important that researchers from a broad spectrum of linguistic disciplines spend time discussing how their work can be done more efficiently, and how it can achieve greater impact, using the profusion of flexible and intuitive graphical tools at their disposal.
The Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York is hosting 'Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics' on September 6-7, 2012. The conference will be preceded by a half-day workshop on the afternoon of Wednesday September 5.
The venue for the conference is the Berrick Saul Building on the Heslington West campus of the University of York. Accommodation on campus will be available.
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ICPLA Conference 2012
Cork, Ireland
27-30 June 2012
http://www.icpla2012.com
The 14th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association will be at University College Cork, Ireland, on June 27-30 2012. The conference will run in our vibrant new Medicine and Health building, which overlooks the River Lee. You will find that Cork city has good transport links, with direct flights from numerous locations in Europe and further afield. There is also a good road and train network. The University itself is close to the city centre and just a 15-minute drive from Cork airport. The organising committee is working on the scientific programme, which will consist of a combination of plenary talks, thematic panels, and general oral and poster sessions. As in previous years, a wide range of topics will be covered, including:
- Clinical phonetics
- Clinical linguistics
- Assessment, treatment and methodology in speech and language pathology
- Acquired and developmental language disorders
- Audiology, hearing impairment
- Communication disorders across languages
As a country renowned for its céad míle fáilte - which translated from the Irish language means a hundred thousand welcomes - we extend a warm welcome to you and invite you to join us at the next ICPLA conference in Cork. We hope that you will extend your stay in Ireland by visiting some of the beautiful countryside of the west coast of Ireland as well as historic sites such as Blarney castle in the local area.
Slán
Alice Lee
Fiona Gibbon
Organising Committee:
Nicola Bessell
Clara Egan
Paul Fletcher
Pauline Frizelle
Nicole Kennedy
Ciara O'Toole
Marcin Szczerbinski
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2012 Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians
26-28 March 2012
University of Leeds
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~lnpbaap/
BAAP is the professional organisation for phoneticians in the British Isles. Its members are involved in research in phonetics, in teaching phonetics in higher education, and in the application of phonetic knowledge in areas such as speech and language therapy, speech technology and forensic science. The Association holds a regular Colloquium, currently every two years. This provides an opportunity for members and invited participants to meet, present their research, and discuss issues of concern to the academic community.
The next BAAP Colloquium will take place from Monday 26 March to Wednesday 28 March 2012, and is hosted by the University of Leeds.
We look forward to welcoming you in Leeds!
If you are a member of BAAP and you have not received any emails about the Leeds Colloquium so far, please contact the organising committee.
If you are a non-member and you are interested in attending the Colloquium at Leeds, please contact the organising committee.
Dr Barry Heselwood
Dr Paul Carter
Dr Leendert Plug
<[log in to unmask]>
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Workshop on Tone and Intonation (WTI-2012)
26-27 January 2012
Guwahati, Assam, India
http://www.iitg.ernet.in/hss/WTI2012/
The focus of this workshop is on tone and intonation, aspects of speech which are crucial for language and communication. Significantly, these aspects of speech are also indispensable in the development of speech technology.
In this workshop we lay emphasis on certain aspects of speech and communication in its diverse but interconnected and related forms, i.e. linguistics, speech & signal processing and other computational aspects. The workshop includes invited talks by scholars working in the domain of speech and language and provides a platform for interdisciplinary interaction among students, scholars and faculties working on tone and intonation.
The workshop is organized by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences from 26-27 January 2012. The workshop venue is the New Conference Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.
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POSITIONS VACANT
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University of California Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu
Lecturer/Visiting Assistant Professor
Pending budgetary approval, the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics is
accepting applications for a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor (or Lecturer)
position in Phonetics and Phonology for the 2012-13 academic year. The
appointee will teach 4-6 courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. Additional strength in morphology, corpus linguistics, neuroscience
and/or a particular language area would be considered an asset but is not
necessary.
Title and salary, commensurate with experience, will be based on established
UC Berkeley salary scales, with benefits according to the standard UC
Berkeley benefits package.
Applicants are requested to send application materials by email. These
should include a vita, a cover letter describing experience and interests in
both teaching and research, sample papers, and documentation of teaching
record (including teaching evaluations). Applicants should also request three
letters of recommendation to be sent by email from individuals familiar with
their work. Applications will be reviewed starting on March 16, 2012. The
position will remain open until filled.
All application materials and questions should be sent to:
[log in to unmask]
UC Berkeley is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.
Application Deadline:
15-Mar-2012
Open until filled
Contact: Paula Floro, Manager
[log in to unmask]
Phone: 510-643-7623 Fax: 510-643-5688
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The deadline for material for the next foNETiks newsletter is 27 January 2012.
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