IEEE Signal Processing Society - SLTC Newsletter : January 2009 : What is the SLTC? A brief history

What is the SLTC? A brief history

Jason Williams

SLTC Newsletter, January 2009

Readers new to the newsletter may not be familiar with the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. This article provides a quick introduction and a brief history.

Overview

The "Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee" (SLTC) is a technical committee of the Signal Processing Society (SPS) of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

The overall aim of the SLTC is to promote activities in speech and language processing. Much of its efforts are devoted to the annual IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), where the SLTC manages reviews of papers covering speech and language, and organizes conference sessions, special sessions, and tutorials.

In addition, the SLTC has a number of other responsibilities. First, it promotes and supports workshops such as the workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) and the workshop on Automated Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU). It also endorses several events sponsored by other professional organizations such as, for instance, the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), The Human Language Technology Workshop (HLT), and SIGdial, the conference of the Special Interest Groups on Dialogue and Discourse.

Second, it makes nominations for IEEE awards, such as best paper and best column awards, technical achievement awards, and education awards. It also promotes the nomination of members to the IEEE Fellow grade, and promotes nominations for Distinguished Speakers.

Third, it supports the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing by reviewing articles and assisting the Editor-in-chief to identify Associate Editor candidates. In addition, the SLTC recommends changes for the sub-categories for paper submissions to the Transactions and ICASSP (called EDICS), promotes relations with ISCA and ACL, produces this quarterly newsletter, and interfaces with the Signal Processing Society and its Board of Governors to ensure that speech and language are adequately represented in conferences, workshops, fellowships awards, and across the IEEE.

The SLTC consists of up to 60 members who each serve a 3-year term, beginning Jan 1. There are currently 44 members. The terms overlap, so that each year about one third of the members are replaced. New members are nominated via a nominations sub-committee, and elected by a vote of the existing committee. The SLTC has no budget: its members are uncompensated volunteers.

The SLTC is the largest of 12 technical committees in the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Other technical committees include "Signal Processing Theory and Methods", "Audio and Electroacoustics", "Bio Imaging and Signal Processing", and "Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing".

History

The Speech and Language Technical committee traces its roots back to the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) Audio Group, which was founded in 1947 and met for the first time on March 22, 1948. The IRE Executive Committee (with real foresight!) originally named it the "Audio, Video and Acoustics Group", but its charter members shrunk the name to just the "Audio Group". Then in 1963 the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) to form the IEEE, and the Audio Group followed along into the IEEE. It changed names in 1965 to "Group on Audio and Electroacoustics", in 1974 to "Group on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing" (ASSP), and in 1976 to the "Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Society". From here, the name remained stable for 14 years, then changed names again in 1990 to become the "Signal Processing Society", which it remains today.

In 1968, this audio group established its first technical committee, on Digital Signal Processing. Then in late 1968 or early 1969, it established its second committee, called the "Speech Processing and Sensory Aids Technical Committee". At some point in the early 1970s "Sensory Aids" was dropped from the name, and for over 30 years it remained the "Speech Processing Technical Committee". Then in 2006 its scope was expanded and its name changed to the "Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee".

These early technical committees first organized and held workshops, and then in 1976, the ASSP Society held the first International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Philadelphia. It included 600 attendees and 226 published papers. ICASSP has continued each year since, and is now substantially larger, with the 2008 ICASSP attracting 2062 registered attendees and 1352 published papers.

As today, much of the early efforts of the Speech Processing Technical Committee were devoted to reviewing papers for ICASSP, but the process then looked much different. In the early days, the technical committees performed all of the reviews, with each member performing as many as 50 reviews. Hard-copies of extended abstracts were sent via postal mail to committee members, and the committee met together in New York City, then later in Piscataway, NJ, to make program decisions. Steve Young recalls, "We would stand in a room with all of the ICASSP proposals (paper only!) in piles and we would make sessions by physically placing the papers on top of sheets with the name of the session on. When we had a good paper but no session, we would wave it in the air and shout 'Could anybody use a paper on XY widgets in one of their sessions?' or 'I have a paper on XY widgets but I really need one on ZZ flow - can anybody do a swap'. It was hugely inefficient but great fun!" Today, external reviewers are used extensively, and all reviewing is electronic, removing the need for an in-person meeting.

Past Chairs of the SLTC (1990 - present)

2009-2010 : Steve Young, University of Cambridge
2007-2008 : Roberto Pieraccini, SpeechCycle, Inc.
2004-2006 : Mazin Gilbert, AT&T Labs Research
2002-2004 : Michael Picheny, IBM Research
2000-2002 : Alex Acero, Microsoft Research
1998-2000 : P. K. (Raja) Rajasekaran, Texas Instruments
1996-1998 : Chin-Hui Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology
1994-1996 : Jay Wilpon, AT&T Bell Labs
1992-1994 : Cliff Weinstein, MIT Lincoln Labs
1990-1992 : Rich Cox, AT&T Bell Labs
1988-1990 : Dan Kahn, Bell Communications Research (now at E-Speech Corporation)
1986-1988 : Steve Levinson, AT&T Bell Labs (now at University of Illinois)

Acknowledgements and more information

Thanks to Rich Cox, Jay Wilpon, Mazin Gilbert, Roberto Pieraccini, and Steve Young for providing extensive input to this article.

For more information, see:

If you have comments, corrections, or additions to this article, please contact the author: Jason Williams, jdw [at] research [dot] att [dot] com.