Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter
July 2011
Welcome to the Summer 2011 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter.
In this issue we are pleased to provide another installment of brief articles representing a diversity of views and backgrounds. This issue includes articles from 23 authors, including contributors and our own staff reporters and editors.
We believe the newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials which don't fit well with traditional journals. We welcome your contributions, as well as calls for papers, job announcements, comments and suggestions. You can submit job postings here, and reach us at speechnewseds [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.
Finally, to subscribe the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.
Jason Williams, Editor-in-chief
Pino Di Fabbrizio, Editor
Martin Russell, Editor
Chuck Wooters, Editor
From the SLTC and IEEE
From the IEEE SLTC chair
John H. L. Hansen
Notes from ICASSP 2011, and Speech and Language Processing for In-Vehicle Applications
IEEE Signal Processing Society Newsletter
The IEEE Signal Processing Society, our parent organization, also produces a monthly newsletter, "Inside Signal Processing".
CFPs, Jobs, and book announcements
Calls for papers, proposals, and participation
Edited by Chuck Wooters
Job advertisements
Edited by Chuck Wooters
Incorporating Laughter into Human-Avatar Interactions: Research and Evaluation - The ILHAIRE project
Olivier Pietquin and Stephane Dupont
The ILHAIRE project (pronounce "ill-hair") is a new project funded under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) chapter of the 7th framework program of the European Community, starting in September 2011. Its purpose is to study the role of laughter during interactions between humans and machines. It will involve 9 partners across 6 European countries: University of Mons (Belgium, coordinator), CNRS (France), Univesity of Augsburg (Germany), Universita degli Studi di Genova (Italy), University College London (UK), Queen's University Belfast (UK), University of Zurich (Switzerland), Supelec (France), La Cantoche Production (France).
Book review: "Symbols and Embodiment: Debates on meaning and cognition"
Antonio Roque
This book review discusses "Symbols and Embodiment: Debates on meaning and cognition", edited by Manuel de Vega, Arthur Glenberg, and Arthur Graesser, which contains many ideas useful to language technologists.
Advances in Acoustic Modeling from ICASSP 2011
Tara N. Sainath
The 36th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) was recently hosted in Prague, Czech Republic from May 22-27. The conference included lectures and poster sessions in a variety of speech and signal processing areas. In this article, some of the main acoustic modeling sessions at the conference are discussed in more detail.
The GIVE challenge: generating instructions in virtual environments
Kristina Striegnitz and Mariët Theune
This article describes the GIVE challenge, which is a shared task to evaluate natural language generation (NLG) systems. The NLG systems have to generate, in real-time, instructions that guide a human user through a virtual environment. The data-collection is carried out over the Internet. Currently, data is being collected for the third installment of the GIVE challenges. Go to www.give-challenge.org to try it out.
The Next Big Thing in Computing
Michael J. Carey, Abualsoud Hanani and Martin J. Russell
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) were developed to deliver the video quality required by modern computer games. However they have much wider applications, including computationally intensive tasks in speech and language processing.
Living rooms getting smarter with multimodal and multichannel signal processing
Dimitrios B. Dimitriadis and Juergen Schroeter
This article gives a short description of how emerging technologies, and more specifically, multimodal and multichannel signal processing, can improve the interaction between users and machines in the living-room “technology battle-field”.
SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue), 15th annual workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
Sudeep Gandhe and Ron Artstein
SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue), the 15th annual workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, will be held in Los Angeles at the Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California on 21-23 September 2011.
Robotics: Science and Systems Workshop on Grounding Human-Robot Dialog for Spatial Tasks
Matthew Marge, Thomas Kollar, Stefanie Tellex, Robert Ross, and Antoine Raux
The just-completed Robotics: Science and Systems workshop on Grounding Human-Robot Dialog for Spatial Tasks aimed to identify key challenges related to situated dialogue for navigation and manipulation.