Tuesday, March 27, 11:30-12:30, Main Hall: "Audio and Acoustics Signal Processing: the Quest for High Fidelity continues", by Karlheinz Brandenburg

Wednesday, March 28, 9:00-10:00: Room A: "From Signal Processing to Information Extraction of Speech: A New Perspective on Automatic Speech Recognition", by Chin-Hui Lee

Tutorials are also an excellent chance to see overviews and learn of the latest advancements in speech and language processing in a focused block of time. With mobile technology advancing, improved speech and language or man-machine interaction is seeing significant growth (as highlighted in the recent IEEE ESPA-2012 conference (Emerging Signal Processing Applications: http://www.ieee-espa.org/) in Las Vegas, NV as a companion meeting to the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). For ICASSP-2012, there are four tutorials which are speech/language related:

Sunday, March 25, 13:30 - 16:30
T-1: The Voice Behind the Speech: Speaker States, Traits, and Vocal Behavior
Björn Schuller and Florian Metze
T-2: Speech Modeling and Enhancement Using Diffusion Maps
Israel Cohen, Sharon Gannot, and Ronen Talmon
Monday, March 26, 09:30 - 12:30
T-6: Reverberant Speech Processing for Human Communication and Automatic Speech Recognition
Tomohiro Nakatani, Armin Sehr, and Walter Kellermann
Monday, March 26, 14:00 - 17:00
T-10: Bayesian Learning for Speech and Language Processing
Shinji Watanabe, Jen-Tzung Chien

Many Industry Vendors/Exhibitors who support speech and language processing are also participating including the following participants: [http://www.icassp2012.com/Exhibitors.asp]

• AppenButler Hill
• LDC: Linguistics Data Consortium
• Nuance
• SpeechOcean
• Starkey Hearing Aids
• Texas Instruments

We very much wish to acknowledge and thank Industry for your continued support of ICASSP!

Speech and language processing continues to be largest technical concentration area within ICASSP, and hope all will visit Kyoto and participate in this year's conference.

IEEE SPS Challenges/Competitions: As a second item here for this newsletter, I would like to bring to your attention interest from the IEEE Signal Processing Society to establish more IEEE SPS Competitions. The SLTC received request from SPS to suggest potential topics/areas for new competitions for future SPS activities. Such friendly challenges serve as an excellent opportunity for researchers to circle their efforts onto a focused issue to bring about collective advancements on problems which in general continue to be a challenge for the community. Since the speech and language community has been very active in competitions (or challenges), the SLTC embarked on process to collect feedback and summarize events over the past decade or so relating to speech and language processing. We sought out help and input from colleagues within ISCA (International Speech Communications Association [http://www.isca-speech.org/]) who have been active in this domain for some time. With the help of some key contributors, including the SLTC External Relations Sub-committee, we collected the following list of challenges (thanks to: Isabel Trancoso, Peter Li, Antonio Bonafonte, Doug O'Shaughnessy, Honza Cernocky):

Summary

• Blizzard Challenge: Corpus-based speech synthesis: SynSIG (since 2005)
  http://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge

• Spoken Dialog Challenge: Carnegie Mellon University:
  http://dialrc.org/sdc/

• Speaker Trait Challenge: Personality, Likability, Pathology: Humaine, INTERSPEECH (2012)
  http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

• Emotion Challenge: Humaine, INTERSPEECH (2009)
  http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/emotion-challenge

• Paralinguistic Challenge: Age, Gender, and Affect: Humaine, INTERSPEECH (2010)
  http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/paralinguistic-challenge

• Speaker State Challenge: Intoxication and Sleepiness: Humaine, INTERSPEECH (2011)
  http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is11-speaker-state-challenge

• Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE): NIST (1996, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011)
  http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/lre.cfm

• Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE): NIST (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011)
  http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/sre.cfm

• Machine Translation Evaluation: for GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation)
  NIST (2006, 2007, 2008) - follow-on is BOLT & BABEL
  http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/gale.cfm

• BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) [DARPA (2011/12)]
  http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/2011/04/19_DARPA_initiates_overarching_language_translation_research_Publishes_Broad_Agency_Announcement_for_Broad_Operational_Language_Translation_program.aspx
  (public page on the evaluation not available at this time)

• BABEL (rapid speech recognition advancements for low resource languages): [IARPA (2011/12)]
  http://www.iarpa.gov/Babel_PD_post.pdf
  (public page on the evaluation not available at this time)

• BEST (IARPA Phase I): BEST Evaluation Speaker Track: NIST and IARPA 2011
  http://www.iarpa.gov
  (public page on the evaluation not available)

• Rich Transcription Evaluation: NIST (2002-2009)
  http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/rt.cfm
  

• CLEAR (Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships) Evaluation: Acoustic Event Detection and Classification:
  NIST and CHIL project (2007)
  http://www.clear-evaluation.org/

• Spoken Term Detection: NIST (2006)
  http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/std/
  

• Broadcast News Recognition: NIST (1996 - 1999)
  http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/ctr/

• Spoken Document Retrieval: NIST (1997 - 2000)
  http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/sdr/

• Topic Detection and Tracking: NIST (1998 - 2004)
  http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/tdt/

• Spoken Language Translation: IWSLT (2010, 2011)
  http://iwslt2010.fbk.eu/
  http://iwslt2011.org/

• Albayzin: Iberian languages (speech synthesis, audio segmentation, speaker diarization, language recognition)
  Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla, SIG-IL (2006, 2008, 2010)
  http://fala2010.uvigo.es/

• ESTER (Évaluation des Systèmes de Transcription Enrichie d'Émissions Radiophoniques)
  ETAPE (Évaluations en Traitement Automatique de la Parole)
  AFCP
  http://www.afcp-parole.org/
  

• Dutch ASR evaluation: N-Best 2008: TNO Human Factors (2008)
  http://speech.tm.tno.nl/n-best/eval/

• EVALITA '09 Speaker Identity Verification: Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB) 2009
  http://evalita.fbk.eu/speaker.html

• Evaluation of Keyword spotting in Czech: Ministry of Interior, Czech Republic, 2008
  http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/sl-tc/spl-nl/2009-Jan/czech-keyword-spotting/

• MOBIO ICPR 2010: Face and Speaker Verification Evaluation: MOBIO project - IDIAP, University of Oulu, Brno University of Technology, 2010
  http://www.mobioproject.org/icpr-2010

Given this extensive list of activities, the SLTC recommended to the IEEE SPS that the speech and language processing field is well represented and we did not recommend any new topics. However, if someone feels an interest, please contact the SLTC and our group would be happy to discuss an option to help coordinate!

In closing, I hope you will join the SLTC in participating in IEEE ICASSP-2012 in Kyoto, Japan in March 25-30, 2012. We look forward to seeing friends and colleagues and seeing the cherry blossoms in beautiful Kyoto, Japan.

Best wishes…

John H.L. Hansen

February 2012

John H.L. Hansen is Chair, Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee.