Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter
February 2014
Welcome to the Spring 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 9 articles and announcements from 12 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions! This issue includes news about IEEE journals and recent workshops, SLTC call for nominations, and individual contributions.
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.
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Florian Metze, Editor-in-chief
William Campbell, Editor
Haizhou Li, Editor
Patrick Nguyen, Editor
From the SLTC and IEEE
From the IEEE SLTC Chair
Douglas O'Shaughnessy
CFPs, Jobs, and Announcements
Calls for Papers, Proposals, and Participation
Edited by William Campbell
Job Advertisements
Edited by William Campbell
Call for Proposals - ASRU 2015
Geoffrey Zweig
Following on the tremendous success of ASRU 2013, the SPS-SLTC invites proposals to host the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop in 2015. Past ASRU workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact.
Speech Synthesis Perfects Everyone's Singing
Minghui Dong, Nancy Chen, and Haizhou Li
Singing is more expressive than speaking. While singing is popular, singing well is nontrivial. This is especially true for songs that require high vocal skills. A singer needs to overcome two challenges among others - to sing in the right tune and at the correct rhythm. Even professional singers need intensive practice to perfect their vocal skills and to proficiently present particular singing styles, such as vibrato and resonance tuning. Recently, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore has developed a technology called Speech2Singing, which converts the singing voice of non-professional singers (or even spoken utterances) into perfect singing.
1 Billion Word Language Modeling Benchmark
Ciprian Chelba
Ciprian Chelba and colleagues released a language model benchmark and would like to advertise it to the speech community. The purpose of the project is to make available a standard training and test setup for language modeling experiments.
An Overview of ASRU 2013
Tara N. Sainath and Jan (Honza) Cernocky
The Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) was recently hosted in Olomouc, Czech Republic from December 8-12, 2013. Each day of the workshop focused on a specific current theme that has become popular amongst ASR researchers. In this report, we highlight the 4 days of the workshop, and touch on some papers in more detail.
Speech and Audio Highlights from MediaEval 2013
Gareth J. F. Jones and Martha Larson
MediaEval is a benchmarking initiative dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. While it emphasizes the 'multi' in multimedia and focuses on human and social aspects of multimedia task, speech and audio processing is a key component of several MediaEval tasks each year. MediaEval 2013 featured a total of 12 tasks exploring aspects of multimedia indexing, search and interaction, five of which involved significant elements of speech and audio processing, which we will discuss in this article.
Asia Information Retrieval Societies conference 2013
Rafael E. Banchs, Min Zhang, and Ming Hui Dong
AIRS 2013, the ninth edition of the Asia Information Retrieval Societies conference, took place from 9th to 11th December 2014 in Singapore. The conference was attended by a total of 85 participants from more than 20 countries. The technical program comprised 45 papers, from which 27 were selected for oral presentations and 18 for poster presentations.