call for participation

ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on

modeling pronunciation variation
for automatic speech recognition

3-7 May 1998

at Rolduc, a former monastery in Kerkrade
in the south of the Netherlands
have a look at the congresscentre and the abbey


Organized by


European Speech Communication Association



COST Telecom Action 249
Continuous Speech Recognition over the Telephone

Automatic Acoustic Recognition Technologies

Dept. of Language & Speech
Nijmegen University

Automatic Speech Recognizers (ASRs) have improved substantially during the last decade. It has now become possible to use ASRs for many practical applications. However, when ASRs are used (and tested) under realistic conditions, the problem of pronunciation variation almost always emerges. This problem has been recognized by several research groups, and more and more effort is spent nowadays on solving it (see e.g. the steadily growing number of publications on this topic, especially in conference proceedings). During this workshop we want to discuss this problem in depth and the different ways in which it could be solved. Although part of pronunciation variation is certainly language-dependent (i.e. the phonological and phonetic processes differ between languages), a large part of the variation is language independent. Furthermore, the techniques that can be used to model pronunciation variation for ASR are usually language-independent.

More information about pronunciation variation & ASR in general, and the workshop in particular can be found here.

The workshop will consist of keynote presentations by renown scientists, and oral and poster presentations by authors of accepted papers. We intend not to have parallel sessions. There will be ample time for discussion.

The workshop will start on Monday morning (4 May) and last until Wednesday afternoon (6 May). On Wednesday afternoon and evening we will organize a social event. Participants are therefore advised to arrive on Sunday (evening) and check out on Thursday (morning). More practical information about the workshop can be found here.

22-10-1997 : deadline for submission of abstract

18-12-1997 : notification of acceptance

16-02-1998 : deadline for early registration

16-03-1998 : deadline for receipt of camera ready copy of paper

04-05-1998 : start of the workshop

The fee for the workshop, including proceedings, social event and full accommodation for 4 nights is :

O	ESCA student		 900 NLG
O	student			 950 NLG
O	ESCA member		1300 NLG
O	non-member		1400 NLG

If you register after 16-02-1998 you will be charged an extra fee of 200 NLG.

In order to avoid any misunderstandings, the fee includes:

a room at Rolduc for 4 nights

4x breakfast (Mo., Tu., We. & Th.)

3x lunch (Mo., Tu. & We.)

3x dinner (Mo., Tu. & We.)

social event on Wednesday

proceedings

The official language of the workshop will be English.

Instructions and style sheets for preparation of the papers can be found at the following 2 places:

ftp://lands.let.kun.nl/pub/strik/workshop/author.kit/

ftp://lands.let.kun.nl/pub/strik/workshop/icassp98/

The contributions to the workshop will be published in the conference proceedings which will be made available to the attendants at the beginning of the workshop. Click on this line to see the preliminary contents of the proceedings, and to obtain information on how to order (extra) copies of the proceedings.

URL /lands.let.kun.nl/TSpublic/strik/

---