IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: Special Issue on Spoken Language Technology

The evolution of speech and language technologies over the past decade has spawned an exciting new research area known as Spoken Language Technology (SLT). Technological advances in SLT promise to provide ubiquitous and personalized access to information, communication, and entertainment services. For example, advances in natural language understanding and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition have resulted in a new generation of automated contact center services that offer callers the flexibility to speak their request naturally using their own words as opposed to the words dictated to them by the machine. Advances in machine translation technology have resulted in speech-to-speech translation products that offer multi-party multi-lingual communication. Advances in information search and data mining are providing the means to extract intelligence information from large corpora of speech data (e.g., TV programs, call center data) to help improve business operation and search for information rapidly without having to listen to conversations.

This special issue on Spoken Language Technology is motivated by the first SLT workshop, Aruba, December 2006, jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACL (www.slt2006.org). The goal is to solicit tutorial articles with comprehensive surveys of important theories, algorithms, tools, and applications of SLT on existing and new commercial, academic and government applications. Prospective authors should submit a white paper summarizing the motivation, the significance of the topic, brief history, and an outline of the content. Authors with accepted proposals will be invited to write a full manuscript.

Scope of topics: Publications inthe following areas are strongly encouraged.

• Spoken language understanding Dialog management Spoken language generation Spoken document retrieval Information extraction from speech Question answering from speech Spoken document summarization Machine translation of spoken language Speech data mining and search Voice-based human computer interfaces Spoken dialog systems, applications and standards Multimodal processing, systems and standards Machine learning for spoken language processing * Speech and language processing in the world wide web

Submission Procedure:

Prospective authors should submit white papers to the web submission system at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/spm/ according to the following timetable. White papers, limited to 3 single-column double-spaced pages, should summarize the motivation, the significance of the topic, a brief history, and an outline of the content. In all cases, prospective contributors should make sure to emphasize the signal processing in their submission.

Schedule White paper due: June 1, 2007 Invitation notification: July 15, 2007 Manuscript due: October 1, 2007 Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2007 Final Manuscript due: January 1, 2008 Publication date: May 2008