ParaLing'07: Paralinguistic speech - between models and data

Workshop Details

This two-day workshop is concerned with the general area of paralinguistic speech, and will place special emphasis on attempts to narrow the gap between "models" (usually built making strong simplifying assumptions) and "real data" (usually showing a high degree of complexity).

01 August 2007 - 02 August 2007

Saarbrücken, Germany

http://www.dfki.de/paraling07

Call for Papers
Papers are invited in a broad range of topics related to paralinguistic speech. Papers can be submitted for oral or poster presentation; acceptance for oral presentation is more likely for papers that explicitly address the general theme of the workshop, i.e. "bridging" issues.

There are at least two different versions of bridging: a weak one and a strong one. The weak, more modest one aims at a better mutual understanding, the strong one at profiting from each other's work. We do not know yet whether after these two days, we really will be able to profit from each other in our own work; however, we do hope that we will have reached a level of mutual understanding that will make future co-operation easier.

WORKSHOP THEME

Research on various aspects of paralinguistic and extralinguistic speech has gained considerable importance in recent years. On the one hand, models have been proposed for describing and modifying voice quality and prosody related to factors such as emotional states or personality. Such models often start with high-intensity states (e.g., full-blown emotions) in clean lab speech, and are difficult to generalise to everyday speech. On the other hand, systems have been built to work with moderate states in real-world data, e.g. for the recognition of speaker emotion, age, or gender. Such models often rely on statistical methods, and are not necessarily based on any theoretical models.

While both research traditions are obviously valid and can be justified by their different aims, it seems worth asking whether there is anything they can learn from each other. For example: "Can models become more robust by incorporating methods used for dealing with real-world data?"; "Can recognition rates be improved by including ideas from theoretical models?"; "How would a database need to be structured so that it can be used for both, research on model-based synthesis and research on recognition?" etc.

While the workshop will be open to any kind of research on paralinguistic speech, the workshop structure will support the presentation and creation of cross-links in several ways:

papers with an explicit contribution to cross-linking issues will stand a higher chance to be accepted as oral papers;
sessions and proceedings will include space for peer comments and answers from authors;
poster sessions will be organised around cross-cutting issues rather than traditional research fields, where possible.

We therefore encourage prospective participants to place their research into a wider perspective. This can happen in many ways; as illustrations, we outline two possible approaches.

1. In application-oriented research, such as synthesis or recognition, a guiding principle could be the requirements of the "ideal" application: for example, the recognition of finely graded shades of emotions, for all speakers in all situations; or fully natural-sounding synthesis with freely specifiable expressivity; etc. This perspective is likely to highlight the hard problems of today's state of the art, and a cross-cutting perspective may lead to innovative approaches yielding concrete steps to reduce the distance towards the "ideal".

2. A second illustration of attaining a wider perspective would be to attempt to cross-link work in generative modelling (e.g., expressive speech synthesis) and analysis (e.g., recognition of expressivity from speech). Researchers on generation are invited to investigate the relevance of their work for analysis, and vice versa. What methodologies, corpora or descriptive inventories exist that could be shared between analysis and generation, or at least mapped onto each other? If certain parameters have proven to be relevant in one area, to what degree is it possible to transfer them to the other area? Issues of relevance in this area may include, among other things, personalisation, speaker dependency vs. independency, links between voice conversion in synthesis and speaker calibration in (automatic) recognition or (human) perception, etc.

TOPICS

Paper are invited in all areas related to paralinguistic speech, including, but not limited, to the following topics:

prosody of paralinguistic speech
voice quality and paralinguistic speech
synthesis of paralinguistic speech (model-based, data-driven, ...)
recognition/classification of paralinguistic properties of speech
analysis of paralinguistic speech (acoustics, physiology, ...)
assessment and perception of paralinguistic speech
typology of paralinguistic speech (emotion, expression, attitude, physical states, ...)

While all papers must be related to paralinguistic speech, papers making the link with a related area, e.g. investigating the interaction of the speech signal with the meaning of the verbal content, are explicitly welcome.

IMPORTANT DATES

1st call for papers	1 December 2006
2nd call for papers	1 February 2007
Deadline for full-paper submission	22 April 2007 (extended deadline!)
Notification of acceptance	1 June 2007
Final version of accepted papers	15 June
Workshop	2-3 August 2007

LOCATION AND REGISTRATION FEES

The workshop will take place at DFKI on the campus of Saarland University, Germany; on the same campus, the International Conference of Phonetic Sciences will take place during the following week.

Workshop registration fees: To be calculated, but will be around ~150 EUR

SUBMISSIONS

The workshop will consist of oral and poster presentations. Submitted papers will stand a higher chance of being accepted as oral presentations when the relevance to the workshop theme is evident.

Final submissions should be 6 pages long, and must be in English. Word+Latex+OpenOffice templates will be made available on the workshop website.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Marc Schröder	DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany
Anton Batliner	University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Christophe d'Alessandro	LIMSI, Paris, France

Programme Committee

Noam Amir	Tel Aviv University, Israel
Véronique Aubergé	ICP, Grenoble, France
Tanja Bänziger	U. Geneva, Switzerland
Louis ten Bosch	U. Nijmegen, Netherlands
Felix Burkhardt	T-Systems, Germany
Nick Campbell	ATR, Tokyo, Japan
Roddy Cowie	QUB, Belfast, UK
Laurence Devillers	Limsi, France
Ellen Douglas-Cowie	QUB, Belfast, UK
Thierry Dutoit	Mons, Belgium
Raul Fernandez	IBM, USA
Christer Gobl	TCD, Dublin, Ireland
Julia Hirschberg	Columbia University, USA
Hideki Kawahara	Wakayama University, Japan
Jody Kreiman	UCLA, USA
Sacha Krstulovic	DFKI, Germany
Diane Litman	U. Pittsburgh, USA
Parham Mokhtari	ATR, Tokyo, Japan
Roger Moore	U. Sheffield, UK
Christian Müller	ICSI, Berkeley, USA
Thierry Moudenc	France Telecom, France
Shrikanth Narayanan	UCLA, USA
Elmar Nöth	U. Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Björn Schuller	Tech. Univ. Munich, Germany
Izhak Shafran	OGI, Portland, USA
Elizabeth Shriberg	SRI, Menlo Park, USA
Jianhua Tao	Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Jürgen Trouvain	U. Saarland, Germany
Enrico Zovato	Loquendo, Italy

Deadline: 21 April 2007

This is a

event.

Sections

Personal tools