Appel: Special issue, ACM TACCESS on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology (SLPAT)

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:22:25 +0100
From: François Portet <Francois.Portet at imag.fr>
Message-ID: <527AA501.40709 at imag.fr>


*Call for Papers - Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Accessible
Computing (TACCESS) On Speech and Language Interaction for Daily
Assistive Technology *

/Guest Editors: François Portet, Frank Rudzicz, Jan Alexandersson, Heidi
Christensen/

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do
things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Many assistive
technologies involve providing universal access, such as modifications
to televisions or telephones to make them accessible to those with
vision or hearing impairments. An important sub-discipline within this
community is Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which has
its focus on communication technologies for those with impairments that
interfere with some aspect of human communication, including spoken or
written modalities. Another important sub-discipline is Ambient Assisted
Living (AAL) which facilitates independent living; these technologies
break down the barriers faced by people with physical or cognitive
impairments and support their relatives and caregivers. These
technologies are expected to improve quality-of-life of users and
promote independence, accessibility, learning, and social connectivity.

Speech and natural language processing (NLP) can be used in AT/AAC in a
variety of ways including, improving the intelligibility of
unintelligible speech, and providing communicative assistance for frail
individuals or those with severe motor impairments. The range of
applications and technologies in AAL that can rely on speech and NLP
technologies is very large, and the number of individuals actively
working within these research communities is growing, as evidenced by
the successful INTERSPEECH 2013 satellite workshop on Speech and
Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT). In particular,
one of the greatest challenges in AAL is to design smart spaces (e.g.,
at home, work, hospital) and intelligent companions that anticipate user
needs and enable them to interact with and in their daily environment
and provide ways to communicate with others. This technology can benefit
each of visually-, physically-, speech- or cognitively- impaired
persons.

Topics of interest for submission to this special issue include (but are
not limited to):

- Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces designed for people
  with physical or cognitive impairments

- Applications of speech and NLP technology (automatic speech
  recognition, synthesis, dialogue, natural language generation) for AT
  applications

- Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AT applications

- Long-term adaptation of speech/NLP based AT system to user's change

- User studies, overview of speech/NLP technology for AT: understanding
  the user's needs and future speech and language based technologies.

- Understanding, modeling and recognition of aged or disordered speech

- Speech analysis and diagnosis: automatic recognition and detection of
  speech pathologies and speech capability loss

- Speech-based distress recognition

- Automated processing of symbol languages, sign language and nonverbal
  communication including translation systems.

- Text and audio processing for improved comprehension and
  intelligibility, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech

- Evaluation methodology of systems and components in the lab and in the 
  wild.

- Resources; corpora and annotation schemes

- Other topics in AAC, AAL, and AT

*Submission process*

Contributions must not have been previously published or be under
consideration for publication elsewhere, although substantial extensions
of conference or workshop papers will be considered. as long as they
adhere to ACM's minimum standards regarding prior publication
(http://www.acm.org/pubs/sim_submissions.html). Studies involving
experimentations with real target users will be appreciated. All
submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as
published in the Journal website at http://www.rit.edu/gccis/taccess/.

Submissions should follow the journal's suggested writing format
(http://www.gccis.rit.edu/taccess/authors.html) and should be submitted
through Manuscript Central http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taccess,
indicating that the paper is intended for the Special Issue. All papers
will be subject to the peer review process and final decisions regarding
publication will be based on this review.

*Important dates:*

- Full paper submission: 31^st March 2014

- Response to authors: 30^th June 2014

- Revised submission deadline: 31^st August 2014

- Notification of acceptance: 31^st October 2014

- Final manuscripts due: 30^th November 2014

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