19.2611, Calls: Lang Acq,Psycholing/USA; Phonology,Phonetics/India

Mon Aug 25 17:27:27 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2611. Mon Aug 25 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.2611, Calls: Lang Acq,Psycholing/USA; Phonology,Phonetics/India

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1)
Date: 23-Aug-2008
From: Bill VanPatten < bill.vanpatten at ttu.edu >
Subject: L2 Processing and Parsing: State of the Science 

2)
Date: 19-Aug-2008
From: Kalika Bali < kalikab at microsoft.com >
Subject: Consonant Challenge for Indian Languages

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:24:00
From: Bill VanPatten [bill.vanpatten at ttu.edu]
Subject: L2 Processing and Parsing: State of the Science
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-2611.html&submissionid=187685&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: L2 Processing and Parsing: State of the Science 
Short Title: L2 Processing and Parsing 

Date: 21-May-2009 - 24-May-2009
Location: Lubbock, TX, USA 
Contact Person: Bill VanPatten
Meeting Email: L2processing at ttu.edu
Web Site: http://www.languages.ttu.edu/L2processing 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2008 

Meeting Description:

Texas Tech University is pleased to host a special conference on 'Second
Language Processing and Parsing: State of the Science'. 

2nd call for papers for the conference ''L2 Processing and Parsing: State of the
Science'' to be held at Texas Tech University, May 21-24, 2009. All abstracts
due November 1, 2008. For detailed information, please see our website:
http://www.languages.ttu.edu/L2processing. 

Invited Plenary Speakers:
David Birdsong
Harald Clahsen
Alan Juffs
Michael Sharwood Smith
Bill VanPatten

Invited Colloquia Organizers:
Paola E. Dussias, Issues in Syntactic Processing
Gretchen Sunderman, Issues in Lexical Processing
Andrew P. Farley, Issues in Instruction and Processing

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:24:09
From: Kalika Bali [kalikab at microsoft.com]
Subject: Consonant Challenge for Indian Languages
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-2611.html&submissionid=187321&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: Consonant Challenge for Indian Languages 
Short Title: CCIL 

Date: 15-Dec-2008 - 18-Dec-2008
Location: Goa, India 
Contact Person: Kalika Bali
Meeting Email: kalikab at microsoft.com
Web Site: http://ragashri.ee.iisc.ernet.in/ILCC 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics; Phonology 

Call Deadline: 29-Sep-2008 

Meeting Description:

Consonant Challenge for Indian Languages
Detection and Recognition of Consonants in Indian Language Speech Data
(Special Session of SLT08 http://www.slt2008.org/default.asp) 

Call for Papers

In order to promote speech technology research in Indian Languages and to better
understand any specific issues related to speech recognition of these languages
and the possible means to address them, we are pleased to announce a Consonant
Challenge in Indian Languages.

The task involves detection of consonants (in CV, VC, CVC and VCV positions) in
a surprise language. Training data is provided in 6 Indian languages, namely,
Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu to all registered
participants. Based on the recognition results received by the organizers and
evaluated by the program committee, the highest two accuracy results will be
awarded a cash prize of USD 500 and USD 250 respectively.

The results will be presented in a special session at SLT 08 in Goa, India. 

Background:
Consonant detection in speech by a machine based on purely spectral features is
always problematic due to a number of reasons like the unvoiced (no-energy)
portions of stop consonants that can be confused with real silence, the high
energy fricative noise that maybe confused with environmental or additive noise,
and the vowel like spectrum of the liquids, the nasals and the semi-vowels that
make them hard to distinguish from vowels. This problem is further compounded in
Indian languages where the number of consonants can go from around 23 (in Tamil)
to almost 40 (in Hindi-Urdu). For example, acoustic phonetic features like voice
and aspiration form a four way contrast in many Indian language stop and
affricate consonants. Further, stop consonants occur for at least four, that is,
labial, dental, retroflex, and velar, place of articulation (this can go to 5 or
6 for some languages like Malayalam and Hindi-Urdu). Though all Indian Languages
come from four major language families (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austronesian and
Tibeto-Burman, with the majority from the former two), the languages have
co-existed for a long time to have borrowed and shared features even at the
phonetic level. For example, the borrowing of retroflex sounds from Dravidian to
Indo-European and of aspiration as a feature of stops the other way around. 

>From a Speech Recognition perspective, a deeper understanding of how consonants
are detected and recognized can not only help us better understand how to model
these sounds (ref. difference between human and computer consonant recognition)
but also, in the specific case of Indian languages, open up research issues 
into model adaptation from one language to another (related)language. This might
allow researchers to explore ways and means to scale from one language to
another where resources in terms of training data are limited

Important Dates:
Training Data release to registered participants: 29th August 2008
Test Data in surprise language made available: 8th September 2008
Recognition results and paper submission: 29th September 2008
Results Announced: 20th October 2008
Camera-ready paper submission: 3rd November 2008

Organizing Committee:
Prof. AG Ramakrishanan, Dept of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of
Science, Bangalore
Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India

Program Committee:
Prof. Hema Murthy, IIT Madras, Chennai
Prof. Preeti Rao, IIT Bombay, Mumbai
Dr. Mallikarjun, CIIL, Mysore
Prof. Roni Rosenfeld, CMU, Pittsburgh
Dr. Shyamal Das Mandal, CDAC Kolkata
Dr. Amitav Das, Microsoft Research
Dr. Ashish Verma, IBM IRL, New Delhi

Contact:
Please mail the organising chairs to register for the challenge at:
ramkiag at ee.iisc.ernet.in
kalikab at microsoft.com

URL:
http://ragashri.ee.iisc.ernet.in/ILCC

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