21.1377, FYI: CfP: INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge

[linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG]

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-1377. Sun Mar 21 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.1377, FYI: CfP: INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Eric Raimy, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssa at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm.

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 19-Mar-2010
From: Bjoern Schuller < schuller at tum.de >
Subject: CfP: INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:22:59
From: Bjoern Schuller [schuller at tum.de]
Subject: CfP: INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=21-1377.html&submissionid=2619174&topicid=6&msgnumber=1
  

Dear List,

for those of you interested: the INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge
has now officially started. Please find more information below.

Call for Papers
INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge 

Age, Gender and Affect:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/paralinguistic-challenge

Organisers:
Bjoern Schuller (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany) 
Laurence Devillers (CNRS-LIMSI, France) 
Christian Mueller (DFKI, Germany) 
Shrikanth Narayanan (University of Southern California, USA)
	 
Sponsors:
HUMAINE Association
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

The Challenge:

Most paralinguistic analysis tasks resemble each other not only by means of
processing and ever-present data sparseness, but by lacking agreed-upon
evaluation procedures and comparability, in contrast to more "traditional"
disciplines in speech analysis; at the same time, this is a rapidly
emerging field of research, due to the constantly growing interest on
applications to human behaviour analysis, and technologies for
human-machine communication and multimedia retrieval. 

In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge shall help
bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information
in spoken language and low compatibility of results, by addressing three
selected tasks. The "aGender" and the the "AVIC" corpora will be provided
by the organisers. The first consists of 46 hours of telephone speech,
stemming from 954 speakers, and will serve to evaluate features and
algorithms for the detection of speaker age and gender. The second features
2 hours of human conversational speech recording (21 subjects), annotated
in different levels of interest. The corpus further features a
transcription of spoken content with word boundaries by forced alignment,
non-linguistic vocalisations, single annotator tracks, different
well-defined chunkings, and the sequence of these. Both corpora are given
with distinct definition of test, development, and training partitions,
incorporating speaker independence, as needed in most real-life settings.
Benchmark results of the most popular approaches will be provided. 

Three sub-challenges are addressed:
- In the Age Sub-Challenge, the age of speakers has to be determined. 
- In the Gender Sub-Challenge, a gender classification task has to be solved.
- Finally, the Affect Sub-Challenge asks for determination of speakers'
interest in ordinal representation in this year's challenge as opposed to
last INTERSPEECH's Emotion Challenge, which dealt with emotion in a broader
sense. 

All sub-challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their
own classification algorithm. However, a standard feature set is given per
corpus that may be used. The labels of the test set are unknown, and
participants have to stick to the definition of training, development, and
test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but
have only one trial to upload their results on the test set, whose labels
are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper
presenting the results that undergoes peer-review. The organisers preserve
the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves
in the challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in multiple
sub-challenges. 

Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent databases are
sought in (but not limited to) the following areas: 
- Participation in any of the sub-challenges 
- Combined determination of paralinguistic information under mutual
information exploitation 
- Novel features and algorithms for the detection of paralinguistic
information 
- Novel corpora and evaluations for paralinguistic tasks

The results of the Challenge will be presented at a Special Session of
Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, Japan.

Prizes will be awarded to the sub-challenge winners and a best paper.
If you are interested and planning to participate in the Paralinguistic
Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please
send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/paralinguistic-challenge

Thank you and best,

Stefan Steidl, Anton Batliner, Felix Burkhardt, Laurence Devillers,
Christian Mueller, Shrikanth Narayanan and Bjoern Schuller


Contact:
Dr. Bjoern Schuller
Senior Researcher and Lecturer

LIMSI-CNRS
Spoken Language Processing Group
BP133 91403 Orsay cedex
France
+33-(0)16985-8008

Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Institute for Human-Machine Communication
D-80333 München
Germany
+49-(0)89-289-28548

schuller at tum.de 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics





-----------------------------------------------------------
This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $65,000. This money will go to help 
keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors for the coming year.

See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out our Space Fund 
Drive 2010 and join us for a great journey!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2010/

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at  
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so, go to: 
https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on how to 
donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit: 
http://linguistlist.org/donation/

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University and as 
such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is a registered 
501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is 38-6005986. These 
donations can be offset against your federal and sometimes your state tax return 
(U.S. tax payers only). For more information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact 
your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will match 
any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this entails your 
contacting your human resources department and sending us a form that the 
EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your employer. This is generally a simple 
administrative procedure that doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without 
costing you an extra penny. Please take a moment to check if your company 
operates such a program.

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST! 
-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-21-1377