SLPAT 2013 - 4th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

4th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
Grenoble, France, August 21?22, 2013
Co-located with INTERSPEECH 2013
Sponsored by the ACL Special Interest Group on
Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SIG-SLPAT)
Call for papers: SLPAT 2013
We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the fourth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), to be co-located with Interspeech 2013 in Grenoble, France, August 21?22, 2013. The deadline for submission of papers and demo proposals is in May, 2013, for exact dates see below. Full details on the workshop, topics of interest, timeline and formatting of regular papers is here:
http://slpat.org/slpat2013
This 2-day workshop will bring together researchers from all areas of speech and language technology with a common interest in making everyday life more accessible for people with physical, cognitive, sensory, emotional or developmental disabilities. This workshop will provide an opportunity for individuals from both research communities, and the individuals with whom they are working, to assist to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress.
Scope and topics
Assistive technologies (AT) allow disabled individuals to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do. Many examples of AT involve providing universal access, such as modifications to multimedia devices or telecommunication appliances to make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An important sub-discipline within the AT research community is known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with some human communication modality, such as spoken or written communication.
Accessibility denotes as to whether a product, device, service or environment is usable for an individual or a group of persons with some impairment. Accessibility can be increased either by designing products and services that are directly usable for all, that are adaptable to different users and user groups or that are compatible with special aids for persons with disabilities through standard interfaces.
From providing access to the web for individuals with severe motor impairments, to improving the intelligibility of speech spoken by individuals with speech impairments, the range of topics in Assistive Technology (AT) and Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC) that make use of or could make use of speech and natural language processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of individuals actively working within the two research communities -- AT/AAC on the one hand and speech/NLP on the other -- is relatively small. This third SLPAT workshop will build on three previous workshops (the first co-located with NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles, the second with EMNLP 2011 in Edinburgh and the third with NAACL/HLT 2012 in Montreal), bringing together individuals from both research communities and the individuals they are working to assist.
Among the users that could benefit from these technologies, the elderly people and people with loss of autonomy are deeply in need of technologies that could help them to live as independently as possible. This year, the SLPAT workshop includes a special topic on this aspect, Speech Interaction Technology for Ambient Assisted Living in the Home.
We welcome submission of papers on theories, models, techniques and evaluation studies with a focus on "Speech and Language Technologies for Assisted Living" but will also accept contributions in other areas of speech and language technology, tailored to accessibility, augmentative & alternative communication (AAC) and assistive technology (AT). Follow the link below for a full overview of the workshop and topics of interest for paper submissions.
Special topic
Smart Homes and intelligent companions are typically equipped with many sensors perceiving different aspects of the user and the home environment. However, an underexploited sensor is the microphone whereas it can deliver highly informative data and can be the prior way of interaction in the home. The special topic of this workshop aims at gathering researchers in speech and language technologies interested in addressing the challenges related to empowering people in loss of autonomy and ensuring social communication and security.
Relevant research topics would include (but are not limited to):
Automatic Speech recognition in multi-source environments
Distant speech recognition
Understanding, modelling or recognition of aged speech
Speech analysis in the case of elderly with impairments, early recognition of speech capability loss
Assistive speech technology
Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR)
Multimodal emotion recognition
Audio scene and smart home context analysis
Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living
General topics
Topics of interest for submission to the workshop include but are not limited to:
Automated processing of sign language
Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments
Speech transformation for improved intelligibility
Speech and Language Technologies for Assisted Living
Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language
Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC/AT applications
Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech
Silent speech: speech technology based on sensors without audio
Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication
Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies
Multimodal user interfaces and dialogue systems adapted to assistive technologies
NLP for cognitive assistance applications
Presentation of graphical information for people with visual impairments
Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications
Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications
Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies
Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology
Web accessibility; text simplification, summarization, and adapted presentation modes such as speech, signs or symbols
Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field
Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes
Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology
Anything included in this year's special topic
Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication
Important dates
May 17: Paper due date
May 31: Demo due date
Jun 21: Notification of acceptance
TBA: Camera-ready deadline
Aug 21-22: SLPAT workshop
Submission
Submissions presented at the SLPAT workshop should mainly contain new material that has not been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must disclose this information at submission time. Please list all other meetings where the paper has been submitted at the end of the abstract field on the submission site.
Further submission details will be announced later.