Speech and Language Indexing for Multimedia (SLIM)

We would like to invite researchers involved in the field of automatic speech and language processing on multimedia data to participate in the creation of a Speech and Language Indexing for Multimedia (SLIM) ISCA Special Interest Group. To push forward this proposal and better define the expectations and missions for such a SIG, we invite you to a meeting at Interspeech, on Wed. 31 August 12:00-12:45 (during lunch break). The meeting will take place in the room called "Caravaggio" in Pala Afffari of the Firenze Fiera Conference Center

The SLIM SIG intends to put together all protagonists working on speech and language processing to analyze, index and access multimedia data. Spoken language clearly plays a major role in semantic access to multimedia data such as lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast, podcasts, social videos on the Web, etc. However, such data raise specific challenges to speech technologies: high transcription error rates can be observed due to the sometime poor quality of the data; semantics can be shared between several modalities; etc. Bringing together researchers from across our community will allow us to direct focused effort at addressing these challenges. The initiative is of interest to people working in areas related to (but not limited to): Spoken content retrieval and spoken term detection for multimedia collections, speech summarization, speech-aware multimedia search engines and automatic speech structuring for indexing purposes, speech-based content recommendation and archive mining. The SLIM SIG offers a unique opportunity to share experience in multimedia spoken data processing, to foster new research directions and to gain visibility both in the speech and multimedia community. To do so, several catalysts can be foreseen: animate a discussion forum and a web site, provide a directory of resources and data, promote evaluation campaigns on multimedia data (initiatives such as MediaEval, ESTER/ETAPE, as well as many others), organize special sessions in the main speech and multimedia conferences, organize dedicated workshops, build strong relations with SIGs in other communities (IEEE, ACM), etc.

Guillaume Gravier, CNRS-IRISA, France
Martha Larson, TU Delft, The Netherlands
Gareth Jones, DCU, Ireland

IEEE SIG on Audio and Speech Processing

The IEEE Computer Society is currently forming a SIG on Audio and Speech Processing for Multimedia and are looking for supporting members.
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tcmc/SIGASP

Gerald Friedland, International Computer Science Institute, US
Xavier Anguera Miro, Telefonica Research, Spain

Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech 2010

The ACM Multimedia SSCS 2010 workshop was devoted to presentation and discussion of recent research results concerning advances and innovation in the area of spoken content retrieval and the area of multimedia search that makes use of automatic speech recognition technology. The complete SSCS 2010 program is available on the SSCS 2010 Program page.

ACM TOIS Special Issue on Searching Speech

We are pleased to announce an upcoming special issue on searching speech in ACM Transactions on Information Systems. The call for papers (now closed) is available here: ACM TOIS Searching Speech Special Issue CfP