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let.ruu.nl>ELSNET's 6TH EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL ON LANGUAGE AND SPEECH COMMUNICATION ************************************************************************ FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT ROBUSTNESS: REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH Barcelona, Spain 13-24 July 1998 Organized by the Department de Teoria del Senyal i Comunicacions (UPC) and the Departament de Filologia Espanyola (UAB), Barcelona, Spain. The Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) announce the Sixth European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication. The central theme of the summer school will be 'Robustness: Real Life Applications in Language and Speech'. The event is sponsored by ELSNET and TMR. Robustness is perhaps the greatest single challenge for our understanding of speech perception and for speech technology. How can we understand speech when its quality has been degraded, when there are other sounds present, or when the listening conditions are different from those in training? Speech-based courses will cover robustness issues in understanding informal speech, in robust automatic speech recognition and in the auditory system. Robustness is also a challenge as far as natural language processing is concerned. Informally written language or transcriptions of spoken language such as spontaneous dialogues are seldom composed of well-formed or grammatical sentences, and real life systems have to be able to cope with this kind of input. NLP-based courses will deal with robust parsing techniques both for text and for spoken dialogues, with language understanding and with topics such as style checking which are highly relevant for commercial applications. The Summer School will include courses on Practical NLP, Robust Speech Recognition, Statistical Parsing, Finite-State Parsing/Style Checking, Robust Analysis of Speech, Forensic Phonetics, Robust Message Understanding, Auditory Scene Analysis, and Robust Efficient Parsing for Spoken Dialogue Processing. The target audience of the Summer School are advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, postdocs and academic and industrial researchers and developers. The Summer School will last for two weeks, and the programme will include plenary sessions, parallel courses and practical workshops. The final programme will be available from December 1997 onwards. Keep checking our WWW-pages (http://gps-tsc.upc.es/veu/ess98/ also available via ELSNET's Home Page at http://www.elsnet.org). All necessary information will be available there. REGISTRATION FEES registration by 15/2/98 registration after 15/2/98 Students 125 ECU 140 ECU Academic staff members 250 ECU 280 ECU Employees of industry 500 ECU 560 ECU Participants from ELSNET Members Sites will receive a 20% reduction. TMR GRANTS ELSNET has successfully applied for TMR funding (Training and Mobility of Researchers) to provide grants to participants of the ELSNET summer school (total 25.000 ECU for 1998). Each grant will cover the full or partial cost for travel, accommodation, and subsistence. Cost for registration cannot be covered by TMR. Conditions for TMR grants It is ELSNET's aim to put special emphasis on activities which will ensure equal access to the Information Society for all European citizens and language communities. As a result, participants from the following categories are eligible: - young researchers (i.e. under 36!) from less-favoured regions - young researchers from the smaller and 'less-favoured' language communities - young researchers employed by SME's (small and medium-sized enterprises) In addition, please note that - applicants should be nationals of an EU Member State or of an Associate State (i.e. Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Israel), which means that participants from CEENIS are not eligible - undergraduate students are not eligible How to apply for a TMR grant An application (and registration) form will be made available on the web together with the final programme. All applications will be considered by a small committee with representatives from ELSNET, ESCA and EACL. IMPORTANT DATES =============== Pre-registration deadline: February 15, 1998 Deadline for grant applications April 1, 1998 Registration deadline: May 1, 1998 Grant notification May 1, 1998 Payment deadline: June 1, 1998 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE ================== Gerrit Bloothooft (Utrech University, NL) Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, UK) Phil Green (Sheffield University, UK) Asuncion Moreno (Universitat Politecnica Catalunya, E) Koenraad de Smedt (University of Bergen, N) LOCAL ORGANIZATION ================== Asuncion Moreno (UPC) (chair) Jose B. Marino (UPC) Climent Nadeu (UPC) Joaquim Llisterri (UAB) Juanma Garrido (UAB) MORE INFORMATION ================ ELSNET Summer School Secretariat Dep. Teoria del Senyal i Comunicacions Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Jordi Girona 1-3 MOD D5 08034 Barcelona. Spain fax:+34-3 401 64 47 http://gps-tsc.upc.es/veu/ess98/ email: summer98Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue