LINGUIST List 8.888

Mon Jun 16 1997

Confs: Concept-to-Speech Generation Systems

Editor for this issue: Brett Churchill <brettlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Hannes Pirker, Workshop on Concept-to-Speech Generation Systems

 ACL'97 Workshop: Concept-to-Speech Generation Systems

 Friday, July 11, 1997

 in conjunction with 35th Annual Meeting
 of the Association for Computational Linguistics
 (ACL'97/EACL'97 Joint Conference)
 July 7-11, 1997 Madrid, Spain

FOCUS OF THE WORKSHOP

Concept-to-Speech (CTS) generation, i.e., the production of synthetic
speech on the basis of pragmatic, semantic, and discourse knowledge offers
a challenging and relatively new field of research in intelligent user
interfaces.
The questions raised in such an environment range from pragmatics, semantics,
and (morpho-)syntax to phonology and phonetics. The modelling of prosody
(at symbolic and acoustic level) serves as one of the open questions within
this paradigm.
Obviously, the development of a CTS system is very demanding. Successful
work within the framework of CTS relies on the ability to integrate efforts
from a number of disciplines, such as Computational Linguistics, Artificial
Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Signal Processing.

The workshop will provide a forum to bring together researchers from
the fields of natural language generation and speech synthesis. The aim
of the workshop is to stimulate interchange of innovative ideas and results
of diverse aspects of CTS generation in order to bridge the gap between
these fields.

- -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Program of the workshop

09:00 Introduction

09:10 - 09:45 Probabilistic Model of Acoustic / Prosody / Concept
 Relationships for Speech Synthesis
 Nanette Veilleux

09:45 - 10:20 Message-to-Speech: High Quality Speech Generation for
 Messaging and Dialogue Systems
 Peter Spyns, Filip Deprez, Luc Van Tichelen, and Bert Van Coile

10:20 - 10:55 A Compact Representation of Prosodically Relevant
 Knowledge in a Speech Dialogue System
 Peter Poller and Paul Heisterkamp

Coffee Break

11:15 - 11:50 Integrating Language Generation with Speech Synthesis
 in a Concept to Speech System
 Shimei Pan and Kathleen McKeown

11:50 - 12:25 Can Pitch Accent Type Convey Information Status in Yes-No
 Questions?
 Martine Grice and Michelina Savino

12:25 - 13:00 Computing prosodic properties in a Data-to-Speech system
 M. Theune, E. Klabbers, J. Odijk, and J.R. de Pijper

Lunch Break

15:00 - 15:35 Semantic and Discourse Information For Text-to-Speech Intonation
 Laurie Hiyakumoto, Scott Prevost, and Justine Cassell

15:35 - 16:10 Looking for the presence of linguistic concepts in the
 prosody of spoken utterances
 Gerit P. Sonntag and Thomas Portele</tt>

Final Discussion

- --------------------------------------------------------------------

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Robert Bannert, Univ. of Umea, Sweden
John Bateman, GMD Darmstadt, Germany
Mary Beckman, Ohio State Univ., USA
Carlos Gussenhoven, Univ. of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Bjorn Granstroem, KTH Stockholm, Sweden
Elisabeth Maier, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany
Scott Prevost, MIT Boston, USA
Mark Steedman, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Kai Alter, Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI),
 Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
 altercns.mpg.de
Wolfgang Finkler, German Research Center for AI (DFKI)
 finklerdfki.de
Hannes Pirker, Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
 hannesai.univie.ac.at

- -------------------------------------------------------------------------

As this workshop takes place in conjunction with the ACL/EACL-97 conference,
participants of the workshop are obliged to register for the main conference
as well. Conference registration details can be obtained via WWW from the
ACL/EACL-97 home page http://horacio.ieec.uned.es:80/cl97/

Workshop registration details can be obtained via
 http://horacio.ieec.uned.es:80/cl97/workshop_reg.html

here is a copy of that text

- -snip--------------------------------------------------------------------

 WORKSHOP REGISTRATION

Registrations via email to aclbellcore.com are strongly preferred.
Please note that the cutoff date for pre-registration is May 31.

Registration fees are US $60 for 1 day workshops and US $80 for 2 day
workshops. Workshop attendees must be registered for the conference.
Acceptable forms of payment are cheques in US dollars payable to ``ACL''
or credit card (VISA/Mastercard) payment. Please submit the following
form with payment indicating the workshop you are interested in.

Name:________________________________________________________________

Institution: (for name tag)__________________________________________

Postal Address:______________________________________________________

Email:_______________________________________________________________

Phone and Fax:_______________________________________________________

Name of Workshops (Circle or check the one(s) you plan to attend):

[ ] Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids
[x] Concept to Speech Generation Systems
[ ] Spoken Language Translation
[ ] Envgram Computational Environments for Grammar Development and
 Linguistic Engineering
[ ] Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution
 for Unrestricted Texts
[ ] Interactive Spoken Dialogue Systems: Bringing Speech and NLP
 Together in Real World Applications
[ ] Referring Phenomena in a Multimedia Discourse and Their
 Computational Treatment (SIGMEDIA)
[ ] Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization
[ ] Automatic Information Extraction and Building of Lexical Semantic
 Resources for NLP Applications. Organized by EuroWordNet (LE2 4003),
 Sparkle (LE 2111) and Ecran
[ ] From Research to Commercial Applications: Making NLP Technology Work
 in Practice
[ ] Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL '97)
[ ] SIGPHON: Computational Phonology

Payment: specify cheque or credit card
Credit card type: (Visa/Mastercard only)___________________________
Credit card info:
____________________________________________________________________
name on card, card number, expiration date


 Please send to:

 ACL
 Priscilla Rasmussen phone: +1-908-873-3898
 P. O. Box 6090 fax: +1-908-873-0014
 Somerset, NJ 08875, USA email: aclbellcore.com