Call for Papers ---------------------------- ACM Multimedia 2009 Workshop Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009) October 23, 2009 Beijing, China ---------------------------- http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/ Multimedia content often contains spoken audio as a key component. Although speech is generally acknowledged as the quintessential carrier of semantic information, spoken audio remains underexploited by multimedia retrieval systems. In particular, the potential of speech technology to improve information access has not yet been successfully extended beyond multimedia content containing scripted speech, such as broadcast news. The SSCS 2009 workshop is dedicated to fostering search research based on speech technology as it expands into spoken content domains involving non-scripted, less-highly conventionalized, conversational speech characterized by wide variability of speaking styles and recording conditions. Such domains include podcasts, video diaries, lifelogs, meetings, call center recordings, social video networks, Web TV, conversational broadcast, lectures, discussions, debates, interviews and cultural heritage archives. This year we are setting a particular focus on the user and the use of speech techniques and technology in real-life multimedia access systems and have chosen the theme "Speech technology in the multimedia access framework." The development of robust, scalable, affordable approaches for accessing multimedia collections with a spoken component requires the sustained collaboration of researchers in the areas of speech recognition, audio processing, multimedia analysis and information retrieval. Motivated by the aim of providing a forum where these disciplines can engage in productive interaction and exchange, Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS) workshops were held in conjunction with SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam and with SIGIR 2008 in Singapore. The SSCS workshop series continues with SSCS 2009 held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing. This year the workshop will focus on addressing the research challenges that were identified during SSCS 2008: Integration, Interface/Interaction, Scale/Scope, and Community. We welcome contributions on a range of trans-disciplinary issues related to these research challenges, including: ***Integration*** -Information retrieval techniques based on speech analysis (e.g., applied to speech recognition lattices) -Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, query/document expansion) -Self-improving systems (e.g., unsupervised adaptation, recursive metadata refinement) -Exploitation of audio analysis (e.g., speaker emotional state, speaker characteristics, speaking style) -Integration of higher-level semantics, including cross-modal concept detection -Combination of indexing features from video, text and speech ***Interface/Interaction*** -Surrogates for representation or browsing of spoken content -Intelligent playback: exploiting semantics in the media player -Relevance intervals: determining the boundaries of query-related media segments -Cross-media linking and link visualization deploying speech transcripts ***Scale/Scope*** -Large-scale speech indexing approaches (e.g., collection size, search speed) -Dealing with collections containing multiple languages -Affordable, light-weight solutions for small collections, i.e., for the long tail ***Community*** -Stakeholder participation in design and realization of real world applications -Exploiting user contributions (e.g., tags, ratings, comments, corrections, usage information, community structure) Contributions for oral presentations (8-10 pages) poster presentations (2 pages), demonstration descriptions (2 pages) and position papers for selection of panel members (2 pages) will be accepted. Further information including submission guidelines is available on the workshop website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/ Important Dates: Monday, June 1, 2009 Submission Deadline Saturday, July 4, 2009 Author Notification Friday, July 17, 2009 Camera Ready Deadline Friday, October 23, 2009 Workshop in Beijing For more information: [log in to unmask] SSCS 2009 Website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/ ACM Multimedia 2009 Website: http://www.acmmm09.org On behalf of the SSCS2009 Organizing Committee: Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, The Netherlands Joachim Kohler, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente, The Netherlands Wessel Kraaij, TNO, The Netherlands