Dear colleagues, Could you be so kind and post our cfp? Thanks a lot Kai PS.: Could you please confirm the receipt of this email directly to [log in to unmask] This way my co-organizers will be kept informed. __________________________________________________ FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION for the Workshop on "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 Information about the workshop can also be retrieved from: http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/~finkler/acl97-cts/index.html --------------------- 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. Among the challenging aspects of a CTS system, we propose to address issues of the following list in the first place: * How can systems for natural language generation be adapted in order to utilize new realization options to the generation process that are offered in the CTS framework? * How can issues in the time-course of the interleaved process for generation and synthesis (when-to-say) be dealt with? Which requirements on speech synthesis are to be fulfilled in an incremental approach to spoken language production? * Due to its inherent integrational property, being influenced by a whole number of representational levels, modelling of prosody will be one of the major topics of the workshop. * How can approaches in the Text-to-Speech tradition to synthesis show their adaptability to Concept-to-Speech? We invite contributions that provide solutions to any of the topics indicated above or that present innovative applications addressing the abovementioned issues. ------------------ 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 Neatherlands Bjorn GRANSTROeM, KTH Stockholm, Sweden Elisabeth MAIER, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany Scott PREVOST, MIT Boston, USA Mark STEEDMAN, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA --------------- WORKSHOP FORMAT --------------- The workshop will be a full-day event that provides a forum for individual presentations as well as group discussions. In the presentation part, authors of accepted papers will describe their results and positions (about 30 minutes each). A plenary discussion of about one hour length will take place. -------------------------- REQUIREMENTS & SUBMISSIONS -------------------------- Authors should submit a full length paper not exceeding 3200 words (exclusive of references). Due to tight time constraints, initial submissions and reviewing will be handled exclusively electronically. Joint submissions with the `Interactive Spoken Dialog Systems' ACL/EACL workshop are allowed. If there are sufficient joint submissions a joint session may be scheduled. Please indicate on the title page that your abstract is a joint submission. Submissions must use the ACL submission style (aclsub.sty) retrievable from the ACL LISTSERV server via anonymous ftp: ftp ftp.cs.columbia.edu Name: anonymous Password: <your email address> cd acl-l/ACL97 get aclsub.sty Submissions have to be mailed as a single LaTeX file or a single postscript file. Mails should be sent to [log in to unmask] and formatted as follows: To: [log in to unmask] Subject: CTS 97 Submission --text follows this line-- title: <title of submission> authors: <authors as they appear on the title page> word count: email: <email address of author to whom correspondence should be directed> ----------------------------body------------------------------ <Body of submission> --------------- IMPORTANT DATES --------------- March 1, 1997 Deadline for submission of papers April 1 1997 Notification of acceptance April 21, 1997 Deadline for final version of papers -------------- IMPORTANT NOTE -------------- 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/ -------------------- ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------- Kai ALTER Hannes PIRKER Wolfgang FINKLER [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] Austrian Research Inst. for AI German Research Inst. for AI (OFAI) (DFKI)