FW: Speech Communication Journal: Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems -- CFP

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Call for Papers

Speech Communication Journal

Special Issue on 
Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems

The success of a conversational system depends on a synergistic  
integration of technologies such as speech recognition, spoken language  
understanding (SLU), dialog modeling, natural language generation,  
speech synthesis and user interface design. In this special issue, we  
will address the SLU component of a conversational system and its  
relation to the speech recognizer and the dialog model. In particular,  
we aim to bring together techniques that address the issue of robustness  
of SLU to speech recognition errors, language variability and  
dysfluencies in speech with issues of output representations from SLU  
that provide greater flexibility to the dialog model. 

The topic of robust SLU has received much attention during the DARPA  
funded ATIS program of the 1990s and more recently the DARPA  
Communicator program. In parallel to that research, a number of  
real-world conversational systems have been deployed to date. However,  
the techniques for robust SLU have branched out in many different  
directions. They have been influenced by many recent areas such as  
information extraction, question answering and machine learning. 

The objective of this issue is to provide the speech and language  
processing community with a forum for presenting recent advances,  
perspectives and research directions in SLU for conversational systems.  
The special issue follows on the related HLT/NAACL 2004 Workshop and  
will address related topics such as: 

  a.. Approaches to building an SLU system
    a.. Rule-based, data-driven, or hybrid
    b.. Automatic adaptation 
  b.. Approaches to robustness in SLU system 
    a.. Handling uncertain and erroneous input
    b.. Handling dysfluencies and language variations 
  c.. Output representation of SLU systems 
    a.. Customizable domain independent representations based on task  
knowledge 
  d.. Tighter integration of ASR and SLU systems 
  e.. Evaluation of SLU systems 
  f.. SLU in multilingual systems
  g.. SLU in multimodal systems 
  h.. Question answering based SLU systems 
  i.. Machine learning algorithms for SLU 
  j.. Information retrieval and extraction for/from spoken dialogs 

Guest Editors:
Dr. Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs - Research, srini@research.att.com 
Dr. Dilek Hakkani-T FCr, AT&T Labs - Research, dtur@research.att.com 
Dr. Gokhan Tur, AT&T Labs - Research, gtur@research.att.com 

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: December 1st, 2004 (early submission is encouraged)
Notification of acceptance: April 1st, 2005
Final manuscript due: June 1st, 2005
Tentative publication date: September 1st, 2005

Submission Procedure:
Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Speech  
Communication Journal for electronic submission  
(http://ees.elsevier.com/specom). During submission authors must select  
the Section as "Special Issue Paper", not "Regular Paper", and the title  
of the special issue should be referenced in the "Comments" page along  
with any other information.

 
The web page for the CFP is:

http://www.research.att.com/~gtur/SpeCom/SpeCom.html (html version)

http://www.research.att.com/~gtur/SpeCom/SpeCom.pdf (pdf version)

Received on Friday, 20 August 2004 01:51:30 UTC