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: summer98@gps.tsc.upc.es