Schedule of Events: Workshops
ACM SIGIR'01 Workshop on Information Retrieval
Techniques for Speech Applications
New Orleans, Louisiana, September 13, 2001
Workshop
Agenda (PDF;
MS Word)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Background
In the last few years automatic speech recognition has left the confines of the basic research lab and become a viable commercial application. Speech recognition technology has now matured to the point where speech can be used to interact with automated phone systems, control computer programs, and even create memos and documents. Moving beyond computer control and dictation, speech recognition has the potential to dramatically change the way we create, capture, and store knowledge. Advances in speech recognition technology combined with ever decreasing storage costs and processors that double in power every eighteen months have set the stage for a whole new era of applications that treat speech in the same way that we currently treat text. The goal of this workshop is to explore the technical issues involved in applying information retrieval and text analysis technologies in the new application domains enabled by automatic speech recognition.
These possibilities bring with them a number of issues, questions, and problems. Speech-based user interfaces create different expectations for the end user, which in turn places different demands on the back-end systems that must interact with the user and interpret the user's commands. Speech recognition will never be perfect, so analyses applied to the resulting transcripts must be robust in the face of recognition errors. The ability to capture speech and apply speech recognition on smaller, more powerful, pervasive devices suggests that text analysis and mining technologies can be applied in new domains never before considered.
About the Workshop
In this workshop we would like to explore techniques in information retrieval and text analysis that meet the challenges in the new application domains enabled by automatic speech recognition.
Specifically, we would like to focus on:
- What new IR related applications, problems, or opportunities are created by effective, real-time speech recognition?
- To what extent are information retrieval methods that work on perfect text applicable to imperfect speech transcript?
- What additional data representations from a speech engine may be exploited by applications?
- Does domain knowledge (context/voice-id) help and can it be automatically deduced?
- Can some of the techniques explored be beneficial in a standard IR application?
- What constraints are imposed by real time speech applications?
- Case studies of specific speech applications - either successful
or not.
The workshop will include a keynote address by James Allan (UMass, Amherst), presentations of accepted papers, and demos of working prototypes. The accepted papers will be published on the WWW and bound in a workshop proceedings distributed to the workshop attendees.
Workshop Chairs
- Anni Coden, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
- Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Almaden Research Center
- Eric Brown, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Program Committee
- John Garofolo, NIST
- Alex Hauptmann, CMU
- Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University
- Justin Zobel, RMIT Australia
Keynote Speaker
James Allan, UMass at Amherst
Participation
Please submit a 3-5 page paper and, if appropriate, a one page description of a working prototype to be shown. Email submissions in PostScript or PDF to Anni Coden, anni@us.ibm.com. We are looking for papers describing recent or preliminary work.
Correspondence
Anni Coden IBM T.J. Watson Research Center P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 Phone: +1-914-784-7073, Fax: +1-914-784-6307 anni@us.ibm.com
Important dates
- Submission deadline: June 18, 2001
- Acceptance: July 16, 2001
- Final Versions: July 30, 2001
Further Information
Further Information can be found on the SIGIR 2001 Web pages (http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~sigir01).
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Dr. Anni R.Coden
T.J. Watson Research Center
30 Sawmill River Road 1S-A16
Hawthorne, NY 10532
914 784 7073
t/l 863 7073 (tel)
914 784 6307 (fax)
anni@us.ibm.com