Call for Papers
Special Issue of

COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE

on

Paralinguistics in Naturalistic Speech and Language





Paralinguistic phenomena including speaker states such as emotion or health condition, speaker traits such as personality, likeability, age or gender, as well as vocal behaviour such as laughter, sighs or hesitation, increasingly become part of every-day and future communication, retrieval, and surveillance systems. This requires present research to focus on realistic conditions in the sense of naturalistic occurrence of these phenomena, on real-life requirements such as presence of noise, reverberation or transmission artefacts, and on efficiency requirements. Further, optimal embedding of computational estimates in a system context needs to be addressed. To this end, speech and language resources and tailored acoustic and lexical features and machine learning architectures are needed. In addition, synergistic parallel assessment of such phenomena exploiting mutual dependencies may lead to improved performance over isolated consideration.

In this vein, this special issue of Computer Speech and Language will be devoted to the computational analysis of Paralinguistics in Naturalistic Speech and Language. Original, previously unpublished submissions are encouraged within the following scope:

• Speaker States (Emotion and Affect, Health Condition, etc.)
• Speaker Traits (Personality, Likeability, Age, Gender, Height, etc.)
• Vocal Behaviour (Laughter, Sighs, Hesitations, Voice Quality, etc.)
• Interdependence of Paralinguistics
• Synergistic Paralinguistic Analysis (Multi-task learning, One-pass decoding, etc.)
• Machine Analysis of Naturalistic Occurrence of Speaker States and Traits
• Paralinguistics in Conversational Speech and Realistic Environments
• Semi- and Unsupervised Speaker Adaptation, Clustering, and Profiling for Paralinguistics
• On-line, Incremental and Real-time Processing for Paralinguistics
• Noise, Reverberation, Coding and Transmission Robustness for Paralinguistics
• Distributed Paralinguistic Analysis and Standardization Issues for Paralinguistics
• Paralinguistic Speech and Language Resources
• Applications of Paralinguistics (Socially-Aware Spoken Dialog Systems, Recognition of Spontaneous Speech, Aging Society, Child-Computer Interfaces, Call-Centres, Education, Gaming, Health Care, Human-Agent and Human-Robot Communication, Surveillance, etc.)

Important Dates
Submission Deadline 1 May 2011
First Notification 1 July 2011
Final Version of Manuscripts 1 October 2011
Tentative Publication Date January 2012

Guest Editors
Björn Schuller, Technische Universität München, Germany, schuller@tum.de
Stefan Steidl, ICSI, USA, steidl@icsi.berkeley.edu
Anton Batliner, FAU, Germany, batliner@informatik.uni-erlangen.de

Submission Procedure
Prospective authors should follow the regular guidelines of the Computer Speech and Language Journal for electronic submission (http://ees.elsevier.com/csl). During submission authors must select for this Special Issue (short name "Natural Paralinguistics").