AIMS:

SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between the two domains will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2020 & 2021, significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.

Previous events took place in Tarragona, Grenoble, Budapest, Pilsen, Le Mans, Mons, and Ljubljana.

VENUE:

SLSP 2020 & 2021 will take place in Cardiff, the capital of Wales and its political, commercial and cultural centre. The venue will be:

Council Chamber
Glamorgan Building
King Edward VII Ave
Cathays Park
Cardiff
CF10 3WT

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/visit/accessibility/cathays-park-campus/glamorgan-building

SCOPE:

The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical models (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

Anaphora and coreference resolution
Audio event detection
Authorship identification, plagiarism, and spam filtering
Biases, explainability and interpretability in language and speech processing
Corpora and resources for speech and language
Data mining, term extraction, and semantic web
Dialogue systems and spoken language understanding
Information retrieval and information extraction
Knowledge representation and ontologies
Lexicons and dictionaries
Machine translation and computer-aided translation
Multimodal technologies
Natural language understanding and generation
Neural representation of speech and language
Opinion mining and sentiment analysis
Part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and semantic role labelling
Question-answering systems for speech and text
Speaker identification and verification
Speech recognition and synthesis
Spelling correction
Text categorization and summarization
Text normalization and inverted text normalization
Text-to-speech
User modeling
Wake word detection

STRUCTURE:

SLSP 2020 & 2021 will consist of:

invited lectures
peer-reviewed contributions
posters

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

John H.L. Hansen (University of Texas, Dallas), Challenges and Advancements in Speaker Diarization & Recognition for Naturalistic Data Streams

Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Automatic Discovery of Phoneme Inventories for Speech Technology in Under-resourced Languages

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub (Jordan University of Science and Technology, JO)
Chitta Baral (Arizona State University, US)
Jon Barker (University of Sheffield, UK)
Jean-François Bonastre (University of Avignon, FR)
Fethi Bougares (University of Le Mans, FR)
Felix Burkhardt (audEERING, DE)
Nicoletta Calzolari (National Research Council, IT)
Bill Campbell (Amazon, US)
Angel Chang (Simon Fraser University, CA)
Kenneth W. Church (Baidu Research, US)
Marcello Federico (Amazon AI, US)
Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Ondřej Glembek (Brno University of Technology, CZ)
Thomas Hain (University of Sheffield, UK)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, IE)
Martin Karafiát (Brno University of Technology, CZ)
Philipp Koehn (Johns Hopkins University, US)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Seiichi Nakagawa (Chubu University, JP)
Stephen Pulman (University of Oxford, UK)
Matthew Purver (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Paolo Rosso (Technical University of Valencia, ES)
Diana Santos (University of Oslo, NO)
Irena Spasić (Cardiff University, UK)
Tomek Strzalkowski (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US)
Tomoki Toda (Nagoya University, JP)
Isabel Trancoso (Instituto Superior Técnico, PT)
K. Vijay-Shanker (University of Delaware, US)
Hsin-Min Wang (Academia Sinica, TW)
Andy Way (Dublin City University, IE)
Wlodek Zadrozny (University of North Carolina Charlotte, US)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Luis Espinosa-Anke (Cardiff)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel Parra-Royón (Granada)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
Irena Spasić (Cardiff, co-chair)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (all included) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Upload submissions to:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp20202021

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNAI series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The registration form can be found at:

https://irdta.eu/slsp2020-2021/registration/

DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):

Paper submission: July 9, 2021
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: August 13, 2021
Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNAI proceedings: August 23, 2021
Early registration: August 23, 2021
Late registration: November 8, 2021
Submission to the journal special issue: February 26, 2022

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

david (at) irdta.eu

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd

Data Innovation Research Institute, Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd

Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice – IRDTA, Brussels/London