First Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive
Technologies (SLPAT)

http://slpat2010.csee.ogi.edu/

NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop
5 or 6 June 2010, Los Angeles, CA

Call for Papers

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do
things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do. An
obvious and ubiquitous example is a wheelchair, which assists with
mobility. Many examples of assistive technologies involve providing
universal access, such as modifications to televisions or telephones to
make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An
important sub-discipline within the AT research community is known as
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on
communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with
some human communication modality, such as spoken or written
communication. From providing access to the web for individuals with
severe motor impairments, to improving the intelligibility of speech
spoken by individuals with speech impairments, the range of AAC topics
that make use of (or could make use of) speech and natural language
processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of individuals
actively working within the two research communities -- AT/AAC on the one
hand and speech/NLP on the other -- is relatively small. This workshop
will work to bring individuals from both of these research communities
together with the individuals they are working to assist within a single
forum.

While AAC is a particularly apt application area for speech and NLP
technologies, we are purposefully making the scope of the workshop broad
enough to include assistive technologies as a whole, even those falling
outside of AAC. Topics that are appropriate for the workshop yet fall
outside of the scope of AAC would include things such as spoken language
or dialogue interfaces to assistive devices, or other related topics in
Human Computer Interaction. While we will encourage work that validates
the methods with human experimental trials, we will also consider work on
basic-level innovations, inspired by AT/AAC related problems. Thus we are
aiming for a broad inclusivity, which is also manifest in the diversity of
our Program Committee.

Topics of interest for submission to the workshop include (but are not
limited to):

- Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications
- Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications
- Automated processing of sign language
- Speech transformation for improved intelligibility
- Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC applications
- Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence
simplification or text-to-speech
- Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive
technologies
- NLP for cognitive assistance applications
- Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive
technologies
- Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of
assistive technology
- Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field
- Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Organizers:

Melanie Fried-Oken (Oregon Health & Science University)
Kathleen F. McCoy (University of Delaware)
Brian Roark (Oregon Health & Science University)

Program Committee:

Norman Alm, University of Dundee
Jean-Yves Antoine, Universite Francois-Rabelais
John Arnott, University of Dundee
Bruce Baker, Semantic Compaction Systems
Melanie Baljko, York University, Canada
Jan Bedrosian, Western Michigan University
Jeff Bilmes, University of Washington
Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge
Alistair D.N. Edwards, University of York
Michael Elhadad, Ben-Gurion University
Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile, & Carleton University, Canada
Jeff Higginbotham, University of Buffalo
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
Linda Hoag, Kansas State University
Matt Huenerfauth, CUNY
Alexander Kain, Oregon Health & Science University
Heidi Koester, Koester Performance Research
Richard E. Ladner, University of Washington
Greg Lesher, Dynavox Technologies, Inc.
Yael Netzer, Ben-Gurion University
Alan Newell, University of Dundee
Rupal Patel, Northeastern University
Helen Petrie, University of York
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen
Howard Shane, Children's Hospital Boston
Fraser Shein, Bloorview Kids Rehab, Canada
Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, University of Tokyo
Annalu Waller, University of Dundee
Tonio Wandmacher, Commissariat a l'energie atomique, France
David Wilkins, Language and Linguistics Consulting, Australia

Important Dates

Submission deadline: March 1, 2010
Notification to authors: March 30, 2010
Workshop: June 5 or 6, 2010