Connectionists: Call for papers: Consonant Challenge, Interspeech 2008

[Odette Scharenborg]

                           Call for papers

                         Consonant Challenge:
   Human-machine comparisons of consonant recognition in quiet and noise

                   Interspeech, 22-26 September 2008
                         Brisbane, Australia


Listeners outperform automatic speech recognition systems at every level  
of speech recognition, including the very basic level of consonant  
recognition. What is not clear is where the human advantage originates.  
Does the fault lie in the acoustic representations of speech or in the  
recogniser architecture, or in a lack of compatibility between the two?  
There have been relatively few studies comparing human and automatic  
speech recognition on the same task, and, of these, overall identification  
performance is the dominant metric. However, there are many insights which  
might be gained by carrying out a far more detailed comparison.

The purpose of this Special Session is to make focused human-computer  
comparisons on a task involving consonant identification in noise, with  
all participants using the same training and test data. Training and test  
data and native listener and baseline recogniser results will be provided  
by the organisers, but participants are encouraged to also contribute  
listener responses.

* Call for papers:
Contributions are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:

- Psychological models of human consonant recognition
- Comparisons of front-end ASR representations
- Comparisons of back-end recognisers
- Exemplar vs statistical recognition strategies
- Native/Non-native listener/model comparisons

The deadline and paper submission guidelines for full paper submission (4  
pages) are identical to the deadline and paper submission guidelines for  
Interspeech 2008. The deadline is April 7th, 2008. Paper submission is  
done exclusively via the Interspeech 2008 conference website. Participants  
of this Challenge are asked to indicate the correct Special Session during  
submission. More information on the Interspeech conference can be found  
here: http://www.interspeech2008.org/

* More information:
More information on the Consonant Challenge and all the materials can be  
found at the Consonant Challenge Website:
http://www.odettes.dds.nl/challenge_IS08/

* Organisers:
Odette Scharenborg (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands --  
O.Scharenborg at let.ru.nl)
Martin Cooke (University of Sheffield, UK -- M.Cooke at dcs.shef.ac.uk)

We hope to see you in Brisbane,
Odette Scharenborg and Martin Cooke