Special Sessions

Speaker Trait Challenge

Monday, 10 September

Part 1:   13:30 – 15:30

Part 2:   16:00 – 18:00

Website

Organizers:  Anton Batliner, Bjorn Schuller  

Summary: Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more "conventional" phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last installment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and intoxication. Consequently, we now want to focus on speaker traits: the InterSpeech 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain and surveillance.

Speech and Language Technologies for STEM

Tuesday, 11 September

10:00 – 12:00

Organizers: Maxine Eskenazi, Martin Russell

Summary: This session explores the use of speech and language processing in education applied across learning disciplines, especially in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).  It will include present work and chart out possible future research directions. 

Analysis of Spoken Language Disorders in Health Applications

Tuesday, 11 September

Part 1, Oral:        13:30 – 15:30

Part 2, Posters: 16:00 – 18:00

Organizer: Marina Nastasenko, Shri Narayanan

Summary: This speech session focused on speech and language disorders processing aims to promote the importance and goals of this research field in the study of important and interesting questions about interdisciplinary problems, tasks, solutions and conclusions related to:

1. Speech Processing: acoustic and linguistic analysis of speech and language disorders, discourse analysis of pathological occurrences in spoken language, automatic speech recognition and spoken dialogue systems in the presence of pathologies

2. Forensic Applications: speaker identification with speech and language disorders, analysis tools and evaluation systems involving speech and language pathologies

3. Health Applications: diagnostic tools and training systems for medical conditions involving speech and language disorders, coping with spoken defects in man-machine interaction

Glottal Source Processing: from Analysis to Applications

Wednesday, 12 September

10:00 – 12:00

Website

Organizers: Thomas Drugman, Abeer Alwan

Summary:  Most current speech processing systems focus on features generated by the vocal tract. However, the glottal source conveys complementary information which has been shown to be useful for voice pathology detection, emotion/voice quality recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, etc. Recent advances in imaging and signal processing techniques have resulted in a number of new and interesting ways to visualize and model the source, as well as to inverse filter the speech signal and study source-related features.  The goal of the present special session is to gather people interested in the glottal source to discuss new analysis techniques and investigate their potential use in various speech-technology applications.

Prosodic Prominence: Annotation, Prediction, Applications

Thursday, 13 September

10:00 – 12:00

Organizers: Petra Wagner (Bielefeld University, Germany), Fabio Tamburini (Universitá di Bologna, Italy)

Summary:  Recent years have shown a renewed interest in various aspects of manual and automatic prominence annotation and its integration into computational systems or technical applications. Also, we are beginning to understand how prominence perception and annotation is influenced by various constraints, ranging from auditory processing to top-down expectancies and multimodality. Among other things, prominence information helps in differentiating speaking styles, conversational settings and inter-speaker dynamics. Furthermore, it provides important cues to periods of high information density within a stretch of speech, thereby facilitating both comprehension and learning.

New Trends in Vowel Nasalization: The Articulation of Nasal Vowels

Thursday, 13 September

13:30 – 15:30

Organizers: Ryan Shosted, Christopher Carignan

Summary:  This session will concentrate on the unique problems of studying vowel nasalization through a novel perspective: oro-pharyngeal articulation. A significant challenge in the study of nasal vowels is separating the relative contribution of the oral and naso-pharyngeal tracts to the acoustic output. A growing body of research shows that it is possible to measure differences in the physical configuration of the oro-pharyngeal tract during nasal and oral vowel congeners. These articulatory differences have acoustic consequences relating to the oral/nasal contrast. This research has implications for speech processing, the biomedical diagnosis and treatment of velopharyngeal dysfunction, phonetics, and phonology. 

Special Event 1: Speech Tools Demo

Wednesday, 12 September

13:30 – 15:30

Organizers:   Diamantino Caseiro, Christoph Draxler

Summary:  The special session on Speech Processing Tools is about software and web services for speech technology development and research - tools which support tasks relevant to the processing of speech data and which is intended to serve the developer and researcher in his or her daily work.   The special session will give tool and service developers a forum to present their software and to obtain academic credit for their important but often unappreciated work.  Contributions to this special session should focus on, and critically evaluate, the innovative features, joy of use, stability, appropriateness, availability, and interoperability of the software or web service. 

Special Event 2: Systems Demo

Wednesday, 12 September

16:00 – 18:00

Organizers:   Diamantino Caseiro