Call for papers: Consonant Challenge, Interspeech 2008

[Martin Cooke <m.cooke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                          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@xxxxxxxxx)
Martin Cooke (University of Sheffield, UK -- M.Cooke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

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