Reminder: Call for papers for the Interspeech Consonant Challenge

[Martin Cooke <m.cooke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                    Reminder: Call for papers
                    =========================

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

                  Interspeech, 22-26 September 2008
                        Brisbane, Australia

* Update:

All information concerning the native listener experiments and baseline 
recognisers including their results can now be found and downloaded from 
the Consonant Challenge website:

      http://www.odettes.dds.nl/challenge_IS08/

* Deadline for submissions:

The deadline and paper submission guidelines for full paper submission 
(4 pages) 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/

* Topic of the Consonant Challenge:

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

* 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