Subject: Computer Speech and Language Special Issue -- Call for papers From: Martin Cooke <m.cooke@xxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 16:56:36 +0100Computer Speech and Language Special Issue – Call for Papers Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge Guest Editors Martin Cooke (University of Sheffield), m.cooke@xxxxxxxx Te-Won Lee (University of California, San Diego), tewon@xxxxxxxx A wide range of techniques exist for the separation – and subsequent recognition – of speech from other acoustic sources. Some approaches rely on signal processing and enhancement while others exploit statistical independence of acoustic sources. Some make strong use of speech knowledge to construct joint models of all sources present. Until recently, there had been no extensive comparison of separation algorithms. However, a special session at Interspeech 2006 in Pittsburgh saw the results of the first Speech Separation Challenge – a large-scale attempt to evaluate different separation/recognition algorithms on the same task, which involved recognising simple sentences in the presence of other, similar, sentences. This special issue of Computer Speech and Language solicits full papers describing systems tackling the Speech Separation Challenge, details of which are available at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin/SpeechSeparationChallenge.htm. Submissions are not limited to those who took part in the special session at Interspeech, but new entrants should contact the guest editors to clarify any details of the Challenge. Contributions describing both existing and novel methods for the recognition of separated speech are welcome so long as results are reported on the Challenge test data. Important dates: Submission deadline: June 30, 2007 (earliest submission: May 2007) Completion of reviews: October 31, 2007 Revision deadline: January 15, 2008 Final decision: February 15, 2008 Electronic submission Papers should be submitted through the Elsevier electronic submission system at http://ees.elsevier.com/csl and should follow the usual Computer Speech and Language guidelines (see links from the above URL). Papers should be identified as being intended for the special issue by choosing the article type as Speech Separation.