Call for papers: SLPAT 2013
---------------------------

We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for the fourth
Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
(SLPAT), to be co-located with Interspeech 2013 in Grenoble, France,
August 21–22, 2013. The deadline for submission of papers and demo
proposals is in May, 2013, for exact dates see below. Full details on
the workshop, topics of interest, timeline and formatting of regular
papers is here:

http://slpat.org/slpat2013

This 2-day workshop will bring together researchers from all areas of
speech and language technology with a common interest in making
everyday life more accessible for people with physical, cognitive,
sensory, emotional or developmental disabilities. This workshop will
provide an opportunity for individuals from both research communities,
and the individuals with whom they are working, to assist to share
research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and
the potential for collaboration and progress.

Scope and topics
----------------

Assistive technologies (AT) allow disabled individuals to do things
that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do. Many
examples of AT involve providing universal access, such as
modifications to multimedia devices or telecommunication appliances to
make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An
important sub-discipline within the AT research community is known as
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on
communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere
with some human communication modality, such as spoken or written
communication.

Accessibility denotes as to whether a product, device, service or
environment is usable for an individual or a group of persons with
some impairment. Accessibility can be increased either by designing
products and services that are directly usable for all, that are
adaptable to different users and user groups or that are compatible
with special aids for persons with disabilities through standard
interfaces.

From providing access to the web for individuals with severe motor
impairments, to improving the intelligibility of speech spoken by
individuals with speech impairments, the range of topics in Assistive
Technology (AT) and Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC)
that make use of or could make use of speech and natural language
processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of
individuals actively working within the two research communities --
AT/AAC on the one hand and speech/NLP on the other -- is relatively
small. This third SLPAT workshop will build on three previous
workshops (the first co-located with NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles,
the second with EMNLP 2011 in Edinburgh and the third with NAACL/HLT
2012 in Montreal), bringing together individuals from both research
communities and the individuals they are working to assist.

Among the users that could benefit from these technologies, the
elderly people and people with loss of autonomy are deeply in need of
technologies that could help them to live as independently as
possible. This year, the SLPAT workshop includes a special topic on
this aspect, Speech Interaction Technology for Ambient Assisted Living
in the Home.

We welcome submission of papers on theories, models, techniques and
evaluation studies with a focus on "Speech and Language Technologies
for Assisted Living" but will also accept contributions in other areas
of speech and language technology, tailored to accessibility,
augmentative & alternative communication (AAC) and assistive
technology (AT). Follow the link below for a full overview of the
workshop and topics of interest for paper submissions.

Special topic
-------------

Smart Homes and intelligent companions are typically equipped with
many sensors perceiving different aspects of the user and the home
environment. However, an underexploited sensor is the microphone
whereas it can deliver highly informative data and can be the prior
way of interaction in the home. The special topic of this workshop
aims at gathering researchers in speech and language technologies
interested in addressing the challenges related to empowering people
in loss of autonomy and ensuring social communication and security.

Relevant research topics would include (but are not limited to):

- Automatic Speech recognition in multi-source environments
- Distant speech recognition
- Understanding, modelling or recognition of aged speech
- Speech analysis in the case of elderly with impairments, early recognition of speech capability loss
- Assistive speech technology
- Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR)
- Multimodal emotion recognition
- Audio scene and smart home context analysis
- Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living

General topics
--------------

Topics of interest for submission to the workshop include but are not
limited to:

- Automated processing of sign language
- Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments
- Speech transformation for improved intelligibility
- Speech and Language Technologies for Assisted Living
- Translation systems; to and from speech, text, symbols and sign language
- Novel modeling and machine learning approaches for AAC/AT applications
- Text processing for improved comprehension, e.g., sentence simplification or text-to-speech
- Silent speech: speech technology based on sensors without audio
- Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication
- Dialogue systems and natural language generation for assistive technologies
- Multimodal user interfaces and dialogue systems adapted to assistive technologies
- NLP for cognitive assistance applications
- Presentation of graphical information for people with visual impairments
- Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications
- Brain-computer interfaces for language processing applications
- Speech, natural language and multimodal interfaces to assistive technologies
- Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology
- Web accessibility; text simplification, summarization, and adapted presentation modes such as speech, signs or symbols
- Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field
- Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes
- Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology
- Anything included in this year's special topic
- Other topics in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Important dates
---------------

- 27 May: Paper due date
- 3 June: Demo due date
- 24 June: Notification of acceptance
- 8 July: Camera-ready deadline
- 21-22 Aug: SLPAT workshop

Submission
----------

Submissions presented at the SLPAT workshop should mainly contain new
material that has not been presented at any other meeting with
publicly available proceedings. Papers that have been or will be
submitted to other meetings or publications must disclose this
information at submission time. Please list all other meetings where
the paper has been submitted at the end of the abstract field on the
submission site.