Speech and Language in Health: from Remote Monitoring to Medical Conversations

Interspeech 2022 Special Session

Description

Technological advancements have been rapidly transforming healthcare in the last several years, with speech and language tools playing an integral role. However, this brings a multitude of unique challenges to consider to increase the generalisability, reliability, interpretability and utility of speech and language tools in healthcare and health research settings.

Many of these challenges are common to the two themes of this special session. The first theme, From Collection and Analysis to Clinical Translation, seeks to draw attention to all aspects of speech-health studies that affect the overall quality and reliability of any analysis undertaken on the data and thus affect user acceptance and clinical translation.

The second theme, Language Technology For Medical Conversations, covers a growing field of research in which automatic speech recognition and natural language processing tools are combined to automatically transcribe and interpret clinician-patient conversations and generate subsequent medical documentation.

By combining these themes, this session will bring the wider speech-health community together to discuss innovative ideas, challenges and opportunities for utilizing speech technologies within the scope of healthcare applications.

Topics

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Data collection protocols and speech elicitation strategies

  • Device selection and related effects

  • Acceptance of data collection in different health cohorts

  • Longitudinal data collection and analysis

  • Patient and Public Involvement in speech research

  • User evaluation of speech technology in a healthcare setting

  • Feature extraction and novel representations that provide clinical interpretability

  • Advancements in analytics and machine learning methodologies that are clinically or biologically inspired

  • Fusion of linguistic and paralinguistic information

  • Health-related conversational analytics

  • Speech recognition and natural language processing in healthcare settings

  • Creation and annotation of medical conversation datasets

  • Role of medical conversation understanding in reducing documentation burden

  • Use of chatbots in healthcare

  • Spoken language technologies in real-world health settings

  • Utilising Electronic Health Records to personalise models in speech recognition or conversational analytics

Paper Submission

Via the main Interspeech website: https://interspeech2022.org/callfor/

Paper submission deadline: 21st March 2022

Paper update deadline: 28th March 2022

Author Notification: 13th June 2022

Special Session Organization

Because a large number of papers (24) were accepted with significant in-person participation the organization will consist of an on-site oral session, an on-site poster session, and a virtual poster session. Please note that all in-person posters give a 2-minute spotlight presentation without questions at the end of the oral session.

Please check below how to prepare for these sessions.


1. On-Site Oral Session

Presenters: Please follow the general instructions on the Interspeech website: https://interspeech2022.org/forauthor/guidelines.php


2. On-Site Poster Session

Presenter: Please follow the poster presenter guidelines also at: https://interspeech2022.org/forauthor/guidelines.php. In addition to your posters, we are going to run poster-spotlight talks during the final 20 minutes of the oral presentation stream. These talks must keep to a strict limit of 2 minutes (with no questions). Please prepare an additional one or two slides for this spotlight presentation, following the Speaker Check-in guidelines at https://interspeech2022.org/forauthor/guidelines.php on uploading your talks before the session.


3. Virtual Poster Session

Presenters: Please follow the general instructions on the Interspeech website: https://interspeech2022.org/forauthor/guidelines.php


Note, all presenters are expected to upload their presentations to the virtual platform. Please check the Author Guideline page on the main website for details on this.

Organisers

  • Nicholas Cummins - Kings's College London (main contact From Collection and Analysis to Clinical Translation theme)

  • Thomas Schaaf - 3M (main contact Language Technology For Medical Conversations theme)

  • Heidi Christensen - University of Sheffield

  • Judith Dineley - King’s College London and University of Augsburg

  • Julien Epps - University of New South Wales

  • Matt Gormley - Carnegie Mellon University

  • Sandeep Konam - Abridge.ai

  • Emily Mower Provost - University of Michigan

  • Chaitanya Shivade - Amazon.com

  • Thomas Quatieri - MIT Lincoln Laboratory