Spoken Language Processing and Conversational Systems

Special Track at FLAIRS Conference

DoubleTree Ocean Point Resort & Spa

North Miami Beach, Florida, USA

May 17-20, 2020

Scope of the Track

Spoken language is the favored media of communication between human beings whether face-to-face or through various communication tools such as the phone, voice chat applications or even the general media like the radio or TV. Hence, adding conversational interfaces to various types of computer software and hardware devices will make them more natural. To achieve this goal, there are still multiple challenges at all the levels from speech recognition and synthesis, spoken language understanding and generation as well as dialog management. To meet these challenges, interdisciplinary work at the cross roads between linguistics, AI, Data Science, and Cognitive Science is carried by researchers around the world.

The goal of this track is to be a forum for scholars and scientists to present their empirical research, and well-grounded theory related to Spoken Language Processing as well as to Dialog and Conversational Systems.

List of Topics

The list of topics includes (but is not limited to):

• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Spoken Language Understanding and Generation
• Spoken Documents Retrieval
• Spoken Documents Summarization
• Question Answering from speech
• Conversational systems and chatbots
• Dialog Management
• Speech Data Mining applied to education, mental disease detection, etc.
• Computational models of Spoken Language (phonology, syntax, discourse, disfluencies, etc.).
• Speaker and Language Identification
• Multimodal Information Processing
• Spoken language interfaces to Educational systems
• Spoken language interfaces to games
• Spoken language to Health and medical systems
• Spoken language interfaces in smart homes
• Spoken language interfaces to assistive technology (car driving, robot or drone navigation, etc.)
• Emotion in speech.
• Evaluation methodologies of the above systems.
• Speech data collection and annotation.

Track Chair

M. Zakaria KURDI, University of Lynchburg, USA

Program Committee

• Guinn Curry, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Thomas Hain, The University of Sheffield, UK
• David Griol, University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Jeffrey Heinz, Stony Brook University, USA
• Jun Wang, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Milos Cernak, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland
• Eric Castelli, French Research Institute for Digital Sciences (INRIA), France
• Mauro Falcone, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy
• Mark Core, University of Southern California, USA
• Kamel Smaïli, University of Lorraine, (LORIA labs), France
• Markku Turunen, Tampere University, Finland
• Sophie Rosset, LIMSI, CNRS, Universite Paris-Saclay, France
• Fazel Keshtkar, St. John’s University, USA
• Drago Burileanu, Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania
• António Teixeira, University of Aveiro, Portugal
• M. Zakaria KURDI, University of Lynchburg, USA
• Others are being contacted

Important Dates

November 18, 2019 Paper submission deadline

January 20, 2020 Paper acceptance notification

February 3, 2020 Poster abstract submission

February 10, 2020 Poster abstract notification

February 17, 2020 author registration

February 24, 2020 Camera ready version due

April 6, 2020 Early registration

May 11, 2020 Regular registration

May 17-20, 2020 Conference

Papers and Abstracts

Papers accepted in the track will be published by AAAI as part of the FLAIRS proceedings. There are three kinds of submissions: full paper – a paper of high quality, which will be published in the proceedings (up to 6 pages) and will be presented by the author in a corresponding track (20 minute oral presentation); short paper – a paper that shows some novelty and general interest, but is more preliminary or in the early stages of development, which also get published in the proceedings (up to 4 pages) and the author presents the work in a poster session; and poster abstract, which will be published as abstract only (up to 250 words; please follow this format for the final camera-ready poster abstract) and the author presents the work in a poster session. Rejected full papers may still be accepted as short papers or poster abstracts, if reviewers found interest in the idea, but the paper quality was not sufficient to be published in full length. There will also be a separate abstract only submission for authors who want to submit just an abstract and present it in a poster session.

For each accepted paper (full, short, or poster abstract), there must be an accompanying author registration. A single author may have up to a maximum of two papers per author registration. Author names may be changed or re-ordered after reviewing; however, for budgetary reasons, registration fees will be based on the details at the time of submission and review.

Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must be original, and not submitted concurrently to a journal or another conference. Double-blind reviewing will be provided, so submitted papers must use fake author names and affiliations. Papers must use the latest AAAI Press Word template or LaTeX macro package, and must be submitted as PDF through the EasyChair conference system. (Do NOT use a fake name for your EasyChair login; your EasyChair account information is hidden from reviewers.)

FLAIRS will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also required not to submit their papers elsewhere during FLAIRS's review period. These restrictions apply only to journals and conferences, not to workshops and similar specialized presentations with a limited audience and without archival proceedings. Authors will be required to confirm that their submissions conform to these requirements at the time of submission.