Call for Papers (pdf version) 3rd call

Important datesTopicsWorkshop FormatRegular PapersShow & Tell PapersIndustry and Forensics trackSpecial SessionsAwardsCSL especial issue

Important Dates

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Regular paper submissions:February 5, 2016
Show & Tell / Industry & Forensics:February 22, 2016
Notifications:March 18, 2016
Camera-ready paper due
(early registration of a covering author is mandatory):
April 13, 2016
Early registration deadline:April 30, 2016 (24:00 GMT+1)

Topics

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The general themes of the conference include speaker and language recognition and characterization. The specific topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Speaker and language recognition, verification, identification
  • Speaker and language characterization
  • Features for speaker and language recognition
  • Speaker and language clustering
  • Multispeaker segmentation, detection, and diarization
  • Language, dialect, and accent recognition
  • Robustness in channels and environment
  • System calibration and fusion
  • Speaker recognition with speech recognition
  • Multimodal speaker recognition
  • Speaker recognition in multimedia content
  • Machine learning for speaker and language recognition
  • Confidence estimation for speaker and language recognition
  • Corpora and tools for system development and evaluation
  • Low-resource (lightly supervised) speaker and language recognition
  • Speaker synthesis and transformation
  • Human and human-assisted recognition of speaker and language
  • Spoofing and tampering attacks: analysis and countermeasures
  • Forensic and investigative speaker recognition
  • Systems and applications

Workshop Format

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As in previous editions, Odyssey 2016 will consist of plenary oral and poster sessions, with special sessions on topics of interest, Show & Tell (demo) sessions and panel discussions with industry partners.

Regular Papers

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Regular papers (including those for special sessions) must be at most 8 pages long and are expected to include scientific or methodological novelty, which must be stated clearly in the Introduction, along with a review of the relevant prior work. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the scientific committee. Accepted papers will appear in electronic proceedings, and will be accessible through the ISCA Archive.

Show & Tell Papers

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For the Show & Tell (demo) sessions, authors must submit short papers (at most, 4 pages long) describing a system or prototype, a target application, a product, a demonstrator or any combination of them. These contributions do not have to present scientific or methodological novelty; therefore, they will not undergo full peer review and will not be included in the proceedings (though will be available for download on the website). One or more poster sessions will be allocated for Show & Tell submissions, with auxiliary equipment (tables, plugs, etc.) available if requested. The organizing committee may select the most interesting submissions for oral presentation.

Industry and Forensics track

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To foster a closer collaboration across industry and academia, an industry track was introduced in Odyssey 2014. The initiative is continued in Odyssey 2016 under the name "Industry and Forensics track", in order to include forensic and investigative speaker recognition, an application which involves diverse areas of expertise.

Companies, R&D labs, government agencies and other interested parties (e.g. forensic experts and labs) are called to participate in the following sessions:

  • Forensic and investigative speaker recognition.
  • Commercial applications of speaker and language recognition.

These sessions are expected to be highly interactive, with a series of pitch talks (3-5 minutes long each), followed by a panel discussion open to the audience, addressing practical issues or unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention.

To participate, just send an email to info@odyssey2016.org with "Industry and Forensics track" as Subject, providing details about your company profile (in particular, your involvement with or your need for speaker and language recognition technology), your interests (forensic, commercial or other) and contact info.

Besides voice biometrics providers and companies that develop and exploit speaker/language recognition solutions, we encourage companies who are IN NEED for speaker or language recognition technology.

Special Sessions

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Special session 1:
Speaker Recognition in Multimedia Content (SS-SRMC)

Speaker information is instrumental in better exploiting spoken multimedia content, as evidenced by recent work on large-scale speaker indexing and linking, or on speaker naming in broadcast archives.

The special session 'Speaker recognition in multimedia content', organized in collaboration with the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language in Multimedia (SIG-SLIM), pursues two main goals: (1) to share recent advances in the field and to identify synergies between the various multimedia applications where speaker recognition, indexing and segmentation is considered; and (2) to raise awareness on speaker-related research in multimedia so as to strengthen the link between the multimedia and the speaker recognition communities.

The session targets researchers working on any topic related to speaker characterization for multimedia content processing, including (but not limited to) speaker segmentation, speaker indexing, speaker clustering, speaker naming or discovery, or speaking face detection. Multimodal (e.g. speech + face recognition) approaches are particularly welcome. We expect submissions presenting original research results, ongoing research and development projects, tools and resources that are being made available, or benchmarking initiatives.

Chairs of SS-SRMC at Odyssey 2016:

Hervé BredinCNRS/LIMSI, France
Claude BarrasLIMSI, France
Guillaume GravierCNRS/IRISA, France

Special session 2:
NIST 2015 Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge (SS-LRiMLC)

In 2015 NIST launched a Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge as an alternative evaluation methodology to attract newcomers to the field by reducing the effort required to preprocess the data through the use of i-vectors.

This special session focuses on the recent advances in language recognition in the context of the NIST Challenge as well as on the Challenge results. As such, we invite participants of the Challenge as well as researchers who work on the language recognition task using i-vectors to submit papers about their systems or techniques. Novel uses of i-vectors for language recognition as well as data resources and benchmark results are of special interest.

Submissions to this Special Session are expected to present original ideas or results, and must be done under the topic "Machine learning for speaker and language recognition".

Chairs of SSS-LRiMLC at Odyssey 2016:

Craig GreenbergNIST, USA
Audrey TongNIST, USA

Awards

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Odyssey 2016 will feature two awards:

All regular papers and all special session papers are candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student paper award, the first author must be a student (meaning that she/he does not yet hold a PhD degree) at the time of paper submission.

Computer Speech and Language Special Issue

Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization

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The goal of this special issue is to highlight the current state of research efforts on speaker and language recognition and characterization. New ideas about features, models, tasks, datasets or benchmarks are growing, making this a particularly exciting time. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, those of Odyssey 2016 (as listed above).

Guest Editors:

Eduardo LleidaUniversity of Zaragoza, Spain
Luis J. Rodríguez-FuentesUniversity of the Basque Country, Spain

Important dates:

Submission open:May 6, 2016
Submission deadline extended:October 9, 2016
Notifications of final decision:March 31, 2017
Scheduled publication:April, 2017

Though the call for papers to this special issue is open, authors with best reviews at Odyssey 2016 will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers (at least 30% of the material must be new). Note that CSL papers have no page limit. All papers will go through the same rigorous review process as regular CSL papers, with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.