Friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen
I wish you a very good morning.
This Haizhou Li a General Chair. I'd like to say few words to kick start
of the
conference.
First of all I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you.
This is not because Singapore is warm.
This is also because of
the Interspeech fever.
This year is very special for me. Every year I travelled to
Interspeech and this year I just sit here and wait to come.
I remember that in 2008 one day Tanya dropped down Singapore and she persuaded me
to meet to place a bid for this conference. It has been six years.
Actually, she told me that running Interspeech is a lot of fun
which is true.
And Isabel Trancoso also told me the same thing
and I trust them because they ran Interspeech before.
And I can confirm that I enjoy very much the process.
But there's one thing that they
forgot to tell me
that is running Interspeech is also a bit of work.
I tell you that I enjoy the process.
Although I don't want to do it the second time.
Frédéric Bimbot was more helpful last year in Lyon he was
the General Chair and at closing ceremony he gave me a gift
which is this megaphone.
?? he never knew we will have to talk to people many times
and this is a utility for effective speech communication.
I did use it in the last year I talked to many people
this was the team, my team, the local team
and here you can see and hear that my message is clear and loud.
With the megaphone.
So the idea of the team that you will see them in next few days
they are helping with
organization and the local logistics you will see them
many times at different locations.
This is the map of the Interspeech, the warm map of Interspeech
and this event is very special for Singapore becaue the statistics show that Interspeech favours
a location that is 35 to 45
degrees of latitude.
And this time it came to the south.
And it is the first time it is in Southeast Asia so we
are very proud that Interspeech came to my home country.
Singapore is the city of multilingual society and we speak many languages.
We speak...
The Constitution recognises four official languages these are: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
For English
English reminds us our colonial history and of course English today actually this is
the most popular language in business and in politics
in Singapore.
Seventy five percent of the local population are actually ethnic Chinese this is why we
speak Chinese
Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin is a language that is
also very commonly used
and for those who don't know that the most popular is TV China that is
in Chinese Mandarin here in Singapore.
Of course we have a minority group. We have Malay who are the indigenous community
and we have
the Indian community, so we have Malay and Tamil as the official languages as well.
In Singapore everyday more then twenty languages are being used in the public.
And they make the best place to celebrate
the diversity of spoken language which is the theme of
this Interspeech.
This year we have this theme that is also to call for greater attention to
languages they are not
well studied.
The map of the world language documented about seven thousand spoken languages available or that
are still in use. But actually our research community have focused very much on a
small fraction of them.
I count it's about one percent of them.
So we have this theme: celebrating the diversity of spoken languages and to call for
greater
attention to those languages to bring our scientific
achievement to benefit people in different parts of The World.
This year the organising committee consists of a key members from Hong Kong and Singapore.
By myself and Bin Ma from a Singapore and we
have Pak-Chung Ching and Helen Meng, they are from Hong Kong.
You know the Singapore and Hong Kong are two competing economies in Asia. We have
better
competitors than collaborators.
But this time we set a example we put together the team we prove to
the world that
actually we can be wonderful collaborators.
In the next few days you will see the technical program which was prepared by
Helen under
the leadership of Helen and also supported by Bin Ma, the Co-Chair.
They had the seamless collaboration to prepare to
the technical program.
You also see the smiling faces on the staircase which is picture that was taken
up to all
the people the decision was made the TVC meeting was made in Singapore.
The conference is attended by
till yesterday it was attended by people from forty seven countries.
And
people show me, the colleagues show me this chart
I though was GDP ranking of The World's economies.
With the exception of Singapore
and I want to highlight that in Singapore we
have large community as compared to our population size.
I tell people that we have the highest number of speech researchers in The World
per capita.
Every speech has to be unique and different so
this time we are putting effort to introduce new programs.
Some of the programs are new and some are just new. I would like to
thank a group of a people, our
team for working together to publicise, to archive Interspeech 2014 proceedings
online, actually this made us available today so if you can access our ISCA website
you should be able to see.
We have streamlined the process to .. in the past this process took usually six
months to one year
before you'd see the proceedings online and we have streamlined this process and we hope
that the future
Interspeech will follow this processing that benefits the members.
This year we also prepared souvenirs for all the participants we have ??, ??
or top value payment card you can use for transportation, making payments and
doing many things and this is limited edition we issued this together with Singapore Metro
System.
We also jointly issued stamps with Singapore Post to commemorate this important event.
Everyone of you must have receiver a souvenir a paper bag that is with the
stamp inside.
One another thing. The group of ?? Ling under leadership of the Sebastian started this
mobile
app last year and we continue this. This year we grow the group by Nicholas
and Tilo
to help them make a lot of effort to adapt their app into Interspeech 2014.
And
actually you can now .. I believe you have received the
instructions and they're available in Google Play in app store.
I realise that
our app Interspeech 2014 was released on
9th September that was to day the iPhone 6 was announced.
So you can see the significance of our app.
The Singapore team added feature into the mobile app, now you can use natural language
to query,
to ask information about papers, talks and even general
information, tourist information in Singapore.
I thank the Singapore team who put together the app and to
encourage the ?? we put up three prizes. One each day with a cash prize
and we will announce
the winners at the end of that day. If you are the
user and you find this logo, this ?? appears
on your mobile phone, please identify yourself to the registration desk.
To bring up the winners and to promote the conference theme we prepared some games
as well.
We have Multilingual Telegraph Express tomorrow and the day after
That helps you to translate your message into Chinese, from English to Chinese and
postcard to your friends and we also have #Tag your badge with language tags game
that
allow you to label your language that you speak so you can greet your friends
and talk to your friends in your common languages.
We also have the game with Shakespear's poems.
That allowes you, that encourage you to translate Shakespear's beautiful poems
into your own language to share with the other fellow participants.
The conference is made possible by
helps from all directions. I would like to especially mention three organizations: the ISCA
who has give us a local team of great support and guidance
to continue the traditions of Interspeech and I would like to thank COLIPS The Chinese
and
Oriental Language Information Processing Society of Singapore.
Almost every member of colleagues has contributed to the organisation in the past years.
I would like to thank The Institute for Infocomm Research
where I work and many of my colleagues are part of the committee.
Of course
I would like to thank The Meeting Matters that is here our PCO.
This year we received high number of sponsorships and a lot of industry players who
in our areas or some of them are
sponsors and some of them are first-time sponsors.
And the overwhelming support from the industry also signifies significant gain of momentum
in our speech technology in the industry. That's very good for community.
Lastly I have some housekeeping announcement.
You have the wireless, there is wi-fi available around this convention center
all the same passwords and
and SSID system, across the convention centre.
And an app I just talked about. Smoking are for those
who need to smoke. In Singapore we have various restrictions of
where you can smoke and please find the
smoking area that's near the poster area downstairs.
And today is welcome reception that starts at seven
o'clock in the ground floor of this building, so please join the event.
And finally I wish you enjoyable stay in Singapore and productive conference.
If I missed out anything please also you can get
information from our social media sites of the conference.
Okay next I would like to invite TPC Chair
Helen to give a briefing on the technical program. Let's welcome her.
Good morning.
I'm Helen Meng and I'm the Chair of the
Technical Program Committee of Interspeech 2014
and a I'm joint with my wonderful
Co-Chair doctor Bin Ma, who actually did most of the work, but today he has
a request for me.
He asked me to present on behalf of both of us and also to keep
this presentation short, so we'll stay within the time limit.
So Interspeech 2014 celebrates the diversity of spoken languages
and when we look at the languages that are mentioned in the abstract of our
papers we see that
there are over thirty languages
and with the top two being English and Mandarin Chinese.
So these come from the accepted papers
we have six hundred and fourteen accepted papers from over eleven hundred submissions, so I
our
acceptance rate is fifty two percent.
Our review process was managed by thirty six Area Chairs across twelve areas and they
have
worked very hard to ensure that every paper gets at least three reviews.
And the accept and reject decisions were finalised in two day face-to-face meeting in
Singapore. Which involved twenty three TPC members.
So altogether our technical program features forty two oral sessions, thirty poster sessions,
six special sessions, five keynotes, eight tutorials, six sattelite workshops and
two Show & Tell sessions.
These are the twelve technical areas of Interspeech 2014 together with the submission statistics.
So you can see that the popular areas are: Area 1 Speech
Perception and Production and Area 7 Speech Recognition.
Whereas for Area 12 Spoken Language Evaluation,
Standardization and Resources we have fewer number of submissions.
So huge thanks go to all our Area Chairs. We have thirty six Area Chairs,
three per area, among whom we
have invited one being the Coordinating Area Chair and
they are acknowledged by having a star next to their names.
So they have really helped us immensely and responded to our requests immediately even on
weekends.
Our special sessions were coordinated by Dr. Tomi Kinnunen and he helped us with
coordinating the assessments of all the special session proposals leading to twelve shortlisted proposals.
These brought in a hundred and five papers that were peer reviewed and the review
process
of the special session papers were consistent with the regular papers.
So eventually we had six special sessions that were retained primarily based on having a
sufficient
number of accepted papers and we have fifty papers total.
Many thanks also go to our nine hundred and fourteen reviewers and crash reviewers and
again their
reviews were submitted on time. Our crash reviewers actually came in to fill in all
the missing
reviews and we thank all of them for making
important contributions to our review process.
So you will see that our technical program has a marvellous lineup of keynote speakers.
There're
shown here. Starting with today where our keynote will be
delivered by our ISCA medalist of 2014.
And the identity of the speaker will be revealed shortly by our ISCA President.
And we thank a professor Brian Mak our Plenary Session Chair for coordinating plenary sessions.
Our tutorials are coordinated by professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah.
And thanks to him we have eight tutorial wiht three hundred attendees covering a diversity
of topics.
Our workshops were coordinated by Dr. Chai Wutiwiwatchai and we have six workshops as sattelite
events with three hundred and ninety attendees.
A thanks also go to professors Eng Siong Chang and Lei Xie.
Also Show & Tell sessions intel sessions Chair Dr. Alvina Goh
and our TPC has been very fortunate because we have leaders from previous Interspeech conferences
who are with us all the way and ?? times they will give us very
kind reminders of
very important issues that we might have forgotten.
So special thanks go to professor Isabel Troncoso and especially to
our Interspeech 2013 Technical Chairs Dr. Lori Lamel and Prof. Pascal Perrier.
So they were with us all the way and gave us many good advice and
answered are numerous
questions with very prompt answers, so thank you very much.
And we'd also like to thank all the authors for submitting high quality papers to
our conference.
So we did a bit of analytics on paper submissions. So what we did was
to automatically
discover the topics based on the paper titles and the abstracts of all our papers
that were submitted.
And we ran LDA - latent Direchlet allocation for up to twenty topics
and for each topic we've got we generated a work cloud, four of which are
shown here, so that the size of
the keyword and work cloud is proportional to the probability of the word in that
topic, so you can see here
in that word clouds which are representative of the automatically discovered topics, they sort of
have some correspondences with our technical areas.
So as a reminder these are our technical areas and in fact the area titles
can be enriched by the
titles of the sub areas. So for example in the Area 1 Speech Perception and
Production we have nineteen
sub areas, so what we did was to try to match the keywords in our
work cloud, we have
up to two hundred words per topic that was automatically discovered and we try to
match
using a maximize F1-measure and
you may guess, so for example
if we try to match the topics to the areas
for example topic one was matched to area three Speech and Audio Analysis and some
of the
keywords with prominence include VAS and whisper which is interesting. Topic two is obviously Area
6
Synthesis and Spoken Language Generation.
Some more examples here topic five
matched to Area 1 Speech Perception and Production and it seems that keyword articulatory
and production have prominence there. So it may indicate that speech production is regaining popularity
and topic six matched to Area 7 Speech Recognition
and apparently DNN is very popular there.
So topic nine for example matched to Area 3 and we see for example reverberant,
reverberation.
So reverberant speech has some prominence there.
Topic fourteen matched with Area 11
Spoken Language Processing, Translation Information
Retrieval and keyword term, detection, STD has some prominence there.
Finally the last batch
for example topic sixteen matched with Area 2 Prosody, Phonetics and Phonology and the extra
linguistic information like age,
child and gender have some prominence there. So what we did was to plot the
matches between the
twenty topics with the areas that we are matched with them and this bar graph
shows the run that I've
just presented to you with twenty topics for one run and we see that none
of the topics
were matched to Areas 9 or 12, so
just to remind you nine is one of the three Speech Recognition topics and twelve
is the last
one Spoken Language Evaluation and Resources.
So what we did to cross-check is to run LDA for over eighty runs and
plot the same plot again and here
we vary the number of topics that we try to discover automatically, but by ??
lash the trend line shows
that the profiles are the same. So again still topics nine and twelve seem to
be weaker.
And we tried to compare with be papers that are submitted across the twelve areas,
so these are areas
declared by the authors and we see that basically again Area 12 tends to be
weaker but if we compare the
three paragraphs across Area 7, 8 or 9
for Speech Recognition we see as we compare with between
green bar graphs here there is redistribution on both sides across these three areas.
We also did some analytics on the reviews where we have four aspects of the
reviews: importance,
novelty, correctness and clarity. And these are rated on a four
point scale and you can see the distributions shown here.
This is the distribution of the overall ratings coming
from a reviewers. These are rated on a six point scale.
And we also did LDA on the review paragraphs submitted by our reviewers and we
ran it up to six
topics, as shown here. You can see that the work clouds tend to be more
diffused, but by ?? large if you look at
for example topic zero it relates with the layout, the format and the organization of
the paper.
Topic one a bit on the methods and the proposed approaches. Topic two on the
writing, whether the writing
is interesting. Topic three on performance and results and then topics four and five are
rather diffused.
Possibly due to the diversity of the contents in the papers.
So that's a quick sum up of the technical program of Interspeech 2014. Lastly but
not least
we'd like to offer our most sincere thanks to all the authors, to our reviewers
and to all the
delegates who are here with us. And now Dr. Ma Bin and myself will respectfully
hand over the success of the technical program to your hands
and we hope you will enjoy the conference. Thank you very much.
Thank you Helen for the insightful briefing to the technical program.
Next I'd like to invite the ISCA President Tanja Schultz to adress us. Tanja, please.
Okay. Can you hear me well?
So on behalf of ISCA I would like to all welcome you to our fifteenth
annual conference the
Interspeech, as you know this is the flagship conference
of the International Speech Communication Association.
And as was already hinted by Haizhou it takes a really brave and active team
to host
Interspeech, to host all of us in their home country and so my first
and foremost thanks goes to the Interspeech 2014
organisation team.
I think they really did a great job. We just heard from Haizhou all the
efforts we also heard from
Helen Meng and Ma Bin who put together wonderful conference program.
And of course the thanks also go to all the Area Coordinators, to the Special
Session
Coordinators, to the scientific community, but of course also to all of you for attending
conference Interspeech
here in this wonderful city of Singapore.
Haizhou was very nice about saying that they have a few sponsors or a couple
more. I would say it's
really a record number of sponsorship we have here in this conference. We also have
a record number of
student grands which had been handed out in combination of ISCA and Interspeech organizers.
We have a huge number of exhibitors which basically had
been taken the exhibition places up to the limits.
And as was also already mentioned, we have for the first time in our history,
we have the
publications already available online and archived at the day of the conference.
I'm also very impressed by youe after program and I'm quite happy that you set
the starting date
of Formula 1 race to friday to not sidetrack all the attendees, so that's very
nice of you.
As we already learned from Helen, so the number of submissions was around eleven hundred
seventy
three which is slightly less then what we had before, but I'm really thankful to
the organisers that they
didn't compromise our rejection rates, so we want to keep it
at the level of about fifty percent. You can see from the chart here that
we have
about fifty percent acceptance rate to really keep the high quality of our conference.
You can also see from the next slide that this doesn't really have a huge
impact on our membership
so we have a rather stable amount of members just about eighteen hundred members which
we
have for the last four years.
What you can see so is that we have a fewer number of students so
that seems to be that the number
of students shrink. We are about thirty percent of our members currently of students.
And this might be a reflection of a more maturing community with more maturing technology
and
industrial players, so I believe in order to keep it at healthy percentage of having
attracting many young
forces and youth students.
We probably in the future will rely more on industrial help and also we are
working hard in ISCA
to have a lot of grants to make sure that students are able to come
to our conference.
As you may know out of these submissions and accepted papers we are selecting
about ten to twelve best student paper finalists
and I'm happy to show you here the first set of six finalists together, so
the first authors of our
students and you see the slot when they will present.
And as you may know
the competition of the finalists also includes the talk that people were given and it
will be assessed by a senior members of the community. So please
join in and make sure that you do see the talks of these students.
The three finalists will be announced at the closing ceremony together although with
the two best journal paper award which we will give out at a closing ceremony.
I also have to share very sad news with you, so we have a Dr.
Yoshi Tokura who passed away
at the end of last year, so lately he was the Vice
Director of the National Institute of Informatics.
And I wanted to make sure that you're all aware of this one.
So now I would like to talk a little bit about the highlights of the
activities of the board in the
past year. Before I do this I wanted to state as a President that I'm
extremely happy and lucky to have
such an active board. So what you see here are all the board members so
we have the
blue ones in the blue boxes these are the active board members and the current
board members,
the green ones are ex official
board members and the light blue are Administrative Secretary. And I wanted to take the
opportunity
to thank all the board members for being so active for
doing so many good things in ISCA.
So thanks to the
let's say careful spending of our predecessors in the
past and thanks to a long stream of very successful conferences,
I believe it is safe to say that ISCA is now in a rather stable
financial situation. You can see
here from the graph so the light gray one are the current assets, so it's
a development of the
assets over the last fourteen years.
So this stable situation really gives us now the opportunity to roll out way more
activities
in order to benefit the community from these assets we have.
So we
tremendously expanded the activities to serve the community and among those are that we
significantly increased the student grant support so we went up from twenty to sixty grants
last year.
We are also in the position now to increase the loan and reduce the risk
for future organizers,
in order to make sure that they can sleep better, actually.
We are also continuously spending fundings for ITRs, for ?? seeks we have additional grands.
And we also spend a significant money on our distinguished lecture tours.
For the first time this year we launched summer school, so we had two ISCA
supported training
schools in 2014 and we are planning on more training schools on the next year.
We also started a fully funding the students' ?? route table and we are investing
money in tailoring
the start software to make it more closely to our needs.
So let me also go about some of the highlights for example this is something
which is
hopefully visible to the members of ISCA. We improved significantly, actually Haizhou's team improved
significantly the ISCA membership portal.
We also as was just mentioned together with Martine ?? they're now in the position
to
timely publish the proceedings on the ISCA archive and we also
improved tremendously the ISCA portal
which I would also like to thank Chris Wellekens for doing the ISCApad each month.
So as you may know we have also a large number of ?? seeks, so
we have twelve Topics Special Interest
Groups and seven Language Special Interest Groups and there is a lot of activity going
on with respect
to organising workshops and challenges, sharing resources, discussions and this they had also tremendously
reorganised the ISCA web pages.
In order to improve the service to the community.
They also came up with the online application and guideline
for workshops and as you can see here from the list we had a
large number of
ISCA supported sattelite workshops and also six Training and Language Schools.
Furthermore I'm happy to announce we have two distinguished lecture tours, so there's
one which started in 2013, which is a professor Hynek Hermansky and Michael Riley, who
travelled The World to give talks and so for this and next
year it will be professor Roger Moore and Catherine Best.
Who already started their tour.
All of these activities would not be possible also without the substantial help from the
students
and we have our Students' Advisory Committee, so this year we have new coordinators which
you see on the
left side on the slide and the two people who
completed their tour you can see on the right side of the slide.
And for all the students here in the room I would like to pass on
behalf of ?? Zack sec that there really
is clear need of volunteers and new members and if you
are student and if you are interested to support, then please either see the
student members at the ISCA Pool or go to the ISCA's students' web page in
order to sign up for helping.
The students are managing their own web sites, they are also having one Interspeech event
which is
called Students Meet Experts.
They're very active in social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
And they're also promoting the students in the ISCApad.
So again if you are student and you're willing to help please sign in.
So now I'm
happy to announce
the upcoming conferences, so in 2015 we will have all of you in Dresden, Germany.
And the conference is chaired by Sebastian Möller and you will hear way more about
the future
conferences in the closing ceremony.
In 2016 we will be in Bay Area in San Francisco chaired by Nelson Morgan.
And in 2017 and I believe this is the first time we announce this we
will have
Interspeech in Stockholm in Sweden and as I said you'll hear about these three future
conferences
more in the closing ceremony. The chairs
will be there and will explain a little bit about this.
So now I would like to ask Kate Neil to come up on stage. She's
our fellow board member and she will
announce this year's ISCA fellows.
Hello. The ISCA's Fellow Program
recognizes and honours outstanding members of our
community who made significant contributions to the theory of
speech communication,
science and technology. And I am very grateful to the ISCA members. Any of you
can do this
who have nominated fellows
to this year.
And also for all the referees and fellows from Selection Committee for their work.
I'm delighted to announce we have six new fellows
I'm sure you'll all agree made many outstanding contributions.
First three fellows are Jim Glass,
the contributions to speech processing and spoken language systems technologies.
Unfortunatelly Jim is having his visa renewed. He can't be with us today.
??
For contributions to advanced and state of the art
in spoken language processing and especially for human-to-human
and human-machine conversational understanding.
??
And many of you are particularly interested in the work of the Chinese,
contributions to advanced and state of the art in spoken language processing
And
there are some people in this field who are on this slider too
who aren't just known by one name and the first one is Isabel.
Isabel Trancoso for research in speech coding and her significant contribution
?? it's the same contribution just,
speech science and technology for the Portuguese language.
And Jacqueline Vessie for pioneering works in clinical phonetics and her immense role of the
interface between phonetics, phonology and speech engineering.
??
The other significant and outstanding contributions to research in education and the processing of speech.
And now I'd love .. I'll see if there are present colleagues, do we have
Jacqueline?
Excellent, if you can come up?
And I can now started present the fellows. ??
So last but certainly not least it's now my great pressure to announce the ISCA
medal for
scientific achievement in 2014
and the medallist is
Anne Cutler.
Good Job.
Thank you.
Okay, so
I think I will hand over now to Haizhou and I'll do the introduction of
Anne and about or what
we're gonna talk later right before her presentation.