Call For proposals2023 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

Deadline: Monday, November 14, 2022.

We are pleased to invite one page research proposals for a

8 Week Residential Research Workshop on Speech and Language Technology

at Le Mans University in France

from June 12 to August 4, 2023

We invite one-page research proposals for the annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Workshop in Speech and Language Technology. Proposals should aim to advance human language technologies (HLT) and related areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as computer vision, and may address applications areas such as healthcare and education.  Proposals may address emerging challenges or long-standing problems.  Areas of interest in 2023 include but are not limited to:

• SPEECH PROCESSING: Dialectal and code-mixed speech recognition, far-field speech recognition, emotion and sentiment recognition, voice conversion and speech synthesis, spoken dialog systems; zero-shot and few-shot learning for speech processing; speech technologies for under-served languages and atypical speech.
• TEXT PROCESSING: Neural architectures for natural language understanding; knowledge discovery from text in multimodal context; novel approaches to semantic parsing, question-answering, and dialog; translation of informal text and dialectal speech, and simultaneous translation; cross-language information retrieval.
• MULTIMODAL PROCESSING: Interactive multimodal AI/HLT for emerging applications in education, healthcare delivery and public health; AL/HLT for natural and social sciences; AI/HLT for medical science.
• EXPLAINABILITY, PRIVACY, EQUITY: Human-interpretable insights into AI/HLT systems; privacy preserving AI/HLT; bringing benefits of AI/HLT systems equitably to all subpopulations and subdomains.

These workshops are a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series, and will be hosted by various partner universities on a rotating basis.  The research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops should serve as good examples for prospective proposers: https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/

All received proposals will be peer-reviewed cursorily for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated by November 21, 2022.  Travel conditions permitting, authors of feasible proposals will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on December 16-18, 2022. At this meeting, proposals will be revised to incorporate new ideas and address any concerns. Then, two or three research topics and the core teams to tackle them will be selected at this meeting.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue research on the selected topics. Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students. Authors of successful proposals typically lead these teams. Other senior participants are drawn from academia, industry and government. PhD students familiar with the field are then selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a competitive search, are star rising-seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2023 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed. If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the topics to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available to participate in the workshop for 6+ weeks. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith commitment that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your travel, residence, and participation in the workshop, including airfare, housing, meals and incidentals.

We intend to have an in-person planning meeting, for we feel strongly that meeting in-person and a residential workshop have been crucial to past successes. But we recognize the uncertainty arising from the lingering COVID pandemic, and will revert to a hybrid or fully virtual event if necessary.    

Please submit proposals to <jsalt2023@lists.johnshopkins.edu (jsalt2023 @ lists.johnshopkins.edu)> by Monday, 11/14/2022.