http://www.interspeech2006.org)
was held in Pittsburgh PA, September 17-21, 2006. In a continuation of Eurospeech/ICSLP
conference series, Interspeech 2006 offered around 650 papers in all aspects of
speech and language processing. In addition to the standard set of poster and
oral papers, Interspeech 2006 also showed off the growing speech and language
commercial community in the formerly heavy industry-based city of Pittsburgh.
New tech companies grown out of CMU and University of Pittsburgh demonstrated
their technologies along with academics during the first evening.
Perhaps because the conference was based in a Hotel (the
Westin Conference Center and Hotel), the early morning plenaries were well
attended where we heard from John Ohala (the ISCA Medalist) on sound variation
in speech; Mike Phillips on creating speech interfaces for the mass market;
Elissa Newport on statistical language learning in human infants; and local, Raj
Reddy on the past and future of speech recognition.
9 special sessions were presented, including a speech
separation challenge, and a combined poster/panel session of speech and language
in education that lead to lively discussion on whether speech synthesis is ready
for language education or not. A panel discussion called "From Ideas to
Companies" was presented with some very candid presentations by founders of some
well-known speech companies in our community. And for the old people amongst us,
a much enjoyed set of presentations and speech artifacts was organized by Janet
Baker.
The paper schedule is still on-line at
http://www.interspeech2006.org,
and proceedings are available through ISCA. Interspeech 2007 will be held in
Antwerp August 27-31 2007.
