Kyoto Hosts Successful ASRU

BY TATSUYA KAWAHARA

The tenth biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2007) was held in Kyoto, Japan on December 9-13, 2007. The ASRU is a flagship workshop of the Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC), and it has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate setting to discuss various issues of automatic speech recognition and understanding. In order to keep with the tradition, which has attracted many top-level researchers and made ASRU a special event in this research community, ASRU-2007 adhered to the convention set by previous workshops of a single track schedule consisting of review talks, poster presentations and panel discussions.

We had two prominent keynote speakers: Prof. Renato De Mori and Prof. Jun'ichi Tsujii. They gave overviews on the trend of language parsing and understanding, which has incorporated statistical formulations but still maintains structural analysis. The review talks in six regular sessions were given by invited speakers: Li Deng, Ye-Yi Wang, Jeff Bilmes, Stephan Vogel, Sharon Oviatt and Mark Clements. In addition, there were evening sessions for project talks and demonstrations. The project talks provided a comprehensive overview of current major research projects: GALE in USA, AMIDA in Europe and a METI-funded project in Japan. The demonstration session, which has become another highlight of recent ASRU workshops, provided an opportunity to exchange latest technologies.

ASRU-2007 received 267 paper submissions, almost double the number received for any previous ASRU conference. Among them, only 115 papers were accepted for presentation, resulting in an acceptance ratio of 43%, which is comparable to or even harder than the ICASSP. The organizers also received numerous requests for workshop participation, but were forced to close the registration very early due to the capacity of the venue and to keep ASRU's tradition of intimacy. The number of registrants was 204, and among them 200 people came to Kyoto, resulting in a turnout ratio of 98%. Most of the people actually attended the technical sessions, demonstrating the high quality of the technical programs. The banquet was also very impressive, featuring the Kyoto-style show (Mai) by the professional performers (Geiko and Maiko). Kyoto was formerly the capital of Japan for over 1000 years, and thus has many cultural heritages including ancient temples and this kind of performance. The workshop went through very smoothly and I hope the ASRU-2007 became a memorable event for every attendees. I would like to thank all members of the organizing committee and reviewers as well as the corporate supporters.

The information of the workshop program, including slide files used by the invited speakers and panelists, is available in the workshop website http://www.asru2007.org