Expressive Speech Synthesis (ESS) is a multidisciplinary research area that addresses one of the most complex problems in speech and language processing. The challenges posed by ESS have been the subject of several collaborative research projects across universities and laboratories around the world. Over the last decade ESS has benefited from advances in speech and language processing as well as from the availability of large conversational-speech databases. These advances have spurred research on the expressiveness of speech and on conveying paralinguistic information including emotion, speaker-state, and speaker-listener relationships. There have also been substantial efforts towards automating database creation and evaluating the quality of speech synthesised for a variety of tasks that require not just the transmission of information, but also the expression of affect.
The purpose of this special issue is to present recent advances in Expressive Speech Synthesis. Original, previously unpublished research is sought in all areas relevant to the field. In particular, submissions on theory and methods for the following areas are encouraged:
Submission procedure:
Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in any recent issue of the Transactions and as available on the web at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/sp/infotsa.html. Note that all rules will apply with regard to submission lengths, mandatory overlength page charges, and color charges.
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at http://sps-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/. When selecting a manuscript type, authors must click on "Special Issue of T-SA on Expressive Speech Synthesis." Authors should follow the instructions for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing and indicate in the Comments to the Editor-in-Chief that the manuscript is submitted for publication in the Special Issue on Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing. We require a completed copyright form to be signed and faxed to 1-732-562-8905 at the time of submission. Please indicate the manuscript number on the top of the page.
Schedule:
| Submission deadline: | 1 June 2005 |
| Notification of acceptance: | 1 December 2005 |
| Final manuscript due: | 28 February 2006 |
| Tentative publication date: | May 2006 |
Guest Editors:
| Dr. Nick Campbell | ATR Network Informatics Research Labs, Kyoto, Japan | nick@atr.jp |
| Dr. Wael Hamza | IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, USA | hamzaw@us.ibm.com |
| Dr. Harald Hoge | SIEMENS AG Central Technology, Germany | harald.hoege@siemens.com |
| Dr. Tao Jianhua | Pattern Recognition Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences | jhtao@nlpr.ia.ac.cn |
| Dr. Gerard Bailly | Institut de la Communication Parlee, France | bailly@icp.inpg.fr |