Third Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)

Co-located with NAACL HLT 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 8, 2012
Sponsored by the ACL Special Interest Group on
Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SIG-SLPAT)

NEWS: Workshop was a great success! See on-line proceedings.

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do. An obvious and ubiquitous example is a wheelchair, which assists with mobility. Many examples of assistive technologies involve providing universal access, such as modifications to televisions or telephones to make them accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments. An important sub-discipline within the AT research community is known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with some human communication modality, such as spoken or written communication.

From providing access to the web for individuals with severe motor impairments, to improving the intelligibility of speech spoken by individuals with speech impairments, the range of topics in Assistive Technology (AT) and Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC) that make use of (or could make use of) speech and natural language processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of individuals actively working within the two research communities – AT/AAC on the one hand and speech/NLP on the other – is relatively small. This workshop will build on two previous workshops (the first co-located with NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles and the second with EMNLP 2011 in Edinburgh), bringing together individuals from both research communities and the individuals they are working to assist.

Full workshop overview and topics of interest

Important Dates

Contact

Contact us by email: slpat2012.workshop@gmail.com