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)

Call for Demos

(submission deadline has passed)

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.

We are planning a short demo/exhibition session as part of this workshop. Submissions of up to two pages are solicited for those who would like to present demonstrations of either mature systems or early research prototype systems. Commercial exhibitors should indicate in their proposal that their systems are commercial products rather than research systems. Submit proposals following the instructions for submission below. Demos and exhibitions will be on tabletops during the specified demo session during the workshop in June, 2012. Please note that no hardware or software will be provided by the local organizer.

Full workshop overview and topics of interest

Important Dates

Submission

Demo papers will be accepted on or before March 23, 2012 in PDF or Postscript formats via the START system, which you can access at: https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2012/SLPAT2012

Submissions should follow the NAACL HLT 2012 formatting requirements for system demo papers found at http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/conference/demos.php, which specify that system demo papers should be no more than 4 pages in length, including references and figures. Important: note that, according to NAACL 2012 demo guidelines, demo papers need not be anonymized, so that they can freely point to on-line versions of demos for reviewers to see. Unfortunately, the submission page in the START system linked to above does not give us the flexibility to change the text for demo submissions, so it still says that those papers have to be anonymized. But, as said here, system demo submissions (unlike regular papers) need not be anonymized. Style files for papers can be found here: http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/conference/conference.php.

Contact

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