4th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

News

SLPAT 2013 is over! But please keep an eye out for upcoming events, preferrably by subscribing to the SIG-SLPAT mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/sig-slpat

• 9 July 2014: Videos of the user panel and the Invited Talk are now available.
• 6 September: We gladly accept the PDF or Powerpoint presentations and/or posters that you presented during the workshop. Just mail them to us and we'll put them in the papers section.
• 6 September: The papers are now published in the ACL Anthology.
• 13 August: All papers are now available as PDF files.
• 17 July: The program is updated with the time slots for the accepted papers.
• 3 July: Now you should be able to register.
• 3 July: The program is published.
• 28 June: The list of accepted papers is official.

Overview

Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to do.

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 Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), which is focused on communication technologies for those with impairments that interfere with some aspect of human communication, including spoken or written modalities. Speech and natural language processing (NLP) can be used in AT/AAC in a large variety of ways including, for example, improving the intelligibility of unintelligible speech, and providing communicative assistance for frail people or individuals with severe motor impairments. However, there has not been very much interaction in the intersection between researchers of AT/AAC and speech/NLP. This workshop will bring individuals from both of these research communities together with AAC users to share research findings, and to discuss present and future challenges and the potential for collaboration and progress. The workshop has historically had a strong focus on applications and user inclusion. SLPAT 2013 builds upon the following previous workshops:

• SLPAT 2010, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles
• SLPAT 2011, co-located with EMNLP 2011 in Edinburgh
• SLPAT 2012, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2012 in Montréal

Frail individuals and the elderly are in deep need of technologies that could preserve independence and executive function. Therefore, this year the SLPAT workshop includes a special topic, Speech Interaction Technology for Ambient Assisted Living in the Home, which is a follow-up of the following two events:

• ILADI 2012 ("Interactions Langagières pour personnes Agées Dans les habitats Intelligents / Vocal interaction for elderly in Smart Homes"), co-located with JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012 in Grenoble
• The special session "Audio Analysis in Smart Homes", of EUSIPCO 2012 in Bucharest

With support from