5th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

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 2014 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
• SLPAT 2013, co-located with the 1st Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals (WASSS)

With support from