********************************************************* TSD 2008 - LAST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ********************************************************* Eleventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2008) Brno, Czech Republic, 8-12 September 2008 http://www.tsdconference.org/ The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International Speech Communication Association. IMPORTANT DATES September 8-12 2008 ..... Conference date CONFERENCE PROGRAM The detailed conference program with links to presentation abstracts is now available on the conference web page http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2008/tsd_prog.html The conference fee covers also a Welcome dinner on Tuesday, a night guided tour of Brno and the half day conference trip on Thursday to the Castle of Pernstejn, the Cerna Hora Moravian brewery with the conference dinner, and a night tour to the Chateau of Rajec nad Svitavou. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Jerry Hobbs, ISI USC, USA Deep Lexical Semantics Frederick Jelinek, USA Toward the Ultimate ASR Language Model Elizabeth Shriberg, SRI, USA Practical Prosody: Modeling Language Beyond the Words Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada The Future of Text-Meaning in Computational Linguistics VENUE: Hotel AVANTI, Brno, Czech Republic CONFERENCE FEES The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your status. It includes one copy of the printed Springer LNCS proceedings, refreshments, social events and organizing costs. The fee does not include accommodation. Full participant: On-site payment: CZK 12,000 Student: On-site payment: CZK 10,000 All costs are in Czech Crowns (Czech Koruna, CZK), see e.g. http://www.xe.com/ucc/ for the current exchange rate. TSD SERIES TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series (as Volume 5246 this year). TOPICS Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to): text corpora and tagging transcription problems in spoken corpora sense disambiguation links between text and speech oriented systems parsing issues parsing problems in spoken texts multi-lingual issues multi-lingual dialogue systems information retrieval and information extraction text/topic summarization machine translation semantic networks and ontologies semantic web speech modeling speech segmentation speech recognition search in speech for IR and IE text-to-speech synthesis dialogue systems development of dialogue strategies prosody in dialogues emotions and personality modeling user modeling knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue applied systems and software facial animation visual speech synthesis Papers on processing languages other than English are strongly encouraged. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Frederick Jelinek, USA (general chair) Hynek Hermansky, Switzerland (executive chair) Eneko Agirre, Spain Genevieve Baudoin, France Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic Attila Ferencz, Romania Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico Louise Guthrie, GB Jan Hajic, Czech Republic Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic Patrick Hanks, Czech Republic Ludwig Hitzenberger, Germany Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic Ales Horak, Czech Republic Eduard Hovy, USA Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic Steven Krauwer, The Netherlands Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic Hermann Ney, Germany Elmar Noeth, Germany Karel Oliva, Czech Republic Karel Pala, Czech Republic Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia Vladimir Petkevic, Czech Republic Fabio Pianesi, Italy Josef Psutka, Czech Republic James Pustejovsky, USA Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands Ernst G. Schukat-Talamazzini, Germany Pavel Skrelin, Russia Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic Marko Tadic, Croatia Tamas Varadi, Hungary Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine Yorick Wilks, GB Victor Zakharov, Russia FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions. Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal interactions. OFFICIAL LANGUAGE The official language of the conference is English. ADDRESS All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to Dana Hlavackova, TSD 2008 Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic phone: +420-5-49 49 33 29 fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20 email: tsd2008@tsdconference.org The official TSD 2008 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/ LOCATION Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a population of almost 400,000. The city is the country's judiciary and trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the south-east part of the Czech Republic. Brno had been a Royal City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms also a cultural center of the region. Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow, Barcelona and Prague and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km). For the participants with some extra time, some nearby places may also be of interest. Local ones include: Brno Castle now called Spilberk, Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian Margraves, Church of St. James, Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul, Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat designed by Mies van der Rohe along with other important buildings of between-war Czech architecture. For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of Battle of three emperors (Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz - Battle by Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz), Pernstejn Castle, Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice Chateau, Letovice Chateau, Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe, Telc - a town on the UNESCO heritage list, and many others are all within easy reach.