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EUROPEAN SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (ESCA)

 

5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology:
EUROSPEECH '97

 

 

Title: Eurospeech '97 Proceedings

Subtitle: ESCA 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology

Volumes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Editors: G. Kokkinakis, N. Fakotakis, E. Dermatas

ISSN: 1018-4074

 

 

 

Additional copies may be ordered from:

 

ESCA - European Speech Communication Association

ICP, Universite Stendhal,

BP 25X, 38040 GRENOBLE Cedex 9, FRANCE

 

Tel: (+33).4.76.82.43.36

Fax: (+33).4.76.82.43.35

 

 

Cover Design: Artemis Kokkinaki-Papapetrou

Edited at: WCL, University of Patras, Greece

Printed by: TYPOFFSET, K. Manouri-Stanidi, Patras, Greece

 

 

 

 

 

 

ESCA PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

 

It is with great relief and pride that I welcome at this 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, for short EUROSPEECH'97, so many new and old colleagues and friends from all over the world. Once the late registration is closed, it may well be that we will go beyond the number of 1,000 participants. This growth from some 840 participants in Berlin for Eurospeech'93 and in Madrid for Eurospeech'95 to the present figure is impressive. The growth is even more impressive if we take into account the number of abstracts being submitted. This grew from 666 in Berlin, to 807 in Madrid and some 1070 this time. Also in terms of number of papers accepted, this will be by far the biggest Eurospeech conference, and for that matter also bigger than any International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) or International Congress of Phonetic Sciences so far.
 
The Eurospeech International Scientific Committee, that gathered in Athens on March 21 and 22, ultimately accepted 726 papers. With only very few withdrawals and some minor changes, the number of papers that actually will be presented at the conference, and that will be included in the proceedings, is 717. This implies a reject rate of about 30% which, as always, is a compromise between keeping up high standards and the desire to accommodate as many participants as possible, given the fact that many administrations only permit conference participation with an accepted paper. It is also a compromise between what the conference site can practically accommodate, which is quite a lot at the Convention Centre of Rodos Palace Hotel, and what participants can actually absorb. People also become more and more reluctant to carry around with them several kilos of proceedings books. Also for that reason I am very pleased that now also this Eurospeech Proceedings will be available on CD-ROM. We just have to wait for the time that hand-held and intelligent CD-ROM-readers will become available. Another compromise is that between plenary keynote presentations and parallel oral and poster sessions. Upon studying the advance program in the call for participation or the more detailed information on the web-site, you will have seen that there will be 4 oral and 2 poster sessions in parallel each day. This makes the program still rather surveyable. The break on Wednesday afternoon with a fine excursion and the banquet later that evening, will hopefully also recharge your batteries for the final meeting day of the conference.
 
I hope and expect that everybody will find enough of his/her flavor in the scientific programme. The diversity may also appeal to you to consume some of the less well known. I also strongly advice you to join the plenary keynote lectures, this will be excellent presentation on carefully selected themes.
 
Such a major event takes a long time for preparation. More than three years ago ESCA already started collecting bids for this year's event, and in the future we may even have to start this process earlier. The ESCA Board finally chose for Greece for the Eurospeech conference in 1997. Originally the meeting place was announced to be Patras, but for various reasons Professor George Kokkinakis and his organizing committee changed that to Rhodes. The beauty and glamour of this holiday island will certainly have brought some extra participants to this event. This necessary change in meeting place is just one example of the many circumstances that Eurospeech organizers have to face and that sometimes makes the ESCA Board and its president nervous. However, George Kokkinakis as the general chairman, George Carayannis as the vice-chairman, Nikos Fakotakis as the secretary and the whole local organizing committee have done a marvelous job with great efficiency and they deserve our great gratitude.
 
ESCA is a European-based international membership organization that welcomes everybody active in the broad field of Speech Communication. Similarly the biennial Eurospeech conference and its satellite events intend to be international events with a European flavour. World-wide participation to Eurospeech is evident although certain countries, like from Central and Eastern Europe, are definitely underrepresented. Whenever this is related to the unavoidable high costs of registration and/or living, the conference organizers and ESCA try to find a solution for that. This year's registration form gave the opportunity to apply for a grant. Over 65 people made use of that possibility, and our resources allowed us to (partially) approve some 35 of these requests.
 
Next to the biennial Eurospeech conference every odd year, ESCA by now is also quite well-known for its workshops (ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshops, ETRWs) on specialized topics, of which some 2 to 4 take place every year. This year two of them are satellite events of Eurospeech'97. One on "Intonation: Theory, models and applications", that will take place in Athens (Sept. 18-20), the other on "Audio-visual speech processing", that will take place in Rhodes (Sept. 27-28). It also became a tradition that the EU Speech Projects Day precedes the main conference on Monday morning (Sept. 22), whereas Cocosda will meet after the main event, most probably in conjunction with a COST workshop. Earlier this year two more, highly successful, ETRWs took place, one on "Robust speech recognition for unknown communication channels" in Pont-a-Mousson (April 17-18), the other in Marseille on "Larynx" (June 18-20). Each time Proceedings are available at the start of the workshop and additional copies can be ordered from the ESCA secretariat (esca@icp.grenet.fr) as long as the stock lasts. Also for 1998 several workshops are being planned. For more information see our NESCA newsletter, the esca-list, the ESCA web-site, or the announcements in the international journal Speech Communication.
 
After the regular all-day Eurospeech sessions on Tuesday Sept. 23, the ESCA General Assembly will take place. On that occasion the newly elected Board members will be installed and we will say farewell to some long-standing Board members that served our association for the maximum period of 8 years. First and foremost this will be our past president Joseph Mariani, who served ESCA and the speech community so eminently, as well as Jens Blauert, who always acted as our financial conscience, and Bjorn Granstrom, who made the ESCA workshops to such a great success. I will also myself resign from the Board and gladfully hand over the presidency to one of the new team. Elections took place this spring on the basis of a list of candidates proposed by the present Board. Regular ESCA members had a chance to propose additional candidates, although nobody made use of that possibility. This implies that (in alphabetic order) Gerrit Bloothooft, Rolf Carlsson, Wolfgang Hess, and George Kokkinakis will complete the Board, next to the sitting members Christian Benoit, Roberto Billi, Paul Dalsgaard, Roger Moore, and Isabel Trancoso. Maria Gosy, furthermore, will act as a non-European-Union observer in the Board.
 
Although the news has been announced already in NESCA 18 at the end of 1996, many of you may not yet know where Eurospeech in the year 1999 will take place. It is with great pleasure that I can express here again that Hungary has accepted our invitation and that Eurospeech'99 will most probably take place from Sept. 6 to 9, 1999 in the Congress Center Liget in Budapest. The General Chairman of the Organizing Committee will be Professor Geza Gordos, with Professor Maria Gosy as the vice-chairman and dr. Geza Nemeth as the secretary.
 
Traditionally I have one last pleasant announcement to make and this concerns the ESCA medal. Since 1989 this has been offered to Gunnar Fant, Jim Flanagan, Adrian Fourcin, and Ken Stevens, respectively. This time the distinguished Professor Mario Rossi from the Institute of Phonetics in Aix-en-Provence will receive this medal.
 
I wish you all a successful conference and a wonderful stay in a sunny Rhodes.
 
 
 

Professor Dr. Louis C. W. Pols

ESCA President
 
 

 

 

 

GENERAL CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE

 
On behalf of the Organizing Committee of Eurospeech '97, I am glad to welcome you to this biennial event of the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) and to the beautiful Greek island of Rhodes.
 
Ancient Greeks used to challenge everybody who boasted to be able to perform an exceptional achievement by saying "éäïý ç Ñüäïò, éäïý êáé ôï ðÞäçìá", which means literally "Here is Rhodes, here you jump", or metaphorically "Prove right now what you pretend to be". This utterance which apparently originated when a boaster claimed that if he were in Rhodes he could make an enormous jump, acquires a special meaning for our conference. As scientists and engineers working in one of the most challenging areas of research and technology, that of man-machine communication by voice, we have to prove that we are able to carry out this endeavour successfully. Eurospeech on the other hand has to prove that it makes substantial progress from event to event so that it is able to efficiently promote the work of its audience in a steadily improving way.
 
Well, established in 1989 in Paris, Eurospeech enjoyed a spectacular increase in submitted papers and attendees at the events that followed in Genoa (1991), Berlin (1993) and Madrid (1995). This year the number of proposed papers surpassed every expectation jumping from 807 in Madrid to 1076 and that of papers accommodated in the program from 535 to 717. The number of participants is expected to approach 1,100 from 840, an impressive "jump" indeed. I would like to thank all the researchers around the world who submitted their contribution to Eurospeech '97 and the members of the international scientific committee who performed the enormous task of reviewing them in a very short time.
 
The technical program includes a large spectrum of novel contributions by authors from 49 countries, arranged in 44 oral and 22 poster sessions. Four oral and two poster sessions will run in parallel. Included in the above are two special sessions: One on "Education for Language and Speech Communication" organized by Gerrit Bloothooft and another on "Robust Speech Recognition: Review and Perspectives" organized by Jean-Claude Junqua. In addition, there will be five plenary sessions in which seven distinguished scientists will give keynote speeches: On Monday afternoon, just after the opening ceremony, Mario Rossi will speak on "Is Syntactic Structure Prosodically Recoverable?". On Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Victor Zue and Jan van Santen will speak on "Conversational Interfaces: Advances and Challenges" and "Prosodic Modelling in Text-to-Speech Synthesis", correspondingly. On Thursday morning in a plenary session on: "Robust Speech Recognition: Review and Perspectives", Jean-Claude Junqua will speak on "Impact of the Unknown Communication Channel on Automatic Speech Recognition: A Review", Jerome Bellegarda on "Statistical Techniques for Robust ASR: Review and Perspectives" and Richard Lippmann on "Using Missing Feature Theory to Actively Select Features for Robust Speech Recognition with Interruptions, Filtering and Noise". Finally, at the closing ceremony on Thursday afternoon, Wolfgang Hess will give a review speech entitled: "Perspectives of Speech Technology Research Highlighted in Eurospeech '97".
 
As in previous Eurospeech conferences an accompanying industrial and scientific exhibition of pro-ducts, books, services and scientific results shown by known firms and institutes, will run from Monday after-noon to Thursday afternoon. A novelty this year is the group presentation of EU-supported projects organized by the EU-project LINGLINK: Promotion and Support for the Application of Language Engineering in Europe. Last but not least, six workshops just before and after the conference including the traditional EU speech projects day, will provide valuable information on recent developments in specific areas.
 
We are proud that Eurospeech '97 features a series of innovations and additional offerings to the delegates included in the registration fees which have been kept to similar levels to those in the recent past.
 
CD-ROM proceedings including the papers and audio files in addition to the usual hard copies which have increased to five volumes.
Mailing of the hard-copy proceedings well before the conference.
A hard-copy program including the paper abstracts in addition to the pocket program.
A bus service from Rhodes Airport to the venue and back to the airport on the day before and after the conference.
A half-day excursion to the famous archeological site and the village of Lindos.
Three lunches at Rodos Palace Hotel.
An ESCA membership of one year for non-ESCA members.
Twenty grants to students and young scientists in addition to those offered by ESCA.
A contest for the best student papers and a competition between man-machine dialogue systems over the telephone network named "Olympics" and organized by ELSNET/ ELRA.
 
Apart from the already mentioned excursion to Lindos, other outstanding events of the conference are the opening ceremony, the welcome reception, the banquet and the closing ceremony. In the opening ceremony the Minister of Development Mrs Vasso Papandreou and the Minister of the Aegean, Mrs Elizabeth Papazoi, who have taken Eurospeech '97 under the auspices of their ministries, and the Mayor of Rhodes Mr George Giannopoulos have been invited to give addresses. Furthermore, a multivision show: "The Dodecanese: A journey in space and time" will be presented by the author Mr Nikos Kasseris and the ESCA medal will be awarded to Mario Rossi by the ESCA president Louis Pols.
 
The welcome reception will be held by the Mayor of Rhodes at the magnificent Palace of the Grand Masters, the residence of the supreme commanders of the Knights of Saint John's order, who ruled in Rhodes from 1309 to 1522 AD.
 
The banquet will take place in the Gardens of the Rodos Palace Hotel by the swimming pool organized as a Greek night and will include Greek specialities and wine, barbecue and an orchestra that will play modern and folk music. The highlight of the night will be the ballet performance by the "Nafsika Dance Theatre" consisting of dance pieces from the well known films "Zorba the Greek" and "Never on a Sunday" choreographed by Sofia Smailou.
 
In the closing ceremony, apart from Wolfgang Hess's review speech and the usual farewell addresses, the awards will be handed to the winners of the ELSNET/ELRA Olympics.
 
I would like to thank all the members of the organizing committee, especially the secretary Nikos Fakotakis and Evangelos Dermatas, the personnel and the graduate students of WCL, especially Kyriakos Sgarbas, Dimitris Galanis, Despina Krana, Panagiota Bobolas, Sofia Antonakopoulou and Jeanette Smith, the commercial organizer CPR and its director Loukia Simonoviki, the ESCA board and especially its president Louis Pols, who has assisted us in every step, for their tireless efforts to bring this conference to a successful end. Without them, Eurospeech '97 would not have materialized. Furthermore, I would like to extend my best thanks to the many sponsors and supporters of Eurospeech '97:
 
The University of Patras and WCL in particular
The European Commission
The Ministries of Development, Culture, Education and the Aegean
The City of Rodos
The Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE)
THE firms ERICSSON SA, INTRAKOM SA, SIEMENS SA, STAT SA, ANKO SA
 
We feel that Eurospeech '97 in Rhodes will be a memorable event and we look forward to sharing it with you.
 
 
 
 

Professor George Kokkinakis

General Chairman

 

 

LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

 

General Chairman

George Kokkinakis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: gkokkin@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Co-Chairman

George Carayannis (ILSP)

Tel.: + 30 1 671 2250

E-mail: gcara@ilsp.gr

 

Secretary

Nikos Fakotakis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 997 336

E-mail: fakotaki@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Scientific Program

George Kokkinakis (WCL)

+ 30 61 991 722

E-mail: gkokkin@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Nikos Fakotakis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 997 336

E-mail: fakotaki@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Proceedings

Evangelos Dermatas (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: dermatas@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr

 

Michael Logothetis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 996 166

E-mail: m-logo@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Kyriakos Sgarbas (WCL)

Tel.: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: sgarbas@wcl.ee.upatras.gr
 
 

Proceedings and CR-ROM (Electronic processing)

Evangelos Dermatas (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: dermatas@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr
 

George Nokas (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: nokas@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr
 

Thanasis Koutras (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: koutras@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr
 

Ioanna Christogianni (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: ioanna@george.wcl2.ee.upatras.gr
 
 

Registration/Finances

Panagiota Bobolas (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 997 303

E-mail: bobola@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Despina Krana (WCL)

Tel.: +30 61 991 722

Email: krana@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Publicity/Hotel Accommodation

Sofia Antonakopoulou (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: sofia@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Exhibition

Panagiota Bobolas (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 997 303

E-mail: bobola@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Social Activities

Vassilis Stylianakis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 996 166

E-mail: stylian@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Audio Visual Equipment

John Mourjopoulos (WCL )

Tel: +30 61 997 336

E-mail: mourjop@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Oral Sessions

Stelios Bakamidis (ILSP)

Tel.: +30 1 671 2250

 

Vassilis Darsinos (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: darsinos@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Poster Sessions

Dimitris Galanis (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 991 722

E-mail: galanis@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Gregory Steinhauer (ILSP)

Tel.: +30 1 671 2250

 

Sponsors

Dimitris Lymberopoulos (WCL)

Tel: +30 61 997 287

E-mail: dlympero@wcl.ee.upatras.gr

 

Addresses:

ILSP

Margari Street 22

11525 Athens Greece

Tel.: +30 1 671 2250

+30 1 674 0898

Fax: +30 1 674 1262

 

Wire Communications Laboratory (WCL)

University of Patras

261 10 Rion, Patras, Greece

Tel.: + 30 61 991 722

Fax: + 30 61 991 855

 

 

 

EUROSPEECH '97 INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

 

B. Atal, AT&T Bell Lab., Murray Hill, NJ, USA

C. Benoit, ICP, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France

R. Billi, CSELT, Torino, Italy

J. Blauert, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany

L. Boves, Nijmegen University, The Netherlands

A. Bradley, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

G. Carayannis, Technical University of Athens, Greece

P. Dalsgaard, University of Aalborg, Denmark

V. Digalakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece

N. Fakotakis, WCL, University of Patras, Greece

K. Fellbaum, Techn. University of Cottbus, Germany

H. Fujisaki, Science University of Tokyo, Japan

S. Furui, NTT, Tokyo, Japan

B. Granström, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

M. Jack, University of Edinburgh, UK

F. Jelinek, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD, USA

G. Kokkinakis, WCL, University of Patras, Greece

Y. Kosarev, Russian Acad. of Scien. St Petersbg, Russia

J. Llisterri, Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

H. Mangold, Daimler Benz, Ulm, Germany

J. Mariani, LIMSI-CNSR, Orsay, France

R. Moore, RSRE-DRA, Malvern, UK

J. Mourjopoulos, WCL, University of Patras, Greece

H. Ney, RWTH, Aachen, Germany

J. Ohala, University of California, Berkeley, USA

D. O'Shaughnessy, INSR-Tel. Univ.of Quebec, Canada

J. Pardo, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain

L. Pols, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

C. Sorin, CNET, Lannion, France

  1. Trancoso, INESC, Lisboa, Portugal
 

 

CONFERENCE SECRETARIAT 

CPR Conferences-Public Relations 

50, King George Sq. 

26221 Patras, GREECE 

Tel: 30 61 270388, Fax: 30 61223 335 

E-mail: cpr@pat.forthnet.gr

 LOCAL COMMITTEE  

Wire Communications Laboratory 

University of Patras 

26110 Rion, Patras, GREECE 

Tel: 30 61 991722, Fax: 30 61 991855 

E-mail: Eurospeech97@wcl.ee.upatras.gr
 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

 

The Eurospeech '97 Organizing Committee acknowledges with gratitude the sponsoring and support of the conference by the following authorities and firms:

 

 

SPONSORS

 

The University of Patras, Greece

The European Commission

The Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE), Greece

The Ministry of Education, Greece

The Ministry of the Aegean, Greece

The City of Rodos, Greece

ERICSSON SA, Greece

INTRAKOM SA, Greece

 

 

 

SUPPORTERS

 

The Ministry of Culture, Greece

 

The Ministry of Development, Greece

(The General Secretariat of Science & Technology)

 

SIEMENS SA, Greece

 

STAT SA, Greece

 

ANKO SA, Greece

 

 
 

ELSNET-ELRA Olympics

 

ELSNET and ELRA have organized a contest for best student papers presented at Eurospeech '97. Out of 45 submitted papers, the jury, consisting of Isabel Trancoso (Lisbon), Roger Moore (Malvern), Niels Ole Bernsen (Odense), and Joseph Mariani (Orsay) have selected two winners while 11 other papers were awarded the qualification 'excellent student paper'. The two prizes consisted of a free trip to Eurospeech'97.

 

 

 
 

ELSNET PRIZE

[best student paper]

 

Kenney Ng, Victor W. Zue

"Subword Unit Representations for Spoken Document Retrieval"

 

 

ELRA PRIZE

[best student paper with focus on language resources]

 

Philip Clarkson, Ronald Rosenfeld

"Statistical Language Modeling using the CMU-Cambridge Toolkit"

 

Qualification 'EXCELLENT STUDENT PAPER'

 

Michelle S. Spina, Victor W. Zue

"Automatic Transcription of General Audio Data: Effect of Environment Segmentation on Phonetic Recognition"

 

Michael K. McCandless, James R. Glass

"MUSE: A Scripting Language for the Development of Interactive Speech Analysis and Recognition Tools"

 

Wolfgang Minker

"Stochastically-Based Natural Language Understanding Across Tasks and Languages"

 

Jason Humphries, P.C. Woodland

"Using Accent-Specific Pronunciation Modelling for Improved Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition"

 

Rayman Lau, G. Flammia, C. Pao, V. Zue

"WEBGALAXY - Integrating Spoken Language and Hypertext Navigation"

 

Jim Huhunin, V.W. Zue

"On the Design of Effective Speech-Based Interfaces for Desktop Applications"

 

Marcel Riedi

"Modelling Segmental Duration with Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines"

 

Chao Wang, J. Glass, H. Meng, J. Polifroni, S. Seneff, V. Zue

"YINHE: A Mandarin Chinese Version of the GALAXY System"

 

Jacob Goldberger, D. Burshtein, H. Franco

"Segmental Modeling using a Continuous Mixture of Non-Parametric Models"

 

A.J. Rubio, P. Garcia, Angel de la Torre, J.C.Segura, J. Diaz-Verdejo, M.C. Benitez, V. Sanchez, A.M. Peinado, J.M. Lopez-Soler, J.L. Perez-Cordoba

"STACC: An Automatic Service for Information Access using Continuous Speech

Recognition Through Telephone Line"

 

Mike Lincoln, S. Cox, S. Ringland

"A Fast Method of Speaker Normalisation using Formant Estimation"

 

 
 
TECHNICAL PROGRAM AT A GLANCE
 
 
MONDAY,22
TUESDAY,23
EU Speech Projects Day
Morning
Registration
Keynote Speech 2 : Conversational Interfaces:Advances and Challenges
8:30-9:30
9:00-9:50
Opening
George Kokkinakis, Eurospeech, Louis Pols, ESCA,
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
Giovanni Battista Varile, EC
10:00-11:30
10:00-13:30
9:30-9:40
T1A:Keyword and Topic Spotting  TMA:Feature Estimation II ,
Roadmap of challenges and achievements Pitch and Prosody 
in speech processing, with focus on the contribution  T1B:Robustness in Recognition 
of EU speech projects  And Signal Processing I 
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Roger Moore, DRA,UK T1C:Modelling of Prosody  TMB:Speech Synthesis Techniques 
9:40-11:00
Coffee Break T1D:Microphone Arrays for
11:00-11:20 Speech Enhancement 
Coffee Break
Future EU activities in Language and Speech 
11:30-12:00
Giovanni Battista Varile, European Commission
ORAL SESSIONS
11:20-11:50 
12:00-13:30
T2A:Multilingual Recognition  TMC:Technology for S&L Acquisition
The role and contribution of the ELSNet,  Speech Processing Tools 
international cooperation,ELRA and EAGLES  T2B:Language Specific Speech
Steven Krauwer, ELSNet, Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Roger Moore, EAGLES Analysis 
11:50-12:20 T2C:Feature Estimation I  TMD:Phonetics and Phonology 
Questions from the floor T2D:Speech Coding I 
12:20-12:30
Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 
Afternoon
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
15:00-16:30
15:00-18:30
Opening Ceremony
14:30-15:40
 T3A:Confidence Measures in ASR  TAA:Speech Analysis & Modelling 
T3B:Speaker and Language 
Identification 
Keynote Speech 1: Is Syntactic Structure Prosodically Recovervable?
 T3C:Perception of Prosody  TAB:Robustness in Recognition
15:40-16:30 
 and Signal Processing II 
T3D:Applications of Speech 
Technology I 
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
16:30-17:00
16:30-17:00
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
ORAL SESSIONS
17:00-18:30
17:00-18:30
17:00-18:30
M4A:Acoustic Modelling I  MAA:Training Techniques, T4A:Spontaneous Speech  TAC:Acoustic Modelling II 
Efficient Decoding in ASR  Recognition 
M4B:Dynamic Articulatory  T4B:Language-Specific Segmental
Measurements  Features 
M4C:Language Identification  MAB:Prosody  T4C:Speaker Recognition I  TAD:Speech Coding II 
M4D:NNs for Speech and T4D:Speech Synthesis:Linguistic 
Language Processing  Analysis 
Welcome Reception
ESCA General Assembly
19:30-22:30
18:45-19:45 
 

 

WEDNESDAY,24
THURSDAY,25
Morning
Keynote Speech 3 : Prosodic Modelling in Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Keynote Speech 4 : Robust Speech Recognition: Review and Perspectives 
9:00-9:50
8:35-9:50
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
10:00-11:30
10:00-13:30
10:00-11:30
10:00-13:30
W1A:Dialogue Systems:Applications  WMA:Speech Recognition in  Th1A:Speaker Adaptation I  ThMA:Front-Ends and Adaptation
Adverse Environments, to Acoustics,Speaker
W1B:Speech Production Modelling  CSR and Error Analysis  Th1B:Dialogue Systems:Design Adaptation
and Applications 
W1C:Speaker Recognition II  WMB:Multimodal Speech  Th1C:Assessment Methods ThMB:Speech Perception 
Processing,Emerging 
W1D:Speech Enhancement I  Techniques and Applications  Th1D:Education for Language and 
Speech Communication 
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
11:30-12:00
11:30-12:00
ORAL SESSIONS
ORAL SESSIONS
12:00-13:30
12:00-13:30
W2A:Spoken Language WMC:Databases, Tools and  Th2A:Hybrid Systems for ASR  ThMC:Dialogue Systems:Linguistic
Understanding  Evaluations Structures, Modelling 
W2B:Language Model Adaptation  Th2B:Topic and Dialogue De-  and Evaluation
pendent Language Modelling
W2C:Prosody and Speech Reco- WMD:Applications of Speech  Th2C:Lipreading  ThMD:Speaker Recognition and 
gnition/Understanding  Technology Language Identification 
W2D:Wideband Speech Coding  Th2D:Articulatory Modelling 
Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 
Afternoon
ORAL SESSIONS
POSTER SESSIONS
15:00-16:30
15:00-18:30
Th3A:Style and Accent Recognition  ThAA:Noise Mitigation,
Speech Enhancement II 
Th3B:Phonetics 
Th3C:Towards Robust ASR for Car  ThAB:F0 and Duration Modelling,
and Telephone Applications Spoken language processing 
Th3D:Language Specific Systems 
Excursion to Lindos
Coffee Break
15:00-18:30 
16:30-17:00
ORAL SESSIONS
17:00-18:30
Th4A:Pronunciation Models  ThAC:Language Modelling 
Th4B:Auditory Modelling and
Psychoacoustics 
Th4C:Voice Conversion and ThAD:Auditory Modelling and 
Data Driven F0-Models  Psychoacoustics,
Th4D:Vocal Tract Analysis  Neural Networks for Speech 
Processing and Recognition 
Banquet
21:30 -
Closing Ceremony
18:45-20:00