Second Call for Papers + Extended Deadline Notice
SIGIR 2008 workshop: Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech
24 July 2008, Singapore
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/SSCS2008

***New deadline: Friday, 23 May, 2008***

Large scale use and commercial application of retrieval technology for spoken content
requires a sustained effort focused on merging speech recognition, audio analysis and
information retrieval into a concerted discipline with a common vision. After the success
of the 2007 Search in Spontaneous Conversational Speech workshop (SSCS 2007), a
second workshop, SSCS 2008, will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2008 in order to
further the cross-pollination between the speech research community and the information
retrieval community. The workshop addresses application domains including:
conversational broadcast, podcasts, meetings, lectures, discussions, debates, interviews
and cultural heritage archives.

We welcome contributions on a range of cross-cutting issues, including:

-Representation of spoken content for optimal search (e.g., LVCSR, word lattice search,
STD on phone lattice)
-Exploitation of evidence beyond word-level (e.g., emotional state, speaker
characteristics, topic shifts, audio events)
-Application of text IR techniques to the speech domain
-Speech mining in multimedia data
-Multimodality (integrating features from associated non-speech content)
-Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, expansion)
-Access to large scale collections
-Evaluation resources and benchmarking activities
-Multi-/cross-lingual retrieval
-Cross-media mining (e.g., coupling images or text fragments to speech)
-Interaction design and system development (e.g., query formulation, result presentation,
search strategies)
-Spoken audio visualization (e.g. results lists, individual results)
-Spoken query search

Contributions for oral presentations (8 pages) poster presentations (2 pages),
demonstration descriptions (2 pages) and position papers for selection of panel members
(2 pages) will be accepted. Further information including submission guidelines can be
found on the workshop website http://ilps.science.uva.nl/SSCS2008

Important Dates (*revised*)
23 May: Paper submission deadline
13 Jun: Notification of acceptance
23 Jun: Camera-ready papers due
24 July: SSCS 2008 Workshop at SIGIR 2008

Organizers
Joachim Koehler, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany
Martha Larson, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Wessel Kraaij, TNO, The Netherlands