Aims and Scope

Speech-based communication with robots faces important challenges for their application in real world scenarios. In contrast to conventional interactive systems, a talking robot always needs to take its physical environment into account when communicating with users. This is typically unstructured, dynamic and noisy and raises important challenges. The objective of this special issue is to highlight research that applies speech and language processing to robots that interact with people through speech as the main modality of interaction. For example, a robot may need to communicate with users via distant speech recognition and understanding with constantly changing degrees of noise. Alternatively, the robot may coordinate its verbal turn-taking behaviour with its non-verbal one such as generating speech and gestures at the same time. Speech and language technologies have the potential of equipping robots so that they can interact more naturally with humans, but their effectiveness remains to be demonstrated. This special issue aims to help fill this gap.

The topics listed below indicate the range of work that is relevant to this special issue, where each article will normally represent one or more topics. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the special issue associate editors.

Topics

sound source localization
voice activity detection
speech recognition and understanding
speech emotion recognition
speaker and language recognition
spoken dialogue management
turn-taking in spoken dialogue
spoken information retrieval
spoken language generation
affective speech synthesis
multimodal communication
evaluation of speech-based human-robot interactions

Special Issue Associate Editors

Heriberto Cuayáhuitl, Heriot-Watt University, UK (contact: hc213@hw.ac.uk)
Kazunori Komatani, Nagoya University, Japan
Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Paper Submission

All manuscripts and any supplementary materials will be submitted through Elsevier Editorial System at http://ees.elsevier.com/csl/. A detailed submission guideline is available as “Guide to Authors” at here. Please select “SI: SL4IR” as Article Type when submitting the manuscripts. For further details or a more in-depth discussion about topics or submission, please contact Guest Editors.

Dates

23 May 2014: Submission of manuscripts
23 August 2014: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
23 October 2014: Submission of revised manuscripts
10 January 2015: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
01 March 2015: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
31 March 2015: Announcement of the special issue articles on the CSL website