International Workshop

25-28 September 2000, St.-Petersburg, Russia

Organized by St-Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS)

Dear Colleagues,

This 2000 Year SPECOM International Workshop will be conducted in Saint-Petersburg. Last workshops were conducted: SPECOM’96 - in St.-Petersburg, SPECOM’97 - in Romania, SPECOM’98 - in St.-Petersburg, SPECOM’99 - in Moscow.

This SPECOM’2000 Workshop is last in XX Century, it’s jubilee. So it’s suggested to members to show in reports achievements and prognoses in their concrete research area.

This year the student section will be included in the program to encourage young researchers for initiative and creative activity.

TOPICS to be covered include, but are not limited to:

• Conceptual models for natural spoken language;
• Models for spoken language semantic interpretation;
• Integration of diverse knowledge in the speech understanding process;
• Using prosodical knowledge in speech semantic interpretation;
• Speech-to-speech translation;
• Telephone natural language response generation;
• Speech dialogue models creation;
• Spontaneous speech perception modeling;
• Multi-lingual and multi-modal systems;
• Speech recognition and synthesis for dialogue systems;
• Conceptual approaches to dialogue educational systems;
• Psychological approaches to speech understanding;
• Applied systems.

Rafael M. Yusupov, SPIIRAS, St-Petersburg, Russia

Co-Chairs:

Rafael M. Yusupov SPIIRAS, St-Petersburg, Russia

A.Gorin AT&T Laboratories, USA

Members:

G.Kokkinakis WCL, University of Patras, Greece

B.Millar Australian National University, Australia

H.Niemann University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

G.Rigoll Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg, Germany

J. Savage Departamento de Computacion University of Mexico, Mexico

R.Piotrowski State Pedagogical University of St-Petersburg, Russia

Y.Kosarev SPIIRAS, St-Petersburg, Russia

SURVEY LECTURES: Some survey lectures will be presented by leading scientists at especial sessions.

LANGUAGE: English is the official language of the workshop. Presentation in Russian will be also allowed. Simultaneous translation will be served.

Prospective authors should submit 3 copies of 1-2-pages abstracts in English of no more than 500 words by regular post or by Email (in ASCII format). Submissions should include a title, author's names, affiliations, address, telephone, fax numbers and e-mail address.

Camera-ready full papers in English (4 pages) will be published in the proceedings distributed at the workshop. The text must be sent to the Organizing Committee by regular mail. Instructions about the form of camera-ready papers will be distributed in due time.

If you have a product (working model, demo program, electronic devices, commercial products, etc.), that you would like to demonstrate, please contact the workshop secretariat by e-mail (see below) as soon as possible. Also people from other interested communities, such as industry, business, science, defense, education, will be invited for this exhibition.

There will be possible excursions to some research and education institutions belonging to the 'Educational Research Center for Speech and Language'.

Chair: Yuri Kosarev SPIIRAS, Russia

Members:

Izolda Lee SPIIRAS, Russia

Andrey Ronjin SPIIRAS, Russia

Anatoli Tkatsh SPIIRAS, Russia

Aleksandr Shalin SPIIRAS, Russia

Registration fees are arranged as following:

Western participants - $ 300; Western students - $ 150;

Central Europe participants - $ 180; Central Europe students - $ 80;

Russian and former SU states participants - $ 50;

Russian students (without workshop Proceedings) - free of charge.

This fee must be paid on-site at the workshop, or by post with 10% discount if before July 1, 2000

The fees include the Reception, a copy of the workshop Proceedings, all workshop material, admission to all sessions and to the exhibition, banquet, and coffee break refreshments.

Additional Proceedings copy is $ 20.

All the participants will be provided with accommodation in a hotel situated in a beautiful suburb of St.-Petersburg. Planned cultural program provides possibility to visit well-known museums, theaters of our city. Walk and bus tours over by the nice historical places of St.-Petersburg are also planned.

The Organizing Committee will be grateful, if you’ll report us about your intention to participate our Workshop.

Dr.Y.Kosarev

SPIIRAS, 39, 14th line, St.-Petersburg, 199178, RUSSIA

Tel.: + 7 812 328 7081

Fax : + 7 812 328 4450

Submission of abstracts: 1 June 2000

Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2000

Submission of camera-ready papers: 1 August 2000