WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES

The international workshop "Speech and Computer" - SPECOM'97 was concerned with the most important topics of speech interaction with computer. It was aimed to obtain and use new original adequate approaches to spoken language understanding by means of integrating the results of pattern recognition, quantitative linguistics, information theory, psychoacoustics and other related areas. It was a meeting place for dialogue between researchers from different fields that are related to speech and computers. An important goal of this workshop - besides the scientific one - to build bridges between researchers, scientists from countries from Western, Central, Eastern Europe and other continents. It was also aimed to develop a spirit of collaborative research and to provide guidance for future research directions.

TOPICS

The topics were chosen in order to maintain the initial goals settled at SPECOM'96 in St. Petersburg, Russia. So the main topics covered include (but are not limited to):

• Conceptual models of natural language
• Models for spoken language semantic interpretation
• Integration of diverse knowledge in speech understanding process
• Spoken language translation models
• Adaptation and training in speech understanding
• Speech recognition
• Text-to-Speech synthesis methods
• Phonetics, phonology and prosody
• Applied systems

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:

• Louis C.W.Pols
  Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, President of ESCA
• Florin T. Tanasescu
  Ministry of Science and Technology

• George Kokkinakis,
  Wire Communication Laboratory, University of Patras, Greece
• Antonio Rubio,
  Department of Electronics and Computer Technology, University of Granada, Spain
• Yuri A. Kosarev,
  Institute for Informatics and Automation, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Steven Krauwer,
  Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, The Netherlands, ELSNET Coordinator
• Lucia Popescu,
  S.C. Software ITC S.A. Bucharest, Romania
• Mircea Fernea,
  S.C. Software ITC S.A. Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Gavril Toderean,
  Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Attila Ferencz,
  S.C. Software ITC S.A. Cluj-Napoca, Romania