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2nd Call for Participation: Scientific Visual Question Answering Shared Task (SciVQA)
by Georg Rehm 08 Apr '25

08 Apr '25

SciVQA: Scientific Visual Question Answering Shared Task Hosted as part of the SDP 2025 Workshop at ACL 2025 31 July 2025 Vienna, Austria SciVQA Shared Task: https://sdproc.org/2025/scivqa.html Competition on Codabench: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5904 Shared Task Overview Scholarly articles convey valuable information not only through unstructured text but also via (semi-)structured figures such as charts and diagrams. Automatically interpreting the semantics of knowledge encoded in these figures can be beneficial for downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). In SciVQA, challenge participants will develop multimodal QA systems using a dataset of 3000 images of scientific figures from ACL Anthology and arXiv papers. Each figure is annotated with seven QA pairs (21000 in total) and includes metadata such as caption, ID, type (e.g., compound, line graph, bar chart, scatter plot), and QA pair type. This shared task specifically focuses on closed-ended visual (i.e., addressing visual attributes such as colour, shape, size, height, etc.) and non-visual (not addressing figure visual attributes) questions. Evaluation Systems will be evaluated using BERTscore, ROUGE-L, and ROUGE-1 metrics. Automated evaluations of submitted systems will be performed through Codabench. Important Dates Release of training data: April 1, 2025 Release of testing data: April 15, 2025 Deadline for system submissions: May 16, 2025 Paper submission deadline: May 23, 2025 Notification of acceptance: June 13, 2025 Camera-ready paper due: June 20, 2025 Workshop: July 31, 2025 Participants are invited to submit papers on their systems. Successful submissions will be published in the proceedings of the SDP 2025 workshop. Organizers Ekaterina Borisova (DFKI, Berlin, Germany) Georg Rehm (DFKI, Berlin, Germany)

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2nd CALL FOR PAPERS: ICNLSP 2025, 8th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing, August 25-27, 2025, Odense, Denmark
by Mourad Abbas 08 Apr '25

08 Apr '25

The *8th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2025)* <https://www.icnlsp.org/2025welcome/> welcomes contributions on both the *theoretical foundations and applied aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Processing*. The conference will feature regular sessions, along with keynote talks delivered by distinguished international researchers. We invite authors to submit their work on topics relevant to *ICNLSP 2025* <https://www.icnlsp.org/2025welcome/> and contribute to advancing research in the field. *The conference will be hybrid.* Topics (ICNLSP 2025) invites contributions on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: -Natural Language Processing (NLP): Cognition and NLP Machine translation Text categorization Summarization Sentiment analysis and opinion mining Computational social web Under-resourced languages: tools and corpora Large language models (LLMs) NLP tools for software requirements and engineering Text annotation tools Knowledge fundamentals and knowledge management systems Information extraction Data mining and information retrieval Lexical semantics and knowledge representation Visualization for nlp -Speech Processing: Signal processing and acoustic modeling Speech recognition (architecture, search methods, lexical modeling, language modeling, adaptation, multimodal systems, applications in education and learning, zero-resource speech recognition, etc.) Speech analysis Paralinguistics in speech and language (perception of paralinguistic phenomena, speaker states and traits analysis, etc.) Spoken dialogue systems and conversational analysis Speech translation Speech synthesis Speaker verification and identification Language identification Speech coding, enhancement, and intelligibility Speech perception and production Brain studies on speech Phonetics, phonology, and prosody Speech and hearing disorders Paralinguistics of pathological speech and language Speech technology for disordered speech and hearing *Important dates* All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”). *Submission deadline:* May 25, 2025 11:59 PM (GMT). *Notification of acceptance:* July 20, 2025. *Camera-ready paper due:* August 3, 2025. *Conference dates:* August 25-27, 2025. Keynote speakers- Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich, Germany. - Prof. Peter Schneider-Kamp, SDU, Denmark. *Publication* 1- *All accepted papers will be published in ACL Anthology <https://aclanthology.org/>.* *2- **Selected** papers will be published (after extension) in:* Signals and Communication Technology (Springer), indexed in *Scopus* <https://www.scopus.com/> and *zbMATH* <https://zbmath.org/>. *Best paper award* To recognize outstanding scientific contributions, *ICNLSP 2025* will present two awards: - *Best Full Paper Award* - *Best Short Paper Award* These awards will be judged by the *Scientific Committee*, based on recommendations from the *Program Committee*. The selection process will consider the *originality, significance, and quality* of the research, as well as the clarity of presentation. We look forward to honoring exceptional contributions to the field of *Natural Language and Speech Processing*! For more information check the conference website : *icnlsp.org/2025welcome* <http://icnlsp.org/2025welcome>

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GermEval 2025 Shared Task on Candy Speech Detection: 3rd Call for Participation
by Michael Wiegand 08 Apr '25

08 Apr '25

apologies for cross-posting We are pleased to announce the *GermEval Shared Task on Candy Speech Detection („Flausch-Erkennung“)* This is the third call to participate in the shared task on candy speech detection („Flausch-Erkennung“). We invite everyone from academia and industry to participate in the shared task. The workshop discussing the results of this shared task is planned to be held in conjunction with the Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS) in September 2025. *Introduction* Numerous methods have been developed for detecting and censoring negative speech (e.g., hate speech or offensive or harmful language) on social media platforms. However, there is much less focus on identifying and promoting positive supportive discourse in online communities. Our shared task aims to address this gap and encourage researchers to focus on such positive expressions. The task is to identify expressions of candy speech (Flausch) in online posts (YouTube comments). We define candy speech as expression of positive attitudes on social media toward individuals or their output (videos, comments, etc.). The purpose of candy speech is to encourage, cheer up, support and empower others. It can be viewed as the counterpart to hate speech, as it also aims to influence the self-image of the target person or group, but in a positive way. *Data* We will provide the participants with annotated training (and development) and unlabeled test datasets containing complete written, German language comment threads under YouTube videos posted by different content creators. The content creators and communities vary in topic, style, age group, etc. The training and test datasets do not overlap in terms of YouTube videos. Furthermore, the test dataset mostly contains (comments on) videos from content creators that are different from those in the training dataset. The communities commenting on these videos can therefore be expected to differ. *Task Details* Candy speech detection is the task of identifying the presence of candy speech (at the span level) in a given YouTube comment and classifying each expression in one of the predefined categories. This shared task focuses on German speaking YouTube communities. Participants will be provided with a dataset of YouTube comments manually annotated for different types of candy speech expressions. We offer the following two subtasks. Participants in this year's shared task may choose to participate in either subtask: Subtask 1: Coarse-Grained Classification The goal of this subtask is to identify whether the given comment contains candy speech ("Flausch") or not. The dataset is manually annotated for the presence of candy speech. Subtask 2: Fine-Grained Classification The goal of this subtask is to identify the span of each candy speech expression in a given text and classify it in one of the predefined categories. The dataset is manually annotated for 10 different types of candy speech expressions, such as “positive feedback”, “compliment”, “group membership” etc. More details on the subtasks (including examples) can be found at the website of the shared task (see link below). *Important dates* Trial data available: February 15, 2025 Training data available: March 3, 2025 Test data available: June 10, 2025 Evaluation start: June 16, 2025 Evaluation end: June 27, 2025 Paper submission due: July 11, 2025 Camera ready due: August 15, 2025 GermEval workshop: September 10, 2025 (co-located with KONVENS) *Website* https://yuliacl.github.io/GermEval2025-Flausch-Erkennung/ *GermEval* GermEval is a series of shared task evaluation campaigns that focus on Natural Language Processing for the German language. GermEval has been conducted regularly since 2014 in co-location with KONVENS/GSCL conferences: https://germeval.github.io/tasks/ *contact email* Please send any enquiry to the following email address: germeval-2025-candy-speech(a)ruhr-uni-bochum.de Best regards, Yulia Clausen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany Tatjana Scheffler, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany Michael Wiegand, Universität Wien, Austria

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[IJCAI-2025] 2nd Workshop on Agent AI for Scenario Planning (AgentScen)
by CHUNG-CHI CHEN 08 Apr '25

08 Apr '25

Dear Colleagues, (Apologize if you received multiple emails from different mailing lists) We are pleased to announce that the 2nd Workshop on Agent AI for Scenario Planning (AgentScen) will be held in conjunction with* IJCAI-25* from August 16–22, 2025, in Montreal, Canada. This workshop will include both paper presentations and *a shared task - **generating business ideas from patent documents*. The goal of the AgentScen workshop is to explore the potential of agent AI in scenario planning.* The submission deadline is May 9, 2025. Workshop details can be found at: * https://sites.google.com/view/agentscen Scenario planning can be applied to key healthcare and biomedical domains, such as pandemic preparedness, hospital resource management, advancements in medical technology, health insurance sustainability, and the future of telemedicine. In the finance and business sectors, it can assist executives, financial analysts, and decision-makers in navigating uncertainties related to market volatility, interest rate fluctuations, investment risks, corporate financial planning, regulatory changes, and technological disruptions. By constructing and analyzing alternative scenarios, organizations can better anticipate challenges and seize emerging opportunities. We are also introducing* a shared task focused on generating business ideas from patent documents.* Participants will be provided with a set of patents and asked to generate explanations for potential future products based on the patented technologies. The aim is to foster AI-driven innovation by leveraging patents as rich sources of technical insight. We look forward to your participation. Best regards, AgentScen Organizers Chung-Chi Chen - Artificial Intelligence Research Center, AIST, Japan Tatsuya Ishigaki - Artificial Intelligence Research Center, AIST, Japan Sophia Ananiadou - University of Manchester, UK Hiroya Takamura - Artificial Intelligence Research Center, AIST, Japan Wataru Hirota - Stockmark, Japan (Shared Task) Tomoko Ohkuma - Asahi Kasei Corporation, Japan (Shared Task) Tomoki Taniguchi - Asahi Kasei Corporation, Japan (Shared Task)

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2nd CFP - AAAS-2025
by Kurimo Mikko 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

[Apologies for cross-posting] == Second Call for Papers and Extended Abstracts == 1st Workshop on Automatic Assessment of Atypical Speech (AAAS-2025) We would like to invite you to submit papers to AAAS workshop co-located with NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT<https://www.nodalida-bhlt2025.eu> in Hestia Hotel Europa in Tallinn, Estonia on March 5th, 2025. Workshop website: https://teflon.aalto.fi/aaas-2025/ == Important Dates == Submission DL: 16 December 2024 (both papers and abstracts) Notification of acceptance: 24 January 2025 Camera-ready DL: 3 February 2025 Workshop: 5 March 2025 (full day) All deadlines are 11:55PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth"). == Overview == Automatic Assessment of Atypical Speech (AAAS) explores the assessment of pronunciation and speaking skills of children, language learners, people with speech sound disorders and methods to provide automatic rating and feedback using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models (LLMs). Automatic speaking assessment (ASA) is a rapidly growing field that answers to the need of developing AI tools for self-practising second and foreign language skills. This is not limited to pronunciation assessment, but the AI tools can also provide more complex feedback about fluency, vocabulary and grammar of the recorded speech. ASA is also very relevant for detection and quantification of speech disorders and for developing speech exercises that can be performed independent of time and place. The important applications of non-standard speech also include interfaces for children and elderly speakers as an alternative to using text input and output. The topic is timely, because the latest large speech models allow us now to develop ASR and classification methods for low-resourced data, such as atypical speech, where annotated training datasets are rarely available and expensive and difficult to produce and share. The goal of this workshop is to present the latest results in ASA and discuss the future work and collaboration between the researchers in Nordic and Baltic countries. == Topics of Interest == In particular, we would like to invite students, researchers, and other experts and stakeholders to contribute papers and/or join the discussion on the following (and related) topics: Automatic speaking assessment (ASA) for L2 (second or foreign language) pronunciation ASA for spoken L2 proficiency ASA for speech sound disorders (SSD) Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for L2 learners ASR for children and young L2 learners ASA and ASR for Nordic and other low-resource languages and tasks Spoken L2 learning and speech therapy using games Automatic generation of verbal feedback for spoken L2 learners using LLMs == Submission Details == We accept both short and long papers, as well as demo papers. The submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Paper length: Short and demo papers up to 4 pages. Long papers up to 8 pages. References are not included in the page count, and the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be added to the page to address reviewer comments. Papers should describe original unpublished work or work-in-progress and will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a double-blind fashion. All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be published in the ACL anthology. All submissions must follow the NoDaLida template, available in both LaTeX and MS Word. The links to the templates can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1osWGzuRnYRQGRS70Lx_pdQKrIT-NefKS/view https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/instructions-for-nodalida-baltic-h… The submission will be through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aaas2025 We also invite submissions of maximum 2-page long extended non-anonymous abstracts with any number of pages for references describing work in progress, negative results and opinion pieces. The abstracts, which should follow the same formatting templates as the peer-reviewed papers, will be considered for presentation by the workshop organisers and the accepted ones will be posted on the workshop website. The abstracts can be based on results related to our theme and already published elsewhere. The abstracts will not be published in the proceedings, but only in the workshop program. Please also consider volunteering to review 2-3 papers. == Invited Speakers == We have the pleasure to announce two invited speakers: 1. Nina R. Benway: What is so hard about AI Speech Therapy? Evidence from Efficacy Trials. Nina R Benway, PhD CCC-SLP, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering with Dr. Carol Espy-Wilson. Nina completed her doctoral training in speech-language pathology (concentration: neuroscience) with Dr. Jonathan Preston at Syracuse University, focusing on clinical trials in children with chronic rhotic speech sound disorders. The three studies of her dissertation resulted in the curation of an open-access 175,000-utterance speech corpus, the engineering of audio classification algorithms predicting speech-language pathologist perception of rhotic speech errors, and the clinical trial validation of an artificial intelligence tool that fully automates a speech sound treatment session. Nina’s doctoral training builds upon her undergraduate training in linguistics (acoustic phonetics) at Cornell University, graduate clinical training at The College of Saint Rose, and six years of clinical practice. Through these experiences Nina has refined a multidisciplinary skill set in speech science, speech signal processing, natural language processing, corpus phonetics, machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI), user interface development, cognitive frameworks of learning, and neurocomputational frameworks of speech production. 2. Ari Huhta: Automatic assessment of second/foreign language speaking: Review of developments for examination and teaching/learning purposes. Ari Huhta is a Professor of Language Assessment at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include diagnostic foreign/second language (L2) assessment, computerised assessment, self-assessment, as well as the development of reading, writing and vocabulary knowledge in L2. He was involved in developing the large-scale multilingual DIALANG online assessment and feedback system in the early 2000s and since then he has specialised in assessments that support language learning. Although his research has focused on learning and assessing reading and writing, he has been involved in designing several rating scales for speaking and in evaluating rating quality and studying rater behavior. Recently, he has participated in research projects that are developing ASR and automated assessment of L2 speaking, as well as using LLMs to evaluate Finnish L2 learners’ proficiency level. == Organizers == Mikko Kurimo (chair), Aalto University, mikko.kurimo(a)aalto.fi Giampiero Salvi, NTNU Sofia Strömbergsson, Karolinska Institutet Sari Ylinen, Tampere University Minna Lehtonen, University of Turku Tamas Grosz, Aalto University Ekaterina Voskoboinik, Aalto University Yaroslav Getman, Aalto University Nhan Phan, Aalto University This workshop is supported by “Technology-enhanced foreign and second-language learning of Nordic languages (TEFLON)” https://teflon.aalto.fi/ NordForsk project nr. 103893. == Contact Information == For questions and comments, please email mikko.kurimo(a)aalto.fi

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Invitation to a Postdoctoral Fellowship Application at La Rochelle University
by Georgeta Bordea 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

The Images and Contents team [1] of the L3i lab at La Rochelle University, invites researchers who have or will have a PhD degree at the call deadline in September 2025 and fulfill the eligibility criteria to prepare a joint application for an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship [2,3]. Potential topics can include current areas of NLP research such as: - Multimodal Large Language Models - Text processing of news archives - Using NLP for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature - Extraction, summarisation, and analysis of financial text - Information extraction for knowledge graph population - Using additional knowledge sources for information extraction from text - Reasoning with knowledge graphs and language Potential candidates should have published at top NLP or ML conferences (EMNLP,ACL,NAACL,EACL,NeurIPS,ICML,ICLR). Female candidates and candidates from other underrepresented groups in Computer Science are especially encouraged to apply. If you want to learn more, please send an email to Georgeta Bordea (name.surname [at] univ-lr.fr [http://univ-lr.fr/]) with your CV attached and the subject line "MSCA NLP". [1] https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/Images-et-contenus [2] https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctoral-fe… [3] https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/calls/msca-postdoctoral…

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Fully funded PhD position on "Event-Event Relation Extraction" at La Rochelle University
by Georgeta Bordea 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

The Images and Contents team [1] of the L3i lab [2] at La Rochelle University invites applications for a fully-funded PhD POSITION. Application deadline: 21/04/2025 Detection, Representation and Visualisation of Event-Event Relations Understanding how events relate to each other is at the heart of narrative comprehension, whether in literature, news discourse, historical analysis, or AI-driven storytelling. The ability to detect, represent, and visualize explicit and implicit event-event relations is crucial for making sense of complex narratives, identifying causal structures, and uncovering hidden patterns in temporal or logical sequences. This research will explore machine learning approaches, structured knowledge graphs, and multimodal visual representations to model event-event relations effectively. The project will leverage AI to tackle four core challenges: (1) accurate detection of implicit and explicit event-event relations across diverse textual sources, (2) structured representation of these relationships using knowledge graphs and semantic models, (3) linking of event sequences with relevant background knowledge, and (4) intuitive visualization of event interactions to enhance interpretability and facilitate narrative analysis. What we offer: A yearly scholarship of €40,000 is provided for the entire duration of enrollment, up to a maximum of 36 months. Funded within the framework of a Junior Professorship (CPJ) on Federating Digital Humanities, this PhD offers strong interdisciplinary and collaborative research opportunities with Digital Humanities and Computer Science researchers. Eligibility: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Information Retrieval, Data Science or a related field. Strong interest or prior experience in NLP, knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, or interactive data visualization. Mode of study: Full time Year of entry: 2025 Duration: 3 years Additional criteria: Applicants must not already (i) hold a doctoral degree; or (ii) be matriculated for a doctoral degree at La Rochelle University, or another institution. Expression of Interest (EOI): Students are to submit their EOIs to Georgeta Bordea (name.surname(a)univ-lr.fr) including the following documents: * CV including information about publications. * Transcripts of most relevant/recent degrees. * To apply, applicants must submit an EOI detailing their suitability for the project by addressing the required skills and key responsibilities in under 800 words. [1] https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/Images-et-contenus [https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/Images-et-contenus] [2] https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/ [https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/]

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Ukrainian NLP Workshop @ ACL 2025: Final CfP and deadline extension
by Mariana Romanyshyn 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

*The Fourth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Workshop (UNLP 2025) <https://unlp.org.ua/>* *Important dates* *April 20, 2025* — Workshop paper due (extended from April 14) May 19, 2025 — Notification of acceptance June 2, 2025 — Camera-ready papers due June 30, 2025 — Pre-recorded video due July 31, 2025 — Workshop *Submission link:* https://softconf.com/acl2025/unlp2025 *Call For Papers* UNLP 2025 <https://unlp.org.ua/> will be held *online* on July 31, 2025, in conjunction with ACL 2025. The workshop will bring together leading professionals from academia and industry who develop language resources, tools, and NLP solutions for the Ukrainian language or do cross-lingual research that can be applied to the Ukrainian language. The workshop will facilitate developments in the processing of the Ukrainian language, as well as provide a platform for discussion and sharing of ideas, encourage collaboration between different research groups, and improve the visibility of the Ukrainian research community. Topics of interest lie in the area of Ukrainian NLP and Computational Linguistics and include, but are not limited to, the following tasks: - morphosyntactic tagging, - named-entity recognition, - syntactic and semantic parsing, - coreference resolution, - information extraction and text mining, - automated question answering and information retrieval, - language modelling and natural language generation, - grammatical error correction, - text summarization, - machine translation, - sentiment analysis, - argument mining, - disinformation detection and fact verification, - development of language resources and evaluation methods, - speech recognition and generation, - knowledge representation and computational pragmatics, - computational semantics, - computational methods for phonology, - cross-lingual models applicable to Ukrainian, - Ukrainian dialects, sociolects, and code-switching, - Ukrainian NLP in interaction with other artificial intelligence technologies. *Note: *The workshop will accept research papers for the Crimean Tatar language with the aim of supporting this severely endangered language of the indigenous people of Ukraine. The workshop will also accept papers with negative results. *Submissions* UNLP invites submissions of completed and ongoing projects. Submissions describing resources or solutions that have been made available to the broader public are strongly encouraged. We invite two types of submissions: long and short papers. Long papers should describe original, unpublished, and completed work. The short papers may describe work in progress, small focused contributions, system demonstrations, new linguistic resources, or experiments based on existing software and resources. The workshop will provide Grammarly Premium to all authors. To request Grammarly Premium, please fill in this form <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSemG2fVh_KJo6JZF9pC4TNQ9gdMawd-TC_…> . *Workshop Organizers* *Main Organizers* Andrii Hlybovets, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine Mariana Romanyshyn, Grammarly, Ukraine Olena Nahorna, Grammarly, Germany Oleksii Ignatenko, Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine *Shared Task Organizers* Nataliia Romanyshyn, Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine Oleksii Syvokon, Microsoft, Ukraine Roman Kyslyi, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Ukraine Volodymyr Sydorskyi, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Ukraine Find our program committee at https://unlp.org.ua/committees/. *Follow us* Website: https://unlp.org.ua/. X: https://x.com/UNLP_workshop. Telegram: https://t.me/UNLP_workshop. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UNLPworkshop. Email: info(a)unlp.org.ua.

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Call for Participation: 4th Cardiff NLP Workshop, 14-15 July 2025
by Nedjma Ousidhoum 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

============================================================== Call for Participation 4th Cardiff NLP Workshop, 14-15 July 2025 ============================================================== Dear corpora-list members, We are organising the 4th Cardiff NLP Summer Workshop, an in-person workshop that will take place from July 1st to July 2nd 2024 in the Abacws building in Cardiff (Wales, UK). The workshop is especially designed for PhD students and early career researchers. *The registration* *is free for everyone* and we are also offering some affordable accommodation options in the university residence rooms near the venue. Please fill in the expression of interest form <https://forms.gle/R6Rv3L3ukGoUfTfL6> by April 8th if you are interested in joining the workshop. Workshop Activities: - Invited speakers from academia and industry - Tutorials - Poster session and networking - Panel NLP research and large language models in academia and industry Important Dates: - Application Period: 19 February - 8 April 2025 - Notification of Acceptance: Late April 2025 - Workshop: 14-15 July 2024 in Cardiff For more details, please check the workshop website: https://www.cardiffnlpworkshop.org/. The Cardiff NLP Organising team.

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CIRCE Online Seminar 31/03/2025 - Dr. Alice Henderson "Learning to Listen: Coping with Spoken Variation in the Workplace"
by Claudia Soria 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

*🎓 *We are happy to announce the next webinar in the CIRCE online seminar series organized by the CIRCE <https://www.circe-project.eu/> project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena <https://www.dfclam.unisi.it/en>, H2IOSC <https://www.h2iosc.cnr.it/> project and CNR-ILC <https://www.ilc.cnr.it/en/>. *Dr. Alice Henderson* /Université de Grenoble Alpes, France/ */Learning to Listen: Coping with Spoken Variation in the Workplace/* 📅 *April 28, 2025* 🕓 *4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (CEST)* *Venue*: Online *Attendees*: Secondary school teachers, researchers, language instructors *Summary*: The university workplace is representative of international-ised/-ising workplaces in general, where different communities, languages, and cultures coexist. Staff encounter their colleagues’ and students’ accents – of Italian, of English, and in my case, French - and sometimes the result is that communication can be quite hard work. Even with the best intentions, sometimes we just cannot understand a speaker. However, when we think about spoken interactions, we have to accept that it is not just about how the speaker produces a language; the actions and skills of listeners should also be addressed. This flip or change of perspective begs two questions: can we, as listeners, learn to cope better with spoken variation? And if so, how? In this talk I’ll summarize speech research findings about how listeners can improve their ability to adapt to new speakers and new accents. I’ll look at listener accommodation and accentism, as well as the conceptual trio of accentedness, comprehensibility and intelligibility. I’ll describe concrete ways to prepare listeners to cope with accented speech, with a primary focus on listeners instead of speakers. Examples will come mainly from my work with non-academic staff at a large, French public university; my 1-hour format for listener training can be reused in other professional contexts. If possible, I’ll also describe the next steps in this work, as I prepare to continue training previous workshop participants as part of a longitudinal study. *Bio*: Alice Henderson is a Professor at Université Grenoble - Alpes, France where she teaches English for Specific Purposes to Science & Technology students. She taught English phonetics and phonology for 24 years and has been involved in training teachers in France, Norway, Poland, and Spain. In 2009 she initiated the international bi-annual conference English Pronunciation: Issues & Practices. Her research interests include English pronunciation teaching and learning, the perception of foreign-accented speech, and English Medium Instruction (EMI). Much of her research has focused on speakers, but she is also intrigued by listeners’ roles, from an intercultural and sociolinguistic perspective. Upcoming webinars: - Ana Tankosic (Monday, May 12, 2025) - Giuliana Regnoli (Monday, May 26, 2025) - Clara Molina (Monday, June 30, 2025) The seminar is free of charge, but participants must register. To access this and next events, you should create an account on theH2IOSC Training Environment <https://h2iosc-training-platform.ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it/registration>. Once logged in with your credentials, choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series” and activate it with the code PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed. The registrations of the previous CIRCE Seminars are also available on the H2IOSC Training Environment. For any inquiry, write to contact(a)circe-project.eu.

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