[Apologies for cross-posting]
== Third Call for Papers and Extended Paper Update DL 20 December==
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-HLThttps://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) NEW: Paper Update DL 20 December 2024 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-hl...
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@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@aalto.fi