Advances in Phonetic Sciences: Role of Speech Corpora and Automatic Processing

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a Special Issue on “Advances in Phonetic Sciences: The role of Speech Corpora and Automatic Processing”.

This Special Issue aims to bring together recent research on advances in speech corpora and to better comprehend the current status and challenges in the construction and analysis of spoken corpora.

During the past few decades, we have witnessed an increasing collaboration between linguistics and speech technology communities (Bradlow et al., 2011; Ernestus and Warner, 2011; Coleman et al., 2011). For instance, on the linguistic side, this collaboration has resulted mainly in an increasing integration of methods, tools and corpora from speech technologies into the analytical practices of linguistic domains such as phonetics and laboratory phonology. In particular, the automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large collections of spoken data are impacting phonetic sciences. These analyses have allowed us to test classical theoretical issues from a different perspective, and they have greatly facilitated the work of linguists (Liberman, 2019). On the speech technology side, in-depth explorations of speech reduction phenomena helped to improve pronunciation dictionaries for speech recognition systems (Adda-Decker and Lamel, 2018; Vasilescu et al., 2018).

In this Special Issue, we would like to address different demands and interactions between linguistics  (with a particular focus on phonetics and laboratory phonology research) and computer science. We also aim to provide a state of the art on corpus construction and publication, technological processing of corpora, ecological use of corpora gathered for a specific purpose by other scholars and data sharing in general, and benefits for real-world applications of advances in speech corpus construction and analysis.  Special emphasis will be placed on the relevance of multidisciplinarity in spoken data creation, analysis and sharing, and on collaborations among different research disciplines. We welcome submissions on advances in speech corpus covering technological and/or linguistic aspects.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) or to the Languages Editorial Office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

* Abstract submission deadline: 15 November 2021

* Notification of abstract acceptance: 15 December 2021

* Full manuscript deadline: 15 April 2022

List of references:

Adda-Decker, M., & Lamel, L. (2018). 4. Discovering speech reductions across speaking styles and languages. In Rethinking Reduction. De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 101–128

Bradlow, A. R., Guion-Anderson, S., & Polka, L. (2011). Cross-language Speech Perception and Variations in Linguistics Experience. C. T. Best (Ed.). Elsevier.

Coleman, J., Liberman, M., Kochanski, G., Burnard, L., & Yuan, J. (2011). Mining a year of speech. VLSP 2011: New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research, 16–19.

Ernestus, M., & Warner, N. (2011). An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants. Journal of Phonetics, 39(SI), 253–260.

Liberman, M. Y. (2019). Corpus phonetics. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 91–107.

Vasilescu, I., Wu, Y., Jatteau, A., Adda-Decker, M., & Lamel, L. (2020). Alternances de voisement et processus de lénition et de fortition: une étude automatisée de grands corpus en cinq langues romanes. Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL), 3, pp. 11–36

Prof. Dr. Ioana Vasilescu
Dr. Yaru Wu
Dr. Mathilde Hutin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

• phonetics
• laboratory phonology
• data collection
• large scale corpora
• speech production variation
• speech perception
• speech technology