TSD 2008 - CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS AND PARTICIPATION
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Eleventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2008)
	      Brno, Czech Republic, 8-12 September 2008
		    http://www.tsdconference.org/

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen.  The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


SUBMISSION OF DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS

Authors are invited to present actual projects, developed software and
hardware or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference. The authors of the demonstrations should provide the
abstract not exceeding one page as plain text. The submission must be
made using an online form available at the conference www pages.

The accepted demonstrations will be presented during a special
Demonstration Session (see the Demo Instructions at
www.tsdconference.org).  Demonstrators can present their contribution
with their own notebook with an Internet connection provided by the
organisers or the organisers can prepare a PC computer with multimedia
support for demonstrators.


IMPORTANT DATES

July 31 2008 ............. Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 7 2008 ............ Notification of acceptance for
                           demonstrations sent to the authors
September 8-12 2008 ...... Conference date

The demonstration abstracts will not appear in the Proceedings of TSD
2008 but they will be published electronically at the conference website.


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between
researchers in both spoken and written language processing from the
former East Block countries and their Western colleagues. Proceedings
of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes
in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.


TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

    text corpora and tagging
    transcription problems in spoken corpora
    sense disambiguation
    links between text and speech oriented systems
    parsing issues
    parsing problems in spoken texts
    multi-lingual issues
    multi-lingual dialogue systems
    information retrieval and information extraction
    text/topic summarization
    machine translation
    semantic networks and ontologies
    semantic web
    speech modeling
    speech segmentation
    speech recognition
    search in speech for IR and IE
    text-to-speech synthesis
    dialogue systems
    development of dialogue strategies
    prosody in dialogues
    emotions and personality modeling
    user modeling
    knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems
    assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue
    applied systems and software
    facial animation
    visual speech synthesis

Papers on processing languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Frederick Jelinek, USA (general chair)
    Hynek Hermansky, Switzerland (executive chair)
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Genevieve Baudoin, France
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Attila Ferencz, Romania
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, GB
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Patrick Hanks, Czech Republic
    Ludwig Hitzenberger, Germany
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Steven Krauwer, The Netherlands
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Elmar Noeth, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Vladimir Petkevic, Czech Republic
    Fabio Pianesi, Italy
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Ernst G. Schukat-Talamazzini, Germany
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine
    Yorick Wilks, GB
    Victor Zakharov, Russia


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Jerry Hobbs, ISI USC, USA
    Deep Lexical Semantics

    Elizabeth Shriberg, SRI, USA
    Practical Prosody: Modeling Language Beyond the Words

    Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
    The Future of Text-Meaning in Computational Linguistics


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will
be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


CONFERENCE FEES

The conference fee depends on the date of payment and on your status.
It includes one copy of the proceedings, refreshments, local
transport, social events and organizing costs. The fee does not
include accommodation.

Full participant:
    Late payment (by August 15):    CZK 10000
    On-site payment:                CZK 12000

Student:
    Late payment (by August 15):    CZK  8500
    On-site payment:                CZK 10000

The payment may be refunded up until August 15, at the cost
of CZK 1500. No refund is possible after this date.

All costs are in Czech Crowns (Czech Koruna, CZK), see e.g.
http://www.xe.com/ucc/ for the current exchange rate.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 3-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation are available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to

    Dana Hlavackova, TSD 2008
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 33 29
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2008@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2008 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000. The city is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of Moravia, which is in the
south-east part of the Czech Republic. Brno had been a Royal City
since 1347 and with its six universities it forms also a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow,
Barcelona and Prague and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or
Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, some nearby places may also
be of interest.  Local ones include: Brno Castle now called Spilberk,
Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the Augustine Monastery
with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian Margraves, Church of St.
James, Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul, Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo
Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat designed by Mies van der Rohe along
with other important buildings of between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with Macocha
Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of Battle of three emperors
(Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz - Battle by
Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz), Pernstejn Castle,
Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice Chateau, Letovice Chateau,
Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe,
Telc - a town on the UNESCO heritage list, and many others are all
within easy reach.