International Conference on Spoken Communication (Naples, 2009)

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
“SPOKEN COMMUNICATION”
NAPLES, 23RD-25TH FEBRUARY 2009

Dear colleagues, dear friends,
The Conference of the G.S.C.P. is organized every three years and now represents a well established appointment arising the interest of all people working in this field. The participation to the previous editions of the conference, both held in Naples, was very high from both European and non European Countries. The proceedings of the 2006 conference, published in May 2008 by Liguori Editore (http://www.liguori.it/schedanew.asp?isbn=4022), gathered more than 120 papers by authors from 21 countries. Topics ranged from linguistics to pragmatics, from philosophy to communication sciences, from pedagogy to psychology, from experimental phonetics to speech analysis tools. A great interest was raised from the research on the acoustic correlates of emotions and on text and communication dynamics.
CALL FOR PAPERS

We are glad to announce that the International Conference on Spoken Communication will be held in Naples from the 23rd to the 25th February 2009, hosted by the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”..

Topic areas:
1. the cognitive dimension
2. the pragmatic and semantic dimension
3. the phonic dimension
4. the morphosyntactic dimension
5. anthropology and sociology of spoken communication
6. spoken communication and language pathologies
7. ontogenesis and phylogenesis
8. tools for the study of spoken communication
The conference program will include roundtables, oral presentations and poster sessions.
Participants interested in presenting a paper for either an oral or poster presentation, should submit an abstract (500 words) by October 15, 2008. Abstracts may be submitted online by accessing the conference website [http://www.comunicazioneparlata.org]. The online abstract submission will open on July 20, 2008. All fields on the online abstract submission form must be completed (author name(s), affiliation(s), e-mail address, title of abstract, preferred format: oral/poster, keywords, topic area). Authors will be notified of the Scientific Committee's decisions on the acceptance of their abstract and on the form of presentation (oral communication or poster) by November 15, 2008. If you have any problems using the online submission form, please email conference2009@comunicazioneparlata.org
OFFICIAL LANGUAGES
The official languages of the conference will be Italian and English.

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Federico Albano Leoni (chair), Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Carla Bazzanella, Università degli Studi di Torino
Pier Marco Bertinetto, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Isabella Chiari, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Morena Danieli, Loquendo, Torino
Francesca M. Dovetto, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles
Annibale Elia, Università degli Studi di Salerno
Antonella Giannini, Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale
Emanuela Magno Caldognetto,Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione del CNR, Padova
Antonino Pennisi, Università degli Studi di Messina
Massimo Pettorino, Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale
Miriam Voghera, Università degli Studi di Salerno

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Massimo Pettorino
Antonella Giannini
Francesca Dovetto
ORGANIZING STAFF
Manuela Lo Prejato
Manuela Senza Peluso

Registration fee: € 180,00. Details of methods of payment will be provided with the next announcement. The registration fee includes admission to all sessions, lunches, coffee breaks, proceedings and conference material. Students and PhD students do not need to pay the registration fee, unless they are authors of a paper.
Deadline Overview:
• by October 15, 2008: submission of a one page abstract (500 words)
• by November 15, 2008: notification of acceptance
• February 23, 24, 25 2009: conference
• by April 30, 2009: submission of the full text

For registration and for further information, please see our website:
http://www.comunicazioneparlata.org
Please visit the website periodically to check information about registration, lodging, venues, programme and participants etc.
The online abstract submission will be open from July 20, 2008 to October 15, 2008.
We look forward to welcoming you in Naples.

Federico Albano Leoni
Carla Bazzanella
Pier Marco Bertinetto
Isabella Chiari
Morena Danieli
Francesca M. Dovetto
Alessandro Duranti
Annibale Elia
Antonella Giannini
Emanuela Magno Caldognetto
Antonino Pennisi
Massimo Pettorino
Miriam Voghera

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Re-publish your articles online!

I recently ran across an interesting article by Geoffrey Sampson, distinguished British linguist, on the future of scholarly publications. As is my policy to (progressively) put online pdfs of published papers (practice net yet very common in my country) not any more easily available, I suggest this reading to all researchers interested in disseminating their work:

The death of learned journals, Geoffrey Sampson (2005)

John Sinclair (1933 – 2007)

Yesterday John Sinclair, corpus linguist and lexicographer, died in Florence.

Every scholar involved in empirical linguistics must recognize his immense contribution to the field, both at a theoretical and applied level. Author of many milestone-publications in lexicography and corpus linguistics, director and founder of the Cobuild project (and Bank of English), among his many contributions are major researches in dictionary and corpus design, computational lexicography, lexical collocations, English for special purpose and on language teaching and learning. John will also be always remembered for his intellectual generosity in discussing his and other's work and in encouraging dialogue and research.

In the last years he and Elena Tognini-Bonelli have lead courses and workshops on various aspects of corpus linguistics at the Tuscan Word Centre (Italy). The picture you see is from the last TWC in late October 2006 (photo by: U. Roemer).

Isabella Chiari

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The best way to start remembering is by keeping his intellectual inheritance:

Corpus and Text: Basic Principles John Sinclair (Tuscan Word Centre)

A list of his publications (up to 2000) can be found at: http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/research/archive/1999-2000/sinclairpubs.htm

CLIPS, Corpus of Spoken Italian

Today has been announced the final release of a new corpsu of spoken Italian (CLIPS), directed by Federico Albano Leoni (University La Sapienza of Rome). The key features of the corpus are: free distibution of audio and transcription, explicit Eagles compliant documentation, and above all phonetic transcription of a section of the collected material.

Here is the brief description of the corpus made by Federico Albano Leoni:

"CLIPS, a corpus of spoken Italian, is freely available at www.clips.unina.it. The corpus (audio files, annotation and documentation) are fully downloadable from the website via ftp, free for research purposes.

CLIPS consists of about 100 hours of speech, equally represented by female and male voices. A section of the corpus is transcribed orthographically, a smaller section has been phonetically labeled. Recordings were made in 15 Italian cities, selected on the basis of linguistic and socio-economic principles of representativeness: Bari, Bergamo, Bologna, Cagliari, Catanzaro, Firenze, Genova, Lecce, Milano, Napoli, Palermo, Parma, Perugia, Roma, Venezia.

For each of the 15 cities different text typologies have been included: a) radio and television broadcasts (news, interviews, talk shows); dialogue (240 dialogues collected using the map task procedure and the “spot the difference” game. In this set: 30 dialogues are phonetically labeled, 90 orthographically transcribed); c) read speech from non professional speakers (20 sentences each, covering medium-high frequency Italian words); d) speech over the telephone (conversations between 300 speakers and a simulated hotel desk service operator), e) read speech from 20 professional speakers (160 sentences, covering all phonotactic sequences and medium-high frequency Italian words) recorded in an anechoic chamber.Documentation, corpus collection and annotation follow the EAGLES guidelines.

Parlaritaliano, portal of spoken Italian resources

On february the 26th 2007 Parlare italiano: osservatorio degli usi linguistici. project will be officially presented in Salerno.
Tools, resources, publications on spoken language, mainly Italian will be collected on the home page Parlaritaliano (http://www.parlaritaliano.it/).

The project joins different Universities: Università di Salerno, Università di Firenze, Università di Napoli “Federico II”, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Università di Roma Tre, Università per Stranieri di Siena, Università di Torino.

Measuring linguistic diversity over the net

Many have wondered about languages represented on the net, on their proportions, on their readers. The exact extension of the web is itself still a huge enigma. There are many obvious implications in what can be called the "language divide".

UNESCO has published a volume collecting many different contributions on this subject. One of the contributions, that of professor Paolillo of Indiana University, reinforced the intuition that most pages are still written in English (more than 50%). Following Global Reach after English, Chinese, Japanese, and than Spanish, German, French and Italian. Chinese in particular has exploded from 2001 to 2005 becoming four times more present. Data obtained by search engine are not trustworthy. Romance languages (all) reach only 14% of the total pages.

Methodological problems have arised in trying to estimate language diversity. Namely: there is a large dependency over indexed pages (but what about the large amount of hidden non indexed pages?). How many language shoud we monitor? Daniel Prado (Unione latine) discusses political and judiciary questions, while addressing particular attention on Romance languages. An extremely interesting reading, from the methodological and political point of view.

ICh

Bibliography

Mesurer la diversité linguistique sur l’Internet Un ensemble d’articles signés par : John Paolillo, Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado et autres. – Révisé et accompagné d’une introduction de l’Institut de statistique de l’UNESCO Montréal (Canada). – Montréal : UNESCO, 2005 (CI.2005/WS/06) (pdf)

Voiceprints...individual identification through speech patterns

Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire are working on speech pattern recognition. A mathematical modelling of voice pattern will be able to improve security by identifying individuals in the future, like fingerprints nowadays do.

"Once we receive our sentence from a speaker we select their voice prints, and then we select from that features which represent the voice prints. We use these special features to build a statistical model representing the individual speaker and we store them. Then at the time of testing – when somebody for example wants use his voice to access his bank over the telephone – we receive the speech data from the user, extract the features the same way and compare these against the reference model we have for that individual. And then we decide whether the user is genuine or an impostor." Dr Aladdin Ariyeeinia, University of Hertfordshire.

Useful links:

Biometrics White Paper
VoiceBiometrics