Call for papers

3rd Advanced Voice Function Assessment International Workshop (AVFA2009)

Madrid (Spain), 18th - 20th  May 2009

Motivation

     Speech is the most important means of communication among humans, resulting from a complex interaction among vocal folds vibration at the larynx and voluntary movements of the articulators (i.e., mouth, tongue, velum, jaw, etc.). The function of voice, however, is not limited to speech communication. It also transfers emotions, expresses personality features and reflects situations of stress or pathology. Moreover, it has an aesthetic value in many different professional activities, affecting salesmen, managers, lawyers, singers, actors, etc.

     Although research in speech science has traditionally favored areas such as synthesis, recognition or speaker verification, the previous facts motivate the current emerging of a new research area related to voice function assessment.

     AVFA2009 aims at fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and interactions among researchers in voice assessment beyond the framework of COST Action 2103, thus reaching the whole scientific community.

Topics

     Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

  • Automatic detection of voice disorders
  • Automatic assessment & rating of voice quality
  • New strategies for parameterization and modeling normal and pathological voices (biomechanical-based parameters, chaos modeling, etc.)
  • Databases of vocal disorders
  • Inverse filtering
  • Signal processing for remote diagnosis
  • Speech enhancement for pathological & oesophageal voices
  • Objective parameters extraction from vocal fold images using videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI and other emerging techniques
  • Multi-modal analysis of disordered speech
  • Robust pitch extraction algorithms for pathological & oesophageal voices
  • Emotions in speech
  • Speaker adaptation
  • Voice Physiology and Biomechanics
  • Modeling of Voice Production
  • Diagnosis and Evaluation Protocols
  • Substitution Voices
  • Evaluation of Clinical Treatments
  • Analysis of Oesophageal Voices

Submission

    Prospective authors are asked to electronically submit a preliminary version of the papers using the online tool with a maximum length of 4 pages, including figures and tables, in English. Preliminary papers should be submitted as pdf documents, fitted to the linked  template, by the 6th of February. The submitted documents should include the title and authors' names, affiliations and addresses. In addition, the e-mail address and phone number of the corresponding author should be given. 

    Workshop proceedings will be edited both in paper and CD-ROM. Author registration to the conference is required for accepted papers to be included in the proceedings. The best papers presented at the workshop will be eligible for publication in a refereed journal.

Best student paper award

Based on the comments given by the reviewers and the presentation at the conference, the organizing committee will give a best student paper award. The awarded author will be nominated at the closing ceremony of AVFA2009.