ISCA student website - Suggestions

Making Resources more prominent

davidg — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:06:02 +0200

I think the Resources listings at http://www.isca-students.org/resources are very useful and of interest to non-students as well as students. To make them easier for non-students to find, I suggest that a link to http://www.isca-speech.org/resources.html be added to the page http://www.isca-students.org/resources. The latter page is linked from the RESOURCES entry in the navigation sidebar at www.isca-speech.org, so it is easy for visitors to www.isca-speech.org to find it.

Regards,
David

Online supplementary materials for papers

davidg — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:53:57 +0200

People in our field often use the Internet to offer extra materials which are associated with a published paper, such as source code, data sets, and other types of useful information which does not fit into the paper itself.

People tend to provide these materials through web hosting tied to their current employment situation, and provide the corresponding URLs in their papers. These URLs often stop functioning after an authorâ€™s employment situation changes. So there is a significant problem with the durability of these URLs.

Perhaps this problem could be addressed if ISCA itself started offering hosting for such materials when they are associated with papers in ISCA proceedings?

Web comments for papers

davidg — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:23:30 +0200

I've heard from John Vig (http://johnvig.org/) that the IEEE is considering adding a feature to their online paper archive which would be "like a blog at the end of each article, i.e., to allow people to comment on possible errors in the paper, references that should, or should not have been included, etc."

I think it might be worthwhile to add a comment system like this for ISCA papers.

Dr. Vig mentioned some valuable potential uses, such as posting corrections. Another potential use is publication of disappointing follow-up results. Some senior people in the speech technology community have expressed concern about under-publication of disappointing results. I have personally seen several cases where positive initial results for a new technique were submitted for publication, but disappointing results discovered in follow-up work (by the original authors or by people who read their paper) were not. I believe that two key aspects of this bias are that it can be hard to make a competitive full-length paper out of nothing more than a disappointing result, and that people feel less motivated to put in the effort and time required to create a full-length paper when the results are disappointing rather than pleasing. It seems plausible that an online comment system could greatly help with these two aspects of the bias problem, because comments could be of any length and would not have to out-compete other work in a competitive peer review process. I think that the ability to make comments of any length is an important difference from the Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences which was launched by CMU in 2004 and did not receive many submissions.

Corpora for simulating environments

davidg — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:34:14 +0100

The Corpora section of the web site has the title "Speech/Text Corpora". Currently, it also contains some collections of noises, which can be added to speech to simulate speech in noisy conditions. These noise collections are not speech or text. I also have some links to collections of room impulse responses that can be used to simulate room acoustics. I haven't submitted these links yet but they are not speech or text either.

Perhaps we should split Corpora into "Speech/Text Corpora" and "Environmental Corpora", with the latter containing things like noise collections, impulse respon

Other online forums

davidg — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:55:47 +0100

At http://isca-students.org/forums/research there are instruction about how to use the forum, such as, "If you would like to share a contribution the content of which does not fit in one of the forums currently available, please contact us, specify the requested forum name and briefly explain why you want us to open the requested forum for you."

Would it be possible to add something like "Related discussions also take place on comp.speech.research and comp.ai.nat-lang,

Freeware areas

davidg — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:04:03 +0100

Hello,

Should we add a 'Dialog systems' area to the Freeware areas? It doesn't seem that (e.g.) RavenClaw (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbohus/ravenclaw-olympus/) fits well into any of the existing 10 areas. I put the Phoenix parser (http://cslr.colorado.edu/~whw/phoenix/download.html) in the Natural Language Processing area, but I think Phoenix fit better in a 'Dialog systems' area.

Regards,
David

Google search box for ISCA archive

davidg — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 07:47:34 +0100

The ISCA Archive includes public web pages providing the titles, author lists and abstracts for papers presented at ISCA events. I have put a Google search box that can be used to search those web pages at http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~gelbart/pub-links.html. Perhaps it would be worth adding a search box like this to the ISCA Students web site until more powerful searching of the Archive is available? The HTML implementing the search box uses the Google SiteSearch template from http://www.google.com/services/free.html.

This search box does lacks many features that Google Scholar or a custom ISCA SAC search engine could provide for searching the ISCA Archive.

Move Resources links in navigation sidebar?

davidg — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:32:50 +0200

The links under Resources in the navigation sidebar on the left side of the page are all publicly viewable. However, the other links under Member's Services are all restricted to registered users. As a result, I'm concerned that some visitors to the site may not understand that the Resources are public. They might click a few of the restricted links listed earlier under Member's Services and come to the false conclusion that all the rest of the Member's Services links are restricted. So I think it would be better if the Resources category were moved out of the Member's Services section.

Subtopics for Articles section

davidg — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:14:35 +0200

The Articles section under Resources currently contains an annotated list of generally useful articles. Would it be possible to create sublists for specific scientific and technical areas? I think an annotated list of important articles and useful tutorials about automatic speech recognition would be useful, and if one is started I will be interested in contributing to it (although I might not have time until next month). Yours truly, David Gelbart

Referral Tool

murat — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 23:01:01 +0200

To be able to invite friends from my profile with a short description of this website, that would be nice to have a referral tool where I can send an automatic invitation.