UPenn is hosting a workshop on New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research, on January 28-30, 2011. Here’s the call for papers:
The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger.
To welcome and promote this revolution, we will organize a workshop on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies; variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop.
Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics.
Important Dates
* Nov. 8, 2010: Abstract submission deadline
* Jan. 28, 2011: Tutorial on forced alignment
* Jan. 29-30, 2011: Workshop