Welcome
Welcome to
Auckland
and to the 11th International Australasian Conference on
Speech
Science and Technology: SST 2006. It is 20 years since the first SST
conference
was held in
Canberra,
Australia.
Since then SST has been hosted by many of the
main universities around
Australia.
The SST conference series was one of the first multi-disciplined
conferences in
speech research to be held, bringing together Engineers, Phoneticians,
Computer
Scientists, Speech Scientists and Psychologists. It is this dynamic mix
which
makes SST a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating conference. Although
the
conference delegates have mainly come from
Australia,
the conference has
always had a strong international flavour. This, though, is the first
time that
the conference has been held outside
Australia
– quite fitting
in a year
in which the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association has
been
renamed the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.
New Zealand,
like
Australia,
has an active speech
research community, and we hope that this conference serves to
strengthen the
ties between researchers in the two countries. The more we know about
the research
paths being followed in each of the countries, the more we can interact
and
stimulate an active research environment for us all.
We are also very pleased to welcome
researchers from outside
Australia
and
New Zealand.
SST 2006 includes delegates and contributors from the
United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Thailand, Japan, Korea, China, USA, and Canada. Such a spread of
participation from around the world confirms the appropriateness of the
“International” label of this conference.
The SST 2006 programme committee
received 126 submissions,
made up of a mixture of full papers and extended abstracts. These were
reviewed
by an international panel of experts, representing the relevant fields
for each
paper. Our heartfelt thanks go to all the referees for giving their
time and
energy to help ensure the high quality of the conference (click here for the
list of referees). 101 papers are in the final line up – 65 oral
presentations
and 36 posters. Each of the 89 written papers included in this proceedings CD
includes a
document footer indicating whether the paper was accepted after review
of the
full paper or of an abstract. Not all of the papers accepted for the
conference
are included on the CD, as some authors were unable to provide full
papers in
time for the preparation of the proceedings.
The oral presentations have been
organised into three
streams on each of three days, and the poster session has been given a
dedicated 2.5 hour slot to allow plenty of time for discussion. The current conference also includes a
day-long session on the Phonetics and Phonology of Australian and New Zealand English (PANZE). In addition, two intonation and rhythm
papers
submitted to PANZE but which could not be scheduled in that stream
have been accommodated within a prosody stream. As is usual for SST conferences, there are several strong
themes running
through the programme, including forensic phonetics, speaker and
language recognition
and identification, automatic speech recognition, acoustic analysis of
speech,
cochlear implant research, first and second language acquisition, tone language research, and a
special
session on written language processing.
We are fortunate to have been able to
attract three highly
respected and experienced researchers as our keynote speakers – Pat
Keating,
Joe Perkell and Michael Corballis, who, in addition to plenary
addresses on Linguistic Voice Quality, Sensorimotor
Control of Speech Production and Language as Gesture respectively,
have kindly agreed to take part in a panel discussion on future
directions in
speech science technology research.
Finally, we would like to
thank the Australasian Speech
Science and Technology Association for entrusting this conference to
us. We
thank Sharon Marsden for her detailed editorial comments on the papers
submitted for the proceedings and Steve Cassidy for technical support
with the
conference website and for his help during the preparation of the proceedings cdrom.
We trust the papers in the conference will excite
you as
much they have us.
On behalf of the SST 2006 Organising Committee
Catherine Watson (Conference Chair)
Paul Warren (Programme Chair)