9 - 11 April 2006
Stellenbosch, South Africa

The organising committee extends a warm invitation to you to attend the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing to be held in Stellenbosch, South Africa from 9 to 11 April 2006. This workshop is hosted by the Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology (SU-CLaST) in collaboration with the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Stellenbosch is situated in the fertile Jonkershoek river valley, surrounded by vineyards, orchards and mountains. It is the oldest town in South Africa, founded by Simon van der Stel in 1679 and renowned for its Cape Dutch buildings, university and wines. Stellenbosch is affectionately known as "Eikestad" - town of oaks. The Stellenbosch mountains form a link in the chain of mountains along the south coast of the Western Cape, to the southern tip of Africa (Agulhas). The Stellenbosch valley was the first to be settled and cultivated by the Dutch as they moved from Cape Town towards the interior.

Besides the spectacular beauty of Stellenbosch and the nearby city of Cape Town we also promise you an exciting scientific programme presented by international experts.

Most applications of speech technology are developed for a specific target language. Within one language, systems usually account for speaker variations such as gender and age. However, in multilingual environments, systems are often used by non-native speakers. Non-native users introduce additional sources of speaker variation such as differences in accent and varying levels of proficiency in the target language. These additional sources of variation are known to have a detrimental effect on system performance if they are not properly accounted for. The purpose of this workshop is to address some of the issues that are related to multilingual speech and language processing. Workshop topics include:

• Multilingual and accented/non-native automatic speech recognition
• Multilingual acoustic and language modelling
• Accent/pronunciation variation modelling
• Automatic language and accent identification
• Multilingual spoken dialogue systems
• Multilingual speech synthesis

Abstract submissions will be possible via this website from the 2nd of June 2005. The closing date for submission of abstracts will be 30 September 2005.

Please note that the number of participants is limited. In order to create an “island” effect, participants will be requested to stay in the hotel just outside Stellenbosch where the workshop will take place.