Conference - From Sound to Sense: Fifty+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication

美国国家科学基金会将为2004年6月11日至13日在马萨诸塞州剑桥的麻省理工学院举行的“从声音到感觉：语音通信五十多年的发现”会议提供部分支持。会议有两个目标。首先是调查该领域的现状，通过提供在过去五十年的语音研究中所取得的成就的历史概述，并通过抽样一些最有趣的最近的工作在这个活跃和令人兴奋的研究课题。二十一位受邀演讲者将在六个不同的领域进行演讲：语音学和语音学;语音声学;语音感知;规划和生产;发展，病理学和补救;和语音技术。第二个目标是促进各分支学科之间的相互交流，以利于这一研究领域今后的工作，这一研究领域的基础是物理学、工程学、语言学、认知学和医学。为此，会议以单一会议而不是多个平行会议的形式组织，以便每个人都能听到所有发言并共同参与讨论。许多演讲将在麻省理工学院的网站上以书面论文的形式存档，并以CD的形式分发，所有的会议都将被录像（如果资金允许的话），为学生和既定的研究人员提供丰富的资源。 许多历史概述将由高级研究人员提出，如贡纳·范特，肯尼思·史蒂文斯，彼得·拉德福格德，约翰·奥哈拉，大卫皮索尼，比约恩·林德布卢姆，维克托祖和雷肯特，他们在各自的子学科中做了开创性的工作，包括语音声学的源滤波器理论，它模拟了声道大小和形状的变化产生口语发音的方式，-声学-发音映射的量子理论，其识别为世界语言中的声音类别提供一些基础的声学上稳定的发音，-人类语音感知、产生、发展和病理学的模型，其将语音的声学和发音的模型与人类语言处理相关联，和算法的自动识别和合成的语音，这不仅为残疾人提供援助，但也作为工具，以测试我们的模型，人类的语音处理。 负责这些进步的受邀演讲者将数十年来思考和调查演讲的宝贵视角带入他们的历史概述。因此，会议提供了一个机会，让学生听到第一手的见解研究人员谁到现在为止可能已经只是经典论文的名字，并与他们有个人接触。其他发言者代表了当前的前沿工作，涉及广泛的问题。这些包括不同的语言如何使用声道的特殊发音声学映射特性，大脑如何操作以处理语音作为输入和输出，以及自动识别和合成如何利用我们对人类如何处理语音的日益了解，为人机和人机交互创造更好的工具。最后的总结演讲，然后是一个讨论论坛，将综合会议上提出的想法，重点是未来的语音研究如何从代表的子专业之间的互动中受益。

The National Science Foundation will provide partial support for a conference, "From Sound to Sense: Fifty+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication," (http://rledev.mit.edu/soundtosense/default.cfm), held on June 11-13, 2004, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. The conference has two goals. The first is to survey the current state of the field, by providing an historical overview of what has been accomplished during the last five decades of speech research, and by sampling some of the most interesting recent work in this active and exciting research topic. Twenty-one invited speakers will present talks in six different areas: Phonology and Phonetics; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception; Planning and Production; Development, Pathologies and Remediation; and Speech Technology. The second goal is to promote cross-fertilization among the subdisciplines, to benefit future work in this field of study, which has its foundations in the physical, engineering, linguistic, cognitive and medical sciences. To this end the conference is organized in single sessions, rather than multiple parallel sessions, so that everyone will hear all presentations and participate in the discussions together. Many of the presentations will be archived as written papers at an MIT web site and distributed as a CD, and all of the sessions will be videotaped (if funds permit), offering a rich resource for both students and established investigators. Many of the historical overviews will be presented by senior researchers such as Gunnar Fant, Kenneth Stevens, Peter Ladefoged, John Ohala, David Pisoni, Bjorn Lindblom, Victor Zue and Ray Kent, who have done pioneering work in their subdisciplines, including advances such as -the source-filter theory of speech acoustics, which models the way that changes in the size and shape of the vocal tract produce the sounds of a spoken utterance, -the quantal theory of acoustic-articulatory mapping, which identifies the acoustically stable articulations that provide some of the bases for sound categories in languages of the world, -models of human speech perception, production, development and pathologies, which relate models of the acoustics and articulation of speech to human language processing, and -algorithms for the automatic recognition and synthesis of speech, which not only provide aids for the handicapped, but also serve as tools for testing our models of human speech processing. The invited speakers who were responsible for these advances bring the valuable perspective of decades of thinking about and investigating speech to their historical overviews. The meeting thus provides an opportunity for students to hear first hand the insights of researchers who up to now may have been only names on classic papers, and to have personal contact with them. Other speakers represent leading-edge current work, addressed to a broad range of questions. These include how individual languages make different use the special articulatory-acoustic mapping properties of the vocal tract, how the brain operates to process speech both as input and as output, and how automatic recognition and synthesis can take advantage of our increasing understanding of how speech is processed by humans, to create better tools for human-computer and human-human interactions by spoken language. A final summarizing address, followed by a discussion forum, will synthesize the ideas presented at the conference, with a focus on how future speech research can benefit from interaction among the represented sub-specialties.