2012Q3 Reports: SIGSPLAT

Report to ACL Exec on SIG-SLPAT (Speech and Language Processing in Assistive Technology) Submitted by: Kathy McCoy June 2012

SIG-SLPAT was approved as an ACL Sig in November of 2011. The initial slate of officers is:

• President: Kathleen F. McCoy, University of Delaware
• Vice President: Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh
• Secretary-Treasurer: Brian Roark, Oregon Health & Science University
• Student Member: Charles Greenbacker, University of Delaware

An election is planned for the end of 2012 (we have already started collecting nominations) to seat an elected set of officers beginning January 2013. We have 55 members on our membership list, and our website can be found at: slpat.org

Prior to becoming a SIG, we held two successful workshops on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies. The first took place at NAACL 2010, and the second took place at EMNLP 2011.

Since becoming a SIG, we have held our third successful workshop at NAACL 2012 in Montreal:

• The Third Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT) co-located with NAACL HLT 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 7-8, 2012

This was a small but high-quality workshop that included a joint poster session with the workshop on predicting and improving text readability for target reader populations, and then a day of paper presentations. A highlight of the workshop was a panel of two users of communication technologies (in this case, they joined via Skype from Dundee Scotland). We plan to hold the next SLPAT workshop in 2013 and are discussing locations.

In addition to our flagship workshop above, the sig sponsored several successful workshops including:

• Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Text Entry Methods Co-located with CHI 2012, Austin, Texas, USA, May 5, 2012.
• Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA) Co-located with LREC 2012, Istanbul, Turkey, May 27, 2012.
• Workshop on Predicting and improving text readability for target reader populations (PITR2012) Co-located with NAACL HLT 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 7, 2012.
• Workshop on Speech and Multimodal Interaction in Assistive Environments (SMIAE 2012) co-located with ACL 2012, Jeju Island, South Korea, July 12-14, 2012