workshop announcement articulatory databases workshop on articulatory databases munich thursday 25th and friday 26th may , 1995 we are currently starting the preparations for a two-day workshop on articulatory databases . this will be the third in the series of workshops organized by the accor working group ( a consortium of phonetic institutes financed by the european community 's esprit programme ) and and follows the electromagnetic articulography meeting in munich ( april , 1992 ) , and the tongue modelling meeting in barcelona ( december 1993 ) . a few words on the aims of a meeting devoted to such an apparently dry topic : the basic premise is that the free availability of articulatory data could provide benefits in several partly overlapping areas : in basic research it could allow investigators to test hypotheses formulated in articulatory terms on a much wider range of data than the individual worker would normally be able to acquire or access unaided . it could promote the development and testing of algorithms for deriving articulatory representations from acoustic data - relevant both for basic understanding of speech production as well as in potential applications such as speech displays for training the speech impaired . it could promote the development and testing of algorithms for speech synthesis / recognition using an articulatory level of representation . the aim of the workshop would be to generate an exchange of ideas among people active in these areas in order to identify , for example ( further suggestions welcome ) : 1 ) what articulatory data is in existence that it would be beneficial to make more freely available ( archival / retrospective approach ) ? 2 ) what standards should freely available data meet ? - specification of recording conditions - anatomical frames of reference - levels of accuracy / reliability - linguistic specification of the speech samples - preferred data structures for distribution . - any other issues relevant to the data being used without risk of misinterpretation by people not actually involved in the the details of acquisition articulatory data can come in many guises depending on the speech subsystem tapped into and the transduction technique used . thus , it is possible to monitor position ( 1 , 2 or 3 dimensions ) , force , emg , airpressure / flow with techniques that may be static or dynamic , may involve imaging or point-tracking etc . etc . we think that people directly involved in acquisition can also benefit from considering how techniques can be standardized to promote maximum comparability of recordings made at different sites and with different hardware . 3 ) in analogy to acoustic databases ( where unlabelled data is of only the most limited use ) , what segmentation and labelling information ( and tools for the exploitation thereof ) could / should be made available with the raw data to facilitate flexible access for different purposes ? 4 ) for future recordings , what categories of data and corpora would be potentially of most widespread use ? if you are interested in participating please contact phil hoole ( preferably by email ) at the address below as soon as possible . further information on registration and format for presentations will be distributed early in 1995 . please also draw this letter to the attention of any colleagues you think might be interested . phil hoole and hans tillmann institut fuer phonetik munich university schellingstr . 3 d - 80799 munich germany fax : + 49 89 2800362 email : hoole @ sun1 . phonetik . uni-muenchen . de