Helen Meng - Böcker

Provides an insightful and practical introduction to crowdsourcing as a means of rapidly processing speech dataIntended for those who want to get started in the domain and  learn how to set up a task, what interfaces are available, how to assess the work, etc. as well as for those who already have used crowdsourcing and want to create better tasks and obtain better assessments of the work of the crowd. It will include screenshots to show examples of good and poor interfaces; examples of case studies in speech processing tasks, going through the task creation process, reviewing options in the interface, in the choice of medium (MTurk or other) and explaining choices, etc. Provides an insightful and practical introduction to crowdsourcing as a means of rapidly processing speech data.Addresses important aspects of this new technique that should be mastered before attempting a crowdsourcing application.Offers speech researchers the hope that they can spend much less time dealing with the data gathering/annotation bottleneck, leaving them to focus on the scientific issues. Readers will directly benefit from the book’s successful examples of how crowd- sourcing was implemented for speech processing, discussions of interface and processing choices that worked and  choices that didn’t, and guidelines on how to play and record speech over the internet, how to design tasks, and how to assess workers.Essential reading for researchers and practitioners in speech research groups involved in speech processing

Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) was established in 2004 by the Asian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six different locations in Asia, starting from 1996. The AIRS symposium aims to bring together international researchers and developers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in the field of information retrieval (IR). The scope of the symposium covers applications, systems, technologies and theoretical aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multi-media data. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp and steady increase in the number of submissions and their qualities, compared with previous IRAL workshop series. We received 136 submissions from all over the world including Asia, North America, Europe, Australia, and even Africa, from which 32 papers (23%) were presented in oral sessions and 36 papers in poster sessions (26%). We also held a special session called “Digital Photo Albuming,” where 4 oral papers and 3 posters were presented. It was a great challenge and hard work for the program committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The high acceptance rates witness the success and stability of the AIRS series. All the papers and posters are included in this LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) proceedings volume, which is S- indexed. The technical program included two keynote talks by Prof. Walter Bender and Prof.