On behalf of the workshop organizing committee, it is our pleasure to welcome you to ASRU 2007, the tenth biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding in Kyoto, Japan. The ASRU workshop began at Arden House in upstate New York in 1989 and has been held at a variety of venues, but has never been held in Asia. The ASRU workshop has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate setting to discuss various issues of common interest in automatic speech recognition and understanding. In order to keep with current tradition, which has attracted many top-level researchers and made ASRU a special event in this research community, we will adhere to the norm of single sessions consisting of review talks, poster presentations and panel discussions.
We have two prominent keynote speakers: Prof. Renato De Mori and Prof. Jun'ichi Tsujii, who have conducted leading research on speech understanding and natural language processing, respectively, for a long time. We also have six invited speakers: Li Deng, Yeyi Wang, Jeff Bilmes, Stephan Vogel, Sharon Oviatt and Mark Clements, who will each give an overview talk on various new directions in research and applications of speech recognition and understanding from an expert's point of view. In addition, there are evening sessions for project talks and demonstrations. The session for project talks aims to provide a comprehensive overview of current research projects: GALE in USA, AMIDA in Europe and a METI-funded project in Japan. The demonstration session, which has become another highlight of recent ASRU workshops, provides an opportunity to exchange latest technologies.
This year we received 267 paper submissions, almost double the number received for any previous ASRU conference. The Technical Program Committee worked very hard to review the submitted papers in a very short time, and finally decided to accept 115 papers, resulting in an acceptance ratio of 43.1%. Because of such competitive paper selection, we believe that the workshop consists of excellent paper presentations. We also received numerous requests for workshop participation, but were forced to close the registration very early due to the capacity of the venue and to keep ASRU's tradition of intimacy.
Kyoto was formerly the capital of Japan for over 1000 years, starting in the 8th through the 19th century, and thus has many ancient temples and national treasures. The city was also selected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Kyoto is a cultural mecca and popular tourist destination where people from all over the world visit and return, time and time again. The fall season in Kyoto is a particular treat, when you can enjoy the many temples amid the beautiful autumn colors. Within walking distance of the workshop venue there are two prominent temples, Nanzen-ji and Eikan-do, which are particularly famous for their autumn appearance, and which you should not miss. Kyoto is also known as the city from which the "Kyoto Protocol", an international treaty for global warming prevention, got its name. Recently, global warming has begun to have a noticeable effect on the city, delaying the end of the fall season until December, which may actually be good for those of you attending ASRU 2007.
With these excellent technical programs and exceptionally beautiful venue, we believe that ASRU 2007 will be a highly successful event. This would not have been possible without the hard work of the organizing committee members: Jean-Claude Junqua, Helen Meng, Satoshi Nakamura, Timothy Hazen, Tomoko Matsui and Kazuya Takeda. We are grateful to the scientific committee members and external reviewers (listed on a separate page) for reviewing so many papers in such a short time. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions provided by our corporate supporters, Google, Microsoft Research and IBM Research, for their generous financial donation.
The organizing committee has made every effort to make this an enjoyable, productive and memorable conference. We would like to thank you for attending and hope the workshop becomes an unforgettable experience for everyone.
Yokoso (Welcome) and have fun!
Sadaoki Furui and Tatsuya Kawahara
General Chairs ASRU 2007