--- name: interspeech-topic-selection description: Use when deciding whether a project belongs at INTERSPEECH, the ISCA flagship speech conference, or should be routed to ICASSP, ASRU/SLT, Odyssey, SSW, ACL/EMNLP, or a speech journal — testing whether spoken language is the contribution, matching subfields to the reviewer pool, and choosing between the 4-page and Long Paper tracks. --- # INTERSPEECH Topic Selection Interspeech is the annual conference of ISCA — the **International Speech Communication Association**, not to be confused with the computer-architecture symposium that shares the acronym. It is the broadest speech venue in existence: phoneticians, hearing scientists, ASR engineers, and voice-cloning teams review in adjacent areas of the same program. Fit means convincing *speech* reviewers, and the 2026 theme in Sydney was "Speaking Together" — inclusion across languages, cultures, and modalities. Reconfirm scope at https://interspeech2026.org before routing. ## The modality test Ask: **if the audio were replaced by its transcript, would the contribution survive?** - If yes, the paper is NLP wearing a headset — route it to an ACL-family venue where text-based reviewers will value it. - If no — the claim depends on acoustics, prosody, speakers, articulation, hearing, or the speech signal itself — Interspeech is a candidate. - Borderline: spoken-language understanding and speech-LLM work fits when the spoken channel (disfluency, ASR errors, prosody, audio tokens) is analyzed, not assumed away. ## Where Interspeech sits among its neighbors | If the core contribution is... | Prefer | Why not Interspeech | |---|---|---| | Speech science *or* technology, any subfield | **Interspeech** | — (this is home turf) | | General signal processing, radar, imaging | ICASSP (IEEE) | Interspeech reviewers expect speech, not DSP breadth | | ASR-only deep dive, workshop-scale | ASRU / SLT (IEEE, biennial) | Smaller, narrower; fine for follow-ups | | Speaker/language recognition depth | Odyssey (ISCA workshop) | Specialist audience; Interspeech still fine | | TTS system depth | SSW (ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop) | Same trade-off as Odyssey | | Text NLP, LLM reasoning, no audio analysis | ACL / EMNLP / NAACL | Fails the modality test | | Mature work needing >4 pages of record | IEEE/ACM TASLP, Computer Speech & Language, Speech Communication | Journal timelines, no conference clock | ## Subfield-to-area matching Interspeech submissions are reviewed inside scientific areas chosen at submission time. Misfiled papers draw reviewers with the wrong evaluation instincts: - **Recognition-side**: ASR architectures, robustness, adaptation, decoding. - **Generation-side**: TTS, voice conversion, singing synthesis. - **Talker-side**: speaker verification, diarization, anti-spoofing, voice privacy. - **Human-side**: phonetics, prosody, production/perception, pathological speech, child speech, second-language learning. - **Interaction-side**: spoken dialogue, SLU, speech translation, audio LLMs. - **Resource-side**: corpora, benchmarks, evaluation methodology, challenges. A phonetics claim reviewed by ASR engineers (or vice versa) is the most common self-inflicted rejection at this venue; pick the area for the *claim*, not the tools. ## Track choice inside Interspeech (new in 2026) Interspeech 2026 introduced a **Long Paper track** (reported: up to 8 pages plus 2 reference pages, targeted acceptance below 30%) alongside the classic 4-page regular paper. Choose long only when the contribution genuinely cannot be stated in four pages — a benchmark with extensive analysis, a theory-plus-system arc. A padded 4-page idea in the long track competes against a stricter bar. Verify the current track rules; this split is one cycle old. ## Signals the project is Interspeech-shaped - The evaluation uses speech-native metrics (WER, MOS, EER, PESQ) on named corpora. - Error analysis engages speakers, accents, noise conditions, or phonetic categories. - The related work traces through the ISCA Archive, not only arXiv and ACL. - A speech scientist and a speech engineer would both find something to argue with. ## Signals to reroute - Results reported only on text benchmarks with audio as an afterthought. - The novelty is a general ML trick demonstrated on speech among other domains — NeurIPS/ICML reviewers reward generality; Interspeech reviewers ask what it teaches about speech. - The paper is a product description without a falsifiable claim. ## Three triage vignettes - **"We fine-tuned an LLM to summarize meeting transcripts."** Transcript-only input, text output, no acoustic analysis — fails the modality test. Route to an ACL-family venue; return here only if ASR-error propagation or prosodic cues enter the analysis. - **"Our vocoder halves inference cost at equal MOS."** Speech-native claim, speech-native metric, engineering contribution — strong Interspeech fit in a generation-side area; SSW is the specialist fallback if the delta is vocoder-internals deep. - **"A cross-linguistic study of vowel reduction in child speech."** No system at all, and still a strong fit — human-side areas review speech *science* on its own terms. This breadth is exactly what ICASSP does not offer. ## Questions to settle before committing - Which two or three scientific areas could plausibly host the claim, and which reviewer pool do you actually want? (Decide now; it is frozen at submission.) - Is there a running challenge whose test set and baseline make your evaluation legible for free? - Does the evidence you can gather by the deadline fill 4 pages convincingly, or does honesty require the Long Paper track or a journal? - If the answer is "reroute," is the finding still worth an ISCA workshop (Odyssey, SSW, task workshops) where the specialist audience is denser? ## Output format ```text [Modality test] survives transcript-only? yes / no / partial — [Interspeech fit] strong / plausible / reroute [Area match] [Track] 4-page regular / Long Paper (verify current rules) / workshop or challenge [Reroute target] [Cycle reality] next deadline and source URL, or 待核实 ``` ## Cycle anchor (checked 2026-07-08) Interspeech 2026: Sydney, Australia, 27 September – 1 October 2026, hosted with ASSTA; submissions closed 25 February 2026. Interspeech 2027 is announced for São Paulo, Brazil (29 August – 2 September 2027) — the first South American edition — so a project failing today's fit test has a concrete next target. Treat every date here as a snapshot; reopen the official site before planning.