interspeech-topic-selection

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

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

[Modality test] survives transcript-only? yes / no / partial — <one line>
[Interspeech fit] strong / plausible / reroute
[Area match] <scientific area the claim belongs to>
[Track] 4-page regular / Long Paper (verify current rules) / workshop or challenge
[Reroute target] <ICASSP / ASRU / SLT / Odyssey / SSW / ACL-family / journal + reason>
[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.