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

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

[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.