Introduction

COCOSDA, an acronym of the International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques, was established in 1991 to promote international cooperation in developing speech corpora and coordinating assessment methods of speech input/output systems. In 1994 it was proposed that a sub-organization for the Oriental community should be established to share linguistic features unique to the region. After a preparatory meeting held by interested members in Hong Kong in 1997, annual meetings have been held since 1998. The community has enjoyed increasing participation from the community and enthusiastic interests to organize future meetings, thus ensuring promising prospect of sustained activities in the future. The purpose of Oriental COCOSDA is to exchange ideas, share information and discuss regional matters on creation, utilization, dissemination of spoken language corpora of oriental languages and also on the assessment methods of speech recognition/synthesis systems as well as to promote speech research on oriental languages. We celebrated the 20 year anniversary of Oriental COCOSDA in Korea in 2017. We believe the Oriental COCOSDA 2018 will be the first step towards the next generation of Oriental COCOSDA. It is our great pleasure to organize the Oriental COCOSDA 2018 in Japan as is the case for Oriental COCOSDA 1998 in Tsukuba Japan which was our first annual workshop. In addition, Oriental COCOSDA 2018 will be held jointly with LREC 2018, Language Resources and Evaluation Conference to help boost the research and development in the field of speech technology and for further enthusiasm towards speech technology in East and Southeast Asia.

Oriental COCOSDA 2018 Conference Chair
Satoshi Nakamura