SLTU2016 Preface

Cultural diversity helps to make our world rich and vital. The world's population of indigenous people now numbers some 350 million individuals representing nearly 6000 languages and cultures. However, if nothing is done, half of those languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. The Fifth International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU 2016) was organized to provide a forum for researchers and industrial counterparts to share achievements and challenges in all areas related to natural language processing and spoken language processing of under-resourced languages, including: linguistic studies of under-resourced languages, resources acquisition of text and speech corpora, zero resource speech technologies, cross-lingual/multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling, speech recognition and synthesis for under-resourced languages, machine translation and natural language processing for under-resourced languages, and applications of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages. SLTU 2016 is the fifth in a series of even-year SLTU Workshops. Four previous Workshops were organized: SLTU’14 in St. Petersburg (Russia), SLTU’12 in Cape Town (South Africa), SLTU’10 in Penang (Malaysia), and SLTU’08 in Hanoi (Vietnam). SLTU 2016, which is adopted as ISCA ITRW, will be held on May 9-12, 2016, in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), a centre of classical Javanese culture. There are more than 700 ethnic languages spoken in Indonesian archipelago, but 146 are endangered. Therefore, SLTU 2016 has special focus on under-resourced languages and endangered languages. SLTU 2016 continues the tradition of previous SLTUs that feature a number of distinguished keynote speaker, and this year, for the first time, SLTU will also offer Interactive Tutorial on ASR-Kaldi and TTS-Festival on Under-Resourced Language. Independently of the scientific actions we will provide excellent possibilities for acquaintance with cultural and historical valuables of Yogyakarta city and its beautiful surroundings.