--- name: interspeech-review-process description: Use when reasoning about how INTERSPEECH review actually works — area-based assignment inside ISCA's scientific program, multi-reviewer scoring and meta-review on CMT, what the rebuttal can and cannot move, oral/poster allocation, ISCA best student paper selection, and reading a decision letter for next-cycle strategy. --- # INTERSPEECH Review Process Interspeech reviews several thousand submissions a year through an area-structured technical program committee, on a compressed spring schedule, with a single decision date. Understanding the machine explains both the review you got and the leverage you have. Mechanics are re-tuned annually by that year's Technical Program Chairs — the 2026 shape below is a snapshot, not a constitution. ## The pipeline, 2026 shape | Stage | 2026 anchor | Author-visible? | |---|---|---| | Submission + update window | 25 Feb / update to 4 Mar | yes | | Area chairs assign reviewers within the chosen scientific area | Mar–Apr | no | | Independent reviews written (typically 3+) | Apr | at release | | Author rebuttal window | reported 24 Apr – 1 May (待核实) | yes | | Meta-review / area consolidation | May | in decision | | TPC acceptance meeting; program packing (oral vs poster) | May | no | | Notification | 5 Jun | yes | | Camera-ready | 19 Jun | yes | The **area** is the unit of everything: your reviewers, your meta-reviewer, and your competition for slots all come from the scientific area you selected at submission. That is why area choice is a strategy decision, not a form field. ## What reviewers are scored on ISCA-style review forms ask for judgments along familiar axes — novelty/relevance, technical correctness, quality of evaluation, clarity, and reference coverage — plus a listen to any audio. Exact form wording per cycle is 待核实; what is stable is the community's calibration: - "Not convincing" (evaluation too thin, no significance, wrong baseline) is the modal complaint — more than "not novel." - Speech reviewers reward *scoped* claims verified carefully over broad claims verified loosely. - Reference coverage includes the ISCA Archive lineage; missing the standard prior system from two Interspeechs ago is read as not knowing the field. ## What the rebuttal moves (and what it cannot) Interspeech's rebuttal is young (introduced in recent cycles) and short. It reliably fixes: factual misreadings, missed content in the dense 4 pages, and protocol misunderstandings. It rarely fixes: taste, scope objections, or a reviewer's judgment that the evidence bar was missed. Write for the meta-reviewer who will arbitrate (see `interspeech-author-response`). ## Decisions and what they encode - **Accept**: mode (oral/poster) arrives with scheduling, not with the decision; poster is a packing outcome, not a demotion — award-winning papers present as posters at this venue. - **Reject**: the letter usually aggregates review themes. Decode for next cycle: evidence gap → fixable by `interspeech-experiments`; fit complaint → re-run `interspeech-topic-selection`; density complaint → the 4 pages were overstuffed, consider the Long Paper track or a journal. - There is no conditional-accept limbo; the accept is real and the camera-ready window is administrative. ## Awards, for calibration not planning ISCA confers **three Best Student Paper awards** at each Interspeech (selection combines reviewing and on-site presentation; the first author must be a student — verify current criteria), and the **ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement** opens the conference. Award papers are useful exemplars of the venue's taste — see `resources/exemplars/library.md` — but optimizing a submission for awards is noise. ## Confidentiality and conduct Reviews, scores, and CMT discussion are confidential; quoting them publicly violates community norms. Reviewer duty flows the other way too — Interspeech recruits heavily from the author pool, and reviewing a few papers well is how the 4-page machine stays alive. ## Reading your reviews: a 20-minute protocol ```text 1. Strip scores; list every distinct claim reviewers make about the paper. 2. Tag each: misreading / evidence gap / scope-taste / writing density. 3. Count how many trace to compression (answer existed but was crushed out of the 4 pages) — that fraction is your writing problem, not your research problem. 4. Identify what the meta-reviewer will likely weight: points echoed by 2+ reviewers, or by the most expert one. 5. Choose the lane: rebut (this cycle) / revise (next cycle) / reroute. ``` ## Calibrating expectations by phase - **March–April (silence)**: normal. Reviewer assignment and writing are underway; there is nothing to check and nobody to email. - **Late April (reviews/rebuttal, if run)**: the one author-input point of the spring. Missing a one-week window because nobody watched CMT is a wholly preventable failure — name the watcher at submission time. - **May (silence again)**: meta-review and TPC consolidation; score changes here are invisible to you. - **Early June**: decision. The same-week triage meeting matters because the camera-ready window is two weeks and registration pricing tiers are ticking. ## Scale, honestly stated Interspeech operates at thousands-of-submissions scale with a large volunteer reviewer pool, which explains the texture of the process: short reviews, area-local calibration, no negotiation rounds, and a program committee that packs a five-day, many-parallel-session program. Publicly posted acceptance rates vary by edition and are not restated here (待核实 per cycle) — but the planning implication is stable: the process is one-shot per year, so the February version of the paper is the paper. ## Output format ```text [Stage now] where in the pipeline, next visible event + date [Review map] per-reviewer objection tags [Meta-review prediction] [Leverage] rebuttal-movable vs immovable points [If rejected] revise-for-2027 / Long Paper / journal / reroute + rationale ``` 2026 anchors were checked 2026-07-08 (rebuttal dates from secondary sources — 待核实); see `resources/official-source-map.md` for the trail.