Date: 19-Mar-2010
From: Bjoern Schuller <schuller tum.de>
Subject: CfP: INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge
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Dear List,
for those of you interested: the INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge
has now officially started. Please find more information below.
Call for Papers
INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge
Age, Gender and Affect:
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/paralinguistic-challenge
Organisers:
Bjoern Schuller (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Laurence Devillers (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
Christian Mueller (DFKI, Germany)
Shrikanth Narayanan (University of Southern California, USA)
Sponsors:
HUMAINE Association
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
The Challenge:
Most paralinguistic analysis tasks resemble each other not only by means of
processing and ever-present data sparseness, but by lacking agreed-upon
evaluation procedures and comparability, in contrast to more "traditional"
disciplines in speech analysis; at the same time, this is a rapidly
emerging field of research, due to the constantly growing interest on
applications to human behaviour analysis, and technologies for
human-machine communication and multimedia retrieval.
In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge shall help
bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information
in spoken language and low compatibility of results, by addressing three
selected tasks. The "aGender" and the the "AVIC" corpora will be provided
by the organisers. The first consists of 46 hours of telephone speech,
stemming from 954 speakers, and will serve to evaluate features and
algorithms for the detection of speaker age and gender. The second features
2 hours of human conversational speech recording (21 subjects), annotated
in different levels of interest. The corpus further features a
transcription of spoken content with word boundaries by forced alignment,
non-linguistic vocalisations, single annotator tracks, different
well-defined chunkings, and the sequence of these. Both corpora are given
with distinct definition of test, development, and training partitions,
incorporating speaker independence, as needed in most real-life settings.
Benchmark results of the most popular approaches will be provided.
Three sub-challenges are addressed:
- In the Age Sub-Challenge, the age of speakers has to be determined.
- In the Gender Sub-Challenge, a gender classification task has to be solved.
- Finally, the Affect Sub-Challenge asks for determination of speakers'
interest in ordinal representation in this year's challenge as opposed to
last INTERSPEECH's Emotion Challenge, which dealt with emotion in a broader
sense.
All sub-challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their
own classification algorithm. However, a standard feature set is given per
corpus that may be used. The labels of the test set are unknown, and
participants have to stick to the definition of training, development, and
test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but
have only one trial to upload their results on the test set, whose labels
are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper
presenting the results that undergoes peer-review. The organisers preserve
the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves
in the challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in multiple
sub-challenges.
Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent databases are
sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:
- Participation in any of the sub-challenges
- Combined determination of paralinguistic information under mutual
information exploitation
- Novel features and algorithms for the detection of paralinguistic
information
- Novel corpora and evaluations for paralinguistic tasks
The results of the Challenge will be presented at a Special Session of
Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, Japan.
Prizes will be awarded to the sub-challenge winners and a best paper.
If you are interested and planning to participate in the Paralinguistic
Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please
send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage:
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/paralinguistic-challenge
Thank you and best,
Stefan Steidl, Anton Batliner, Felix Burkhardt, Laurence Devillers,
Christian Mueller, Shrikanth Narayanan and Bjoern Schuller
Contact:
Dr. Bjoern Schuller
Senior Researcher and Lecturer
LIMSI-CNRS
Spoken Language Processing Group
BP133 91403 Orsay cedex
France
+33-(0)16985-8008
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Institute for Human-Machine Communication
D-80333 München
Germany
+49-(0)89-289-28548
schullertum.de
Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Text/Corpus Linguistics
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