LINGUIST List 17.314
Mon Jan 30 2006
FYI: Blizzard Challenge 2006
Editor for this issue: Svetlana Aksenova
<svetlanalinguistlist.org>
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1. Simon
King,
Blizzard Challenge 2006
Message 1: Blizzard Challenge 2006
Date: 30-Jan-2006
From: Simon King <Simon.Kinged.ac.uk>
Subject: Blizzard Challenge 2006
The Blizzard Challenge 2006 Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases http://www.festvox.org/blizzard Alan W Black, Keiichi Tokuda, Simon King, Michael Picheny, and Toshio Hirai February 1, 2006
In order to better understand and compare research techniques inbuilding corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, BlizzardChallenge 2005 was held last year. We will now have the secondchallenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2006.
The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build asynthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of testsentences. The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluatedthrough listening tests.
For the Blizzard Challenge 2006, ATR-SLC (http://www.slc.atr.jp/) willrelease a newly-recorded five-hour American English speech database.Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated andeach participant will synthesize them with their system. The speechwill then be put on the web for evaluation.
The results will be presented at a satellite event at Interspeech 2006-- ICSLP, in Pittsburgh PA. Participants will be expected to submit 4page papers describing their entries for review. Accepted papers willbe presented at the workshop, and published on the Blizzard website.
Call for participation: http://festvox.org/blizzard/
The Blizzard Challenge: Registration
Interested parties should register their intentions to participate bymailing blizzardfestvox.org
Further description of the Challenge itself was published inInterspeech 2005 Eurospeech in Lisbon:http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/bc2005/IS051946.PDF
Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
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