[Corpora-List] Blizzard Challenge 2006

[Simon King]

 		     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 in
building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, Blizzard
Challenge 2005 was held last year.  We will now have the second
challenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2006.

The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build a
synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test
sentences.  The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluated
through listening tests.

For the Blizzard Challenge 2006, ATR-SLC (http://www.slc.atr.jp/) will
release a newly-recorded five-hour American English speech database.
Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated and
each participant will synthesize them with their system.  The speech
will 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 4
page papers describing their entries for review.  Accepted papers will
be 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 by
mailing blizzard at festvox.org.  They should identify a contact person
in their team, as well as provide email and real mail addresses.

A registration fee of 500USD is due at time of submission (June 2) to
offset the costs of paying undergraduate listeners.  There is a
mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge:

   blizzard-discuss at festvox.org

To join the list send a message to majordomo at festvox.org with the
following line in the body of the message

     subscribe blizzard-discuss

The Blizzard Challenge 2006: Tentative timeline

     Feb  1 2006  Blizzard Challenge 2006 Announcement
     Mar 17 2006  Participant registration deadline
     Apr  7 2006  Deadline for agreement for the use of the corpus
     Apr 17 2006  Database released
          (one month for training)
     May 29 2006  Test sentences released
          (one week for synthesis)
     Jun  2 2006  Deadline for the synthesized speech
          (one week for preparation of the evaluation web site)
     Jun 12 2006  Evaluation system goes live
          (one month for evaluation)
     Jul 14 2006  End of Evaluation
          (two weeks for gathering the scores)
     Jul 31 2006  Results distributed to teams
          (two weeks for writing paper)
     Aug 18 2006  Satellite workshop papers due
     Sep 16 2006  Presentation of results at the satellite
                  workshop at Interspeech2006 in Pittsburgh

Further Information:

For further information please contact blizzard at festvox.org

Further description of the Challenge itself was published in
Interspeech 2005 Eurospeech in Lisbon:
http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/bc2005/IS051946.PDF