[Corpora-List] The Blizzard Challenge 2007

[Simon King]

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                      The Blizzard Challenge 2007
      Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases
                    http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/
               Alan W Black, Keiichi Tokuda, Simon King,
                  Michael Picheny, and Shinsuke Sakai
                            January 23, 2007
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In order to better understand and compare research techniques in
building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, Blizzard
Challenge 2005 and 2006 were held.  We will now have the third
challenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2007.

The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build
synthetic voices 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 2007, ATR-SLC (http://www.slc.atr.jp/) will
release an eight-hour American English speech database.  We would ask
each participant to build three voices using a) the whole set of the
database, b) the ARCTIC subset of the database, and c) a
limited-amount of sentences chosen by each participant, respectively.
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 ISCA Speech
Synthesis Workshop, in Bonn, Germany.  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 (March 30)
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 2007: Timeline

     Jan  23 2007  Blizzard Challenge 2007 Announcement
     Feb   2 2007  Participant registration deadline
     Feb  16 2007  Deadline for agreement for the use of the corpus
     Feb  23 2007  Database released
           (one month for training)
     Mar  23 2007  Test sentences released
           (one week for synthesis)
     Mar  30 2007  Deadline for the synthesized speech
           (two weeks for preparation of the evaluation web site)
     Apr  16 2007  Evaluation system goes live
           (one month for evaluation)
     May  14 2007  End of Evaluation
           (two weeks for gathering the scores)
     May  28 2007  Results distributed to teams
           (one month for writing paper)
     June 29 2007  Satellite workshop papers due
           (two weeks for review)
     July 16 2007  Notification of acceptance
     Aug  22-24 2007 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis in Bonn
     Aug 25 2007   Presentation of results at the satellite
                   workshop in Bonn

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
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