ELRA news - Call for Participation: ESTER campaign

[Magali Jeanmaire]

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                         Call for Participation:
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Introduction:
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The aim of the ESTER campaign (l’Evaluation des Systèmes de Transcription
enrichie d’Emissions Radiophoniques / Evaluation of automatic broadcast news
transcription systems) is to promote the evaluation of speech processing
systems
for the French language, to establish a permanent evaluation infrastructure
and to
disseminate, as widely as possible, the information and the resources
acquired in
the campaign. The ESTER campaign forms part of the EVALDA project and is funded
by the French Ministry of Research in the context of its Technolangue
programme.

In the context of the ESTER campaign, the transcriptions are to be
annotated with
additional and associated information such as speaker turns, named entities
etc. On the
one hand, such an enriched transcription aims to provide an orthographic
transcription
of an audio signal and on the other hand, a structured representation of an
audio document
enabling information extraction from audio files. The aim of evaluating the
quality of the
associated annotations, along with the evaluation of the orthographic
transcriptions, is to
establish a reference or benchmark of present performance levels of each
component of
an indexation system whilst also providing an idea of overall system
performance.

Participation:
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Research and development centres, public or private, wishing to take part
in the ESTER
campaign are invited to make themselves known to the campaign organisers
(see below)
in order to register as participants. On registering as a participant and
signing an end-user
contract, you will receive the data available for Phase 1 of the campaign.
The contract will be
sent to you after declaring your interest in the campaign.

Those participating in the ESTER campaign will receive the
training/development/test data free
of charge (providing results obtained during the evaluation campaign are
returned). The data
provisionally available for distribution are listed below:

- Le Monde: 1997- 2002
- MLCC: Transcriptions of debates from the European Parliament (1992-1994)
- France Inter: 25 hours of transcribed broadcast news
- Radio France International (RFI): 15 hours of transcribed broadcast news

Participants that return results for the obligatory evaluation tasks are
permitted to keep the data
mentioned above, for no additional cost.

For more information on the project and the timetable, please consult the
project website:
http://www.afcp-parole.org/ester.

Organisers
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The ESTER campaign forms part of the EVALDA project under the aegis of the
Association
Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP) with the support of the
Délégation Générale
de l'Armement (DGA) and ELDA (Evaluation and Language resources
Distribution Agency).

Contacts :
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Guillaume Gravier, IRISA (ggravier at irisa.fr)
Jean-François Bonastre, AFCP (Jean-francois.bonastre at lia.univ-avignon.fr)
Edouard Geoffrois, DGA/CTA (edouard.geoffrois at etca.fr)
Kevin McTait, ELDA (mctait at elda.fr)