[hts-users:01093] Blizzard Challenge 2008 - preliminary announcement
[This announcement is available in PDF from
http://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2008]
PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT
The Blizzard Challenge 2008
Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases
Alan W Black, Simon King, and Keiichi Tokuda
January 9, 2008
In order to better understand and compare research techniques in
building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, the Blizzard
Challenges 2005, 2006, and 2007 were held. We are now pleased to make
this preliminary announcement of the fourth challenge: Blizzard
Challenge 2008. The basic challenge is to take the released speech data,
build synthetic voices, and synthesize a prescribed set of test
sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer are then evaluated
through extensive listening tests.
For the Blizzard Challenge 2008, we are planning to release two
databases. CSTR (www.cstr.ed.ac.uk) will release a 15-hour UK English
speech database and lexicon. This database has not yet been publicly
released: participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2008 is currently the
only way to obtain this data. We plan to allow participants to retain
this data for research purposes after the Challenge has finished.
Participants will be asked to build two voices using (a) all data and
(b) the ARCTIC subset. The second database will be of another major
language (not English), from which participants will also be asked to
build a voice. The results will be presented at a workshop, which we
hope will be a satellite of INTERSPEECH 2008 in Brisbane, Australia
(www.interspeech2008.org). A condition of participation will be
submission of a paper to this workshop. Accepted papers will be
presented at the workshop, and published on the Blizzard website.
Blizzard website
http://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge
Registration:
Interested parties should register their intention to participate as
soon as possible, by mailing blizzard@xxxxxxxxxxxx They should identify
a contact person in their team, and provide email and postal addresses.
A registration fee of 750USD per participant will be required to offset
the costs of running the challenge and paying listeners; we believe this
is excellent value for money!
There is a mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge:
blizzard-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxx
To join the list send a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with the
following line in the body of the message
subscribe blizzard-discuss
Provisional timeline
Feb 16 2008 Earliest database release date (about 7 weeks for voice
building)
Apr 7 2008 Test sentences released (1 week for synthesis)
Apr 14 2008 Deadline for submitting synthesized speech
Apr 21 2008 Evaluation system goes live (8 weeks for evaluation)
June 16 2008 End of Evaluation (2 weeks for statistical analysis)
June 27 2008 Results distributed to teams (1 month for writing paper)
July 1 2008 Satellite workshop papers due (1 week for review)
Aug 15 2008 Notification of acceptance
Sep 22 2008 Presentation of results at the satellite workshop in
Brisbane (tentative)
Sep 22-26 2008 Interspeech 2008 in Brisbane
Further Information
For further information please contact blizzard@xxxxxxxxxxxx A
description of the challenge was published at Interspeech 2005:
http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/bc2005/IS051946.PDF