Blizzard Challenge 2016-8 Git Repository

From SynSIG

Some, but not all, of the material has been aligned with the book text. Because some of the books provided by the publisher are in PDF format, and the audio for each book is typically a sequence of audio tracks, it is non-trivial to extract a clean version of the text and then to align it with the speech (e.g., at sentence level).

Therefore, we asked all participants to collaborate and share the effort of creating clean, sentence-aligned transcripts of the speech. This was co-ordinated by Sebastien Le Maguer. Please contact Sebastien before embarking on any further manual cleanup of the text, or alignment with the audio, so that he can eliminate duplicate work.

The archive of the shared repository for cleaned-up text and alignments with the audio can be found at http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2017-18/usborne/contrib/blizzard_training_data.tar.bz2 (requires a license for the 2017-18 data, then use the same username/password).

Current contents of the archived repository

Some of the teams that participated in the 2016 pilot and the 2017 and 2018 challenges contributed to the repository, as detailed below.

The archive contains a packed git repository with the branches corresponding to the teams which contributed to the data annotation. Here is a description of each branch (to access to a branch, just do git checkout -b <branch_name>):

  • Branch: CSTR
    • init repo + cleaning text
  • Branch: NII
    • manually corrected text
  • Branch: INNOETICS
    • sentence-level alignment which includes:
      • A more consistent use of quotation in dialog parts.
      • Square brackets to denote non-linguistic vocalizations. The text within [] is a very rough representation of the vocalization but is not used consistently and should not be considered appropriate for any further processing. It is rather a placeholder that could help the segmentation process work its way around these vocalizations. At least, it works for us.
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