Blizzard Challenge 2012 Rules

DATABASE ACCESS

• After registration and completion of the required licenses, download passwords will issued, as described on the main Blizzard 2012 page.

REGISTRATION FEE

• A registration fee (provisionally set at 500GBP, or approx 750USD) will be due during Phase Two to offset the costs of running the challenge, including paying local assistants and undergraduate listeners. The fee is fixed, regardless of how many tasks you participate in. The fee must be paid by a date to be specified.

EXPERT LISTENERS

• Each participant is expected to provide at least ten speech experts as listeners of the evaluation tests. Native speakers are preferable, where possible. The organisers would also appreciate assistance in advertising the Challenge as widely as possible (e.g., to your students or colleagues).

BUILDING VOICES

• It is not permissible for a single participant to submit multiple entries for any task, because the listening test will become unmanageable. This rule will only be relaxed in the event of a small number of participants.

• Participants involved in joint projects or consortia who wish to submit multiple systems (e.g., an individual entry and a joint system) should contact the organisers in advance to agree this. We will try to accommodate all reasonable requests, provided the listening test remains manageable.

Phase One

• Task EH1.1: build a voice from the supplied audiobook data, which comprises around 50 hours of speech material, of which around 32 hours have high-confidence transcriptions, with the remainder having transcriptions of lower confidence.

Phase Two

• Task EH2.1 - not yet specified

USE OF EXTERNAL DATA

• "External data" is defined as data, of any type, that is not part of the provided database.
• You are allowed to use external data in any way you wish, subject to any exclusions given in these rules
• Use of external data is entirely optional and is not compulsory
• You may obtain and use the original recordings by John Greenman from librivox.org of the four books in the distributed data (A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories)
• For the EH1.1 task, you must not use any additional data from the same speaker (John Greenman), or recordings of any other material by the same author (Mark Twain), or any text by the same author (Mark Twain).
• You may exclude any parts of the provided databases if you wish.
• Use of the provided segmentations, transcriptions or labels is optional.
• If you are in any doubt about how to apply these rules, please contact the organizers immediately.

SYNTHESISING THE TEST EXAMPLES

• Phase One: a set of test sentences will be distributed before the 2011 workshop, but no formal listening test is planned. The test sentences will be drawn from contiguous (e.g., paragraph-sized) sections of novels and will have similar segmentation, transcriptions and labels to the distributed corpus.

RETENTION OF SUBMITTED SYNTHETIC SPEECH SAMPLES

• Any examples that you submit for evaluation will be retained by the Blizzard organisers for future use.
• You must include in your submission of the test sentences a statement of whether you give the organisers permission to publically distribute your waveforms and the corresponding listening test results in anonymised form. In the past, all participants have agreed to this and we strongly encourage you to give this consent.

LISTENING TEST

• The listening test design is not yet specified and participants are encouraged to contribute ideas for the evaluation of synthesised audiobooks, or other tasks based on this data.

PAPER

• Each participant will be expected to submit a six-page paper describing their entry for review.
• One of the authors of each accepted paper should present it at the Blizzard 2012 Workshop
• In addition, each participant will be expected to complete a form giving the general technical specification of their system, to facilitate easy cross-system comparisons (e.g. is it unit selection? does it predict prosody? etc. etc)

HOW ARE THESE RULES ENFORCED?

• This is a challenge, which is designed to answer scientific questions, and not a competition. Therefore, we rely on your honesty in preparing your entry.