Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop

The Blizzard Challenge 2014 workshop is an ISCA sponsored workshop and is a satellite event of INTERSPEECH 2014

Friday 19th September 2014

The workshop will be held at - I2R, Fusionopolis, Singapore with the generous support from ISCA, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Google Inc., Apple Inc., and DeitY, Gov. of India.

Google UK has generously provided financial support to the Blizzard Challenge 2014

Call for participation

The Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop is the culmination of the Blizzard Challenge 2014 which is an open speech synthesis evaluation campaign using common data sets and a large listening test. The aims of the workshop are to present the results from the listening tests and for participants in the Challenge to describe their systems.

The Blizzard Challenge 2014 uses datasets from six Indian languages: Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil and Telugu, recorded by professional speakers in high quality studio environments to build monolingual and multilingual synthesis systems. These speech databases are provided by the group of institutions: IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Madras, DAIICT, SSN College of Engineering, IIT Mandi, IIT Guwahati in collaboration and support from DeitY, Gov. of India.

The workshop is a satellite event of Interspeech 2014

Who can attend the workshop ?

The workshop is open to all and we encourage participation from anyone interested in speech synthesis.

Who can submit a paper to the workshop ?

All participants in the Challenge are expected to submit a paper describing their entry (even if they cannot attend the workshop in person). Papers will be refereed by the Programme Committee and the Expert Committee.

Programme Committee

• Kishore Prahallad, IIIT Hyderabad, India
• Hema A. Murthy, IIT Madras, India
• Simon King, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Alan W. Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Keiichi Tokuda, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan

Expert Committee (Indian Languages)

• S. R. Mahadeva Prasanna, IIT Guwahati, India
• Anil Kumar Sao, IIT Mandi, India
• Hemant Patil, DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India
• S. Nagarajan, SSN College of Eng., Chennai, India
• Suryakanth V. Gangashetty, IIIT Hyderabad, India

Organizing Committee

• Kishore Prahallad, IIIT Hyderabad, India
• Hema A. Murthy, IIT Madras, India
• Simon King, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Swaran Lata, DeitY, Gov. of India
• Somnath Chandra, DeitY, Gov. of India
• Minghui Dong, I2R, Singapore

Paper submission instructions

• Use the Interspeech 2014 authors' kit, but your paper should be up to SIX pages in length
• Remember that Blizzard is a scientific investigation - we are all trying to understand why some techniques work better than others.
• With this in mind, please write a detailed, technical paper aimed at a specialist audience. Focus on analysis and evaluation. Try to explain WHY your system performed the way it did, and what makes it different from other systems. Explain why your system is designed in a particular way. For example, report internal evaluations you have done to select certain methods.
• Submit your paper by email to blizzard@festvox.org by the 9th August 2014 and we will notify you of acceptance within a week(15th August 2014). If you need an earlier notification (e.g., in order to obtain travel permission from your employer), then please contact us.

Location and date

Date: Friday 19th September 2014 (all day)

Venue: The Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop will take place at the following address: Infuse Theatre, Level 14

Institute for Infocomm Research, A-Star

1 Fusionopolis Way, Connexis South Tower

Singapore 138632

The Connexis building is located at the MRT station CC23 on the Circle Line (Yellow Line on map). The station is inside the building. If you come from East-West line (Green line on map), you will need to transfer at Buona Vista Station (CC22 or EW21). Please refer to the MRT map here.

Registration desk will be located at the lobby on Level 1 outside the entrance of south Tower of the building. Please collect your access pass from the desk and then proceed to Level 14. The workshop will be at Infuse Theatre on Level 14.

Please find the address on google map: Click Here

Programme

The workshop format is single-track with oral presentations from the participants in the Challenge, the organizers and invited speakers.

Each system presentation should last for a maximum of 15 minutes, plus a few minutes for questions. Presenters should bear in mind that the audience will mainly comprise speech synthesis experts; therefore presentations do not need to include extensive background material.

Blizzard challenge workshop 2014 follows the similar program to the previous years.

The tentative program schedule is as follows.

• 09.00 Registration opens (+ coffee)
• 10.00 - 11.00 Welcome, introduction, summary of results
  • Chairs: Minghui Dong and Kishore Prahallad
    • Welcome from Minghui Dong and Kishore Prahallad, on behalf of the organisers
    • Message from sponsor, DietY, Gov. of India, Ms. Swaran Lata
    • Message from sponsor, Google
    • Message from sponsor, Apple - David Winarsky
    • Summary of Blizzard Challenge 2014 from Kishore Prahallad
• 11.00 - 12.30 System presentations (20 minutes each + questions)
  • Chair: Keiichi Tokuda
    • IITM Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
    • MILE-TTS Indian Institute of Science, India
    • CMU Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• 12.30 - 14.00 Lunch
• 14.00 - 16.00 System presentations (20 minutes each + questions)
  • Chair: Hema A. Murthy
    • S4A Simple4All project consortium, various countries
    • NITECH Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
    • USTC National Engineering Laboratory of Speech and Language Information Processing, China
    • ILSP Institute for Language & Speech Processing / Innoetics, Greece
• 16.00 Coffee break
• 16.30 - 18.00
  • Chair: Alan W. Black
    • Discussion/meeting: Further directions and next year tasks
    • Brief presentations by: Keiichi Tokuda, Junichi Yamagishi, Alan W. Black
  • Wrap up
• 18.00
  • Evening reception
    • Minghui will provide the information and directions immediately after the wrap up.

Practical information

Registration (closed)

We are closing the registration today (Sep 18, 2 PM) due to overwhelming response we have received. Thank you for your interest.

Registration procedure

Please mail blizzard@festvox.org to register. In your email, please use this EXACT WORDING in the subject line "Registration for the Blizzard Challenge Workshop 2014". Any other wording could lead to a delayed response.

Please send one email per person registering and tell us which organisation (if any) you belong to. Please use the below format in the body of the email.

________________________

Full Name:

Organization:

Email-id:

Country:

Photo-ID/Passport Number:

Member of the participating team: (if yes, please write the team name)

Representing a sponsor: (if yes, please mention the sponsor name)

_________________________

The photo-ID/passport number is required to prepare a pass to enter into the building of the venue. If this information is not present in your email, there may be a delay in preparing the pass on the spot at the venue.

All registrations will be acknowledged. Places for the sponsors and participating teams have already been allocated. Space is limited and so all remaining places will now be allocated on a 'first come, first served' basis.

• If you are the presenter of a paper, or another member of a participating team, please mention that in your registration email
• If you represent one of the sponsors, please mention that too

Cost

There is no cost to attend the Blizzard Workshop this year, thanks to support from ISCA, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Google Inc., Apple Inc., and DeitY, Gov. of India.

Accommodation and travel

Same as Interspeech 2014.

Published proceedings

The papers will be published on festvox.org