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.

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)

• Hema A. Murthy, IIT Madras, India
• 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
• Swaran Lata, DeitY, Gov. of India.
• Somnath Chandra, DeitY, Gov. of India.

Organizing Committee

• Kishore Prahallad, IIIT Hyderabad, India
• Simon King, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Minghui Dong, I2R, Singapore
• Hema A. Murthy, IIT Madras, India.
• Swaran Lata, DeitY, Gov. of India.
• Somnath Chandra, DeitY, Gov. of India.
• Alan W. Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
• Keiichi Tokuda, Japan

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:

I2R, Fusionopolis, Singapore.

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 complete schedule will be updated soon.

Practical information

Registration

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.

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 and Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R).

Accommodation and travel

Same as Interspeech 2014.

Published proceedings

The papers will be published on festvox.org