Blizzard Machine Learning Challenge 2017 Rules

DATABASE ACCESS

• After registration and completion of the required licenses, download passwords will issued, as described on the main Blizzard 2017 page.

REGISTRATION FEE

• A registration fee of 600 GBP is payable by all participants who wish to submit their output for evaluation, to offset the costs of running the challenge, including paying local assistants and listeners. The fee must be paid by Friday 21st April 2017. You can pay this fee using Edinburgh University's online payments system at http://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/browse/category.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=20 where you should register for the event called 'Blizzard Challenge 2017'. After doing this, please email blizzard@festvox.org to notify us that you have paid. If you are absolutely unable to use the online payments system, please contact blizzard@festvox.org for assistance with a bank transfer. However, we strongly prefer the epay system because it reduces the costs and admin work for us. If you must pay by bank transfer, please contact us in plenty of time (at least 4 weeks before the payment deadline); an additional administration fee of 150 GBP will be added for any payments not made using the epay system.

Note: if you are also taking part in the main challenge, you only have to pay a single registration fee, which then covers both of your entries.

LISTENERS

• Each participant should try to recruit as many naive listeners (with no professional knowledge of synthetic speech) as possible, and at least 10. They do not have to be native speakers. All members of your team are also expected to perform the complete listening test: there will be a separate listening test URL for people who consider themselves experts in speech synthesis.
• The organisers would also appreciate assistance in advertising both the Challenge and the listening test as widely as possible (e.g., to your students or colleagues).

MATERIALS PROVIDED

All participants will have access to the following material after signing the license:

• An estimated 5 hours of speech from one native British English female professional speaker (this is precisely the same 5 hours released in 2016 for the main Blizzard Challenge) along with linguistic features and speech features.

The speech material has been very kindly provided by Usborne Publishing and the preparation of the linguistic features benefitted greatly from the effort contributed by Innoetics.

THE CHALLENGE

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.

Task

You may only make a submission for ONE of the following two tasks

• 2017-ES1
  • Predict speech features from linguistic features
  • Materials provided: Frame level pairs of 687-dimensional linguistic features and 77-dimensional speech features
  • You must not use the speech waveforms provided for the other spoke task
• 2017-ES2
  • Directly predict speech waveforms from linguistic features
  • Materials provided: Pairs of 687-dimensional linguistic features and speech waveforms
  • You must not use the speech features provided for the other spoke task

USE OF EXTERNAL DATA

• "External data" is defined as data, of any type, that is not part of the provided database.
• You are NOT allowed to use external data in any way.
• You may not augment the provided data (e.g., with additional features), although you may apply transforms such as normalisation.
• If you are in any doubt about how to apply these rules, please contact the organizers immediately.

SYNTHESISING THE TEST EXAMPLES

• The exact nature of the test set will not be revealed in advance, but is likely to include both sentence, paragraph and short book-length texts from a similar domain to the provided corpus, as well as texts from other domains.

• Synthetic speech may be submitted at any standard sampling rate (but always at 16 bits per sample). Waveforms will not be downsampled for the listening test.

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

Formal listening tests will be conducted to evaluate the synthetic speech submitted. Whilst the task is to synthesise speech suitable for reading an audiobook to children, the listening test will likely also evaluate the performance of the voice in terms of naturalness and intelligibility on other types of material (i.e., as in most previous Blizzard Challenges).

PAPER

• Each participant will be expected to submit a six-page paper (using the Interspeech 2017 template) describing their entry for review. Please email your paper to blizzard@festvox.org .
• One of the authors of each accepted paper should present it at the Blizzard 2017 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.