AFCP, French-speaking regional branch of ISCA, and the partners of the project ETAPE (1) are proud to announce an evaluation campaign on vocal technologies for the French language. The ETAPE 2011 campaign follows the series of ESTER campaigns organized in 2003, 2005 and 2009, targeting a wider variety of speech quality and the more difficult challenge of spontaneous speech. Speech transcription and information extraction (speaker turns, named entities) will be evaluated, focusing on TV material with various level of spontaneous speech and multiple speaker speech.

A corpora of about 30h of radio and TV shows covering various types and topics (news, debates, etc.), including the reference transcription with named entity annotations, will be made available to participants. After completion of the evaluation campaign, the corpus will be complemented with phonetic alignments and syntactic trees that will be available to participants for research purposes. The entire ETAPE data set will also be made availble to non participants via ELRA.

Tentative calendar:
   may 2011     proposal of an evaluation plan for discussion
   june 2011    release of training and development data
   dec. 2011    evaluation campaign (to be defined with participants)
   feb. 2012    workshop

For more information:

  - visit the ETAPE page of the AFCP website (http://www.afcp-parole.org/etape.html)

  - subscribe to the ester-info mailing list: send a mail to sympa@listes.afcp-parole.org with the following line in the mail body

SUBSCRIBE ester-info firstname lastname

  - contact us: guillaume.gravier@irisa.fr, gilles.adda@limsi.fr

(1) ETAPE is a French national project targeting the organisation of evaluation campaigns in the field of automatic speech processing. Partially funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), the project brings together national experts in the organisation of such campaigns under the scientific leadership of the AFCP, the French-speaking Speech Communication Association, a regional branch of ISCA.

Partners of the ETAPE projects are, in alphabetical order: Association
Francophone de la Communication Parlée, Direction Générale de
l'Armement, ELDA S.A., Laboratoire National d'Essais, Laboratoire de
Linguistique Formelle (Univ. Paris 7), Laboratoire de Phonétique et
Phonologie (Univ. Paris 3).