2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
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NEWS

The *test datasets* have been released on the website! Noise-free datasets have also been made available for benchmarking purposes.

Additional *instructions* have been added in order to make the systems more comparable and facilitate scientific analysis of the results. Check the website for details.

We are proud to announce one additional *sponsor* for our workshop. The best challenge papers will receive a monetary prize.

We are envisaging a *special issue* of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine to which the authors of the best challenge papers will be invited to contribute.


FEATURED TASKS

The challenge consists of recognising distant-microphone speech mixed in
two-channel nonstationary noise recorded over a period of several weeks
in a real family house. Entrants may address either one or both of the
following tracks:

Medium vocabulary track: WSJ 5k sentences uttered by a static speaker

Small vocabulary track: simpler commands but small head movements


TO ENTER

You will find everything you need to get started (and even more) on the
challenge website:
- a full description of the challenge,
- clean, reverberated and multi-condition training and development data,
- baseline training, decoding and scoring software tools based on HTK.

Submission consists of a 2- to 8-page paper describing your system and
reporting its performance on the development and test datasets. In
addition, you are welcome to submit an earlier paper to ICASSP 2013,
which will tentatively be grouped with other papers into a dedicated
session.

Any approach is welcome, whether emerging or established.

If you are interested in participating, please email us so we can
monitor interest and send you further updates about the challenge.


BEST CHALLENGE PAPER AWARDS

The best challenge papers will distinguished by an award from the
Industrial Board.


IMPORTANT DATES

July 2012          Launch
October 2012       Test set release
January 15, 2013   Challenge & workshop submission deadline
February 18, 2013  Paper notification & release of the challenge results
June 1, 2013       post-ICASSP workshop


INDUSTRIAL BOARD

Masami Akamine, Toshiba
Carlos Avendano, Audience
Li Deng, Microsoft
Erik McDermott, Google
Gautham Mysore, Adobe
Atsushi Nakamura, NTT
Peder A. Olsen, IBM
Trausti Thormundsson, Conexant
Daniel Willett, Nuance


WORKSHOP SPONSORS

Conexant Systems Inc.
Audience Inc.
Adobe Systems Inc.
Google Inc.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories


ORGANISERS

Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe & Jonathan Le Roux, MERL
Francesco Nesta & Marco Matassoni, FBK-IRST