Air Traffic Control Speech Recognition Challenge

AIRBUS, in collaboration with IRIT and SAFETY DATA-CFH, is launching a challenge on automatic speech recognition of English Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications to:

• identify top players in the field for future collaboration;
• encourage research community to tackle the specific issues of ATC (accent / noise / code-switching robustness, highly specific vocabulary).

Why is it challenging?

ATC audio is very noisy, made of non-native speech, with code switching, high speech rate and lots of domain-specific vocabulary -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxEfwSNBgNU&t=80s for example. 

What are the tasks?

• Standard audio transcription (evaluated with WER)
• Call sign extraction (evaluation with Precison/Recall/F1)

What is the dataset?

40h of transcribed real-life non-native English ATC data

+ 5h for validation/leader board

+ 5h for final evaluation

(you can use your own additional data)

What is to win?

#1 will be invited to speak at the challenge workshop and to visit Airbus facility and simulators.

5 of the best challengers will be retained for a second internal selection aiming to choose Airbus R&T partner for developing future on-board speech-to-text solutions.

Who can participate?

Anyone: start-ups, medium & big companies, research labs.

You can participate in the challenge even if you are not considering a partnership with AIRBUS or if you are planning to do only one of the tasks.

Important dates

Declaration of intent: Now, write to atc-challenge@airbus.com

Registration open: Mon 5th February, via AIRBUS challenge platform https://airbusaigym.nova.airbusdefenceandspace.com/

Training data available + leader board:  Mon 5th March - Sun 29th April (8 weeks)

Release of evaluation data: Wed 2ndMay

Results submission: Wed 9thMay

Final workshop: between Mon 18th and Fri 22nd June (date to be confirmed)

Special session at international conference for publication: pending approval (submitted)

More questions?

Post to the challenge forum or write to atc-challenge@airbus.com.