{"id":25861,"date":"2016-05-20T09:31:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T14:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=25861"},"modified":"2016-05-20T09:32:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T14:32:09","slug":"the-2016-blizzard-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=25861","title":{"rendered":"The 2016 Blizzard Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.inf.ed.ac.uk\/blizzard\/blizzard2016\/english\/register-er.html\" target=\"_blank\">Blizzard Challenge needs you<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>Every year since 2005, an ad hoc group of speech technology researchers has held a \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.synsig.org\/index.php\/Blizzard_Challenge\" target=\"_blank\">Blizzard Challenge<\/a>\", under the aegis of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.synsig.org\/index.php\/Main_Page\" target=\"_blank\">Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group<\/a> (SYNSIG) of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.isca-speech.org\/iscaweb\/\" target=\"_blank\">International Speech Communication Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The general idea is simple:\u00a0\u00a0Competitors take a\u00a0released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer are then evaluated through listening tests.<\/p>\n<p>Why \"Blizzard\"? Because the early competitions used the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.festvox.org\/cmu_arctic\/\" target=\"_blank\">CMU ARCTIC datasets<\/a>, which began with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.festvox.org\/cmu_arctic\/cmuarctic.data\" target=\"_blank\">set of sentences<\/a> read from James Oliver Curwood's novel <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/4703\/4703-h\/4703-h.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Flower of the North<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, if you have an hour of your time to donate towards making speech synthesis better, <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.inf.ed.ac.uk\/blizzard\/blizzard2016\/english\/register-er.html\" target=\"_blank\">sign up and be a listener<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Blizzard Challenge needs you! Every year since 2005, an ad hoc group of speech technology researchers has held a \"Blizzard Challenge\", under the aegis of the Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group (SYNSIG) of the International Speech Communication Association. The general idea is simple:\u00a0\u00a0Competitors take a\u00a0released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computational-linguistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25861"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25864,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25861\/revisions\/25864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}