Speech separation challenge problem

[Martin Cooke <m.cooke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear list

SPEECH SEPARATION CHALLENGE!

Do you have an algorithm for speech separation, or do you just fancy a 
new challenge? If so, you should take part in the 1st large-scale global 
comparison of techniques for separating and recognising speech. Results 
will be presented at a special session of Interspeech 2006 
(*http://www.interspeech2006.org)* <http://www.interspeech2006.org> 
taking place in Pittsburgh (USA) from 17-21 September, 2006.

The task is to recognise speech from a target talker in the presence of 
stationary noise or other speech. You will be provided with lots of 
training data. Only one signal per mixture is provided (i.e. the task is 
"single microphone"). Sentences have a simple structure to ensure the 
overhead of building an automatic speech recognition system is kept small.

We welcome contributions from the widest possible range of approaches to 
the speech separation/recognition problem, including well-known existing 
algorithms as well as novel techniques.

For full details of the challenge and to download training/test sets, see

   *http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin/SpeechSeparationChallenge.htm* 
<http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/%7Emartin/SpeechSeparationChallenge.htm>

Important deadlines

* April 7th 2006: submit your 4-page Interspeech paper for reviewing in 
the normal way
* June 9th 2006: notification of acceptance

Organisers

   Martin Cooke (University of Sheffield, UK)
   Te-Won Lee (UCSD, USA)