Blizzard 2014 Hub Task Annotations

PURPOSE:
This data set contains the annotation labels generated in the frame of SIMPLE4ALL for the Hub Task in Blizzard Challenge 2014 for the training and evaluation of a given Indic language included in the Challenge. The target languages are: Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil, and Telugu. It should be noted that these labels are to complement the speech and text data available from the Challenge organizers.

CONTENTS:
The structure of the data set is as follows:
1) The archives of training data annotation contain the data which (assuming the relevant speech data has been obtained) will allow HTS voices to be trained: a) the directory lab/ contains HTK format label files with time alignments and “questions.hed” is an HTK format question file matching the labels which enables decision-tree building using the HTK tool HHEd; b) The directory utt/ contains the full XML Ossian utterance structures from which the files in lab/ are derived and are included for completeness. The file “questions.hed.key” is a human-readable guide to the meaning of the features in the label files.

2) The submission archives for each language each includes two directories. These two directories contain HTK format labels compatible with those for the training data for the two types of sentences used in the Blizzard evaluation: news text (RD) and Semantically Unpredictable Sentences (SUS).

SAMPLES:
Some samples of the final synthesized waveforms are available for the demo.
– NATURAL: Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu.
– SYNTHETIC: Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu.

LICENSE:
This annotation dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The associated scripts are licensed according to the description provided in the “Simple4All” Ossian tool.

CITATION:
If you use any part of the datasets in your work, please cite the following paper:
D. Gowda R. Karhila M. Gibson A. Suni, T. Raitio and O.Watts, “The Simple4All Entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2014”, In Proc of the Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop, Singapore, September 2014.

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