Introduction

This publication contains the Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Evaluation Audio Corpus created for the Department of Defense (DoD) Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) by Arcon Corp., and produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2000S96, ISBN 1-58563-188-4. A companion corpus, Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Audio Transcripts, was also produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2000T54 and ISBN 1-58563-189-2. These corpora support the 2000 Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE1) evaluation. There are a total of 120 files, one conversation each, for a rough total of nine hours and 22 minutes (2.2 Gigabytes) of audio data. For an example of a corresponding transcript from the Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Evaluation Transcripts Corpus, please click here. Due to size and format considerations, no example of a speech file is provided.

The 2000 Speech in Noisy Environments Evaluation (SPINE1) is a first attempt to assess the state of the art and practice in speech recognition technology in noisy military environments and to exchange information on innovative speech recognition technology in the context of fully implemented systems that perform realistic tasks. It is intended to be of interest to all university, industrial and commercial speech system developers working on the problem of robust speech recognition. The evaluation gives participants the opportunity to participate in a flexible evaluation, suited to development needs and abilities.

The SPINE1 evaluation focuses on the task of transcribing speech produced in noisy environments with emphasis on noisy military environments. The evaluation is designed to promote research progress in this area, to provide the opportunity for participants to try out new ideas for developing robust speech recognition systems that are of both scientific and practical interest, and to measure the performance of this technology. More information on this evaluation is available at SPINE1.

This work was sponsored in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-9982201.

Data

The evaluation task is to transcribe speech produced in noisy environments. The training and test speech data to be used for this evaluation were generated by ARCON Corp. for the DoD Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) under controlled conditions. The speech data consists of conversations between two communicators working on a collaborative, Battleship-like task in which they seek and shoot at targets (ARCON Communicability Exercise, ACE). Participants may talk freely, but the total vocabulary used is fairly limited. Each person is seated in a sound chamber in which a previously recorded military background noise environment is accurately reproduced. The participants use handsets and transmission channels that are resident to the particular environment. The evaluation data includes 20 talker-pairs, with six five-minutes conversations per talker-pair (about 600 minutes total), from a set of four scenarios.

Samples

For an example of the speech data in this corpus, please examine this audio sample.

Updates

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