DOI: 10.35111/k42c-jh17
title: Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Evaluation Transcripts

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Evaluation Transcripts was developed for the Department of Defense (DoD) Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) by Arcon Corp. The corresponding audio, Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) Evaluation Audio, is available as <a href="../../../LDC2000S96">LDC2000S96</a>. These corpora supported the 2000 Speech in Noisy Environments evaluation. For an example transcript, please click <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2000T54.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p><br>
<p>The 2000 Speech in Noisy Environments Evaluation (SPINE1) was 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 was intended to be of interest to all university, industrial and commercial speech system developers working on the problem of robust speech recognition. The evaluation gave participants the opportunity to participate in a flexible evaluation, suited to development needs and abilities.</p><br>
<p>This work was sponsored in part by <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/" rel="nofollow">National Science Foundation</a> Grant No. IIS-9982201.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The SPINE1 evaluation focused on the task of transcribing speech produced in noisy environments with the emphasis on speech produced in noisy military environments. The evaluation was 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 were of both scientific and practical interest, and to measure the performance of this technology.</p><br>
<p>The evaluation task was to transcribe speech produced in noisy environments. The training and test speech data used for this evaluation were generated by ARCON Corp. for the DoD Digital Voice Processing Consortium (DDVPC) under controlled conditions.</p><br>
<p>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 could talk freely, but the total vocabulary used was fairly limited. Each person was seated in a sound chamber in which a previously recorded military background noise environment was accurately reproduced. The participants used handsets and transmission channels that were resident to the particular environment.</p><br>
<p>The evaluation data includes 20 talker-pairs, with six five-minute conversations per talker-pair (about 600 minutes total), from a set of four scenarios.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>August 13, 2001: A tagging error was discovered in which several files containing occurrences of the incorrect tag "[{noise}]," were converted to the correct tag, "[/noise]." There were 433 occurrences of this error across all files. Also, a single occurrence of two instances of "[noise/]" on the same line was corrected to "[/noise]" in the second instance. The corpus has been corrected.</p></br>