InterSpeech 2021

Fearless Steps Challenge Phase-3 (FSC P3): Advancing SLT for Unseen Channel and Mission data across NASA Apollo audio
(Oral presentation)

Aditya Joglekar (University of Texas at Dallas, USA), Seyed Omid Sadjadi (NIST, USA), Meena Chandra-Shekar (University of Texas at Dallas, USA), Christopher Cieri (University of Pennsylvania, USA), John H.L. Hansen (University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
The Fearless Steps Challenge (FSC) initiative was designed to host a series of progressively complex tasks to promote advanced speech research across naturalistic “Big Data” corpora. The Center for Robust Speech Systems at UT-Dallas in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) conducted Phase-3 of the FSC series (FSC P3), with a focus on motivating speech and language technology (SLT) system generalizability across channel and mission diversity under the same training conditions as in Phase-2. The FSC P3 introduced 10 hours of previously unseen channel audio from Apollo-11 and 5 hours of novel audio from Apollo-13 to be evaluated over both previously established and newly introduced SLT tasks with streamlined tracks. This paper presents an overview of the newly introduced conversational analysis tracks, Apollo-13 data, and analysis of system performance for matched and mismatched challenge conditions. We also discuss the Phase-3 challenge results, evolution of system performance across the three Phases, and next steps in the Challenge Series.