First Speech Separation Challenge

The first international Speech Separation Challenge took place in 2006, with results disseminated at Interspeech in Pittsburgh and later in a special issue of Computer Speech and Language (volume 24, 2010). The main focus of the challenge was to compare algorithms and human listeners on the task of identifying words in sentences from one talker when mixed with similar utterances from another talker, using a single channel (i.e., operating monaurally). Development and test data was also provided for a stationary noise masking condition. For technical details and a summary of the outcome of the Challenge, see the article by Cooke, Hershey and Rennie (pp 1--15) of the special issue (available as cooke_csl2010.pdf in this dataset). 

The current dataset consisted of the following zip files:

twotalker_dev.zip    two-talker development set
twotalker_test.zip    two-talker test set
1.zip, 2.zip etc         training data for each of 34 talkers (500 sentences each)
ssn_dev.zip             speech-shaped noise (SSN) development set
ssn_test.zip             SSN test set

The Challenge was funded by the EU Network of Excellence PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling and Computational Learning)