2021

COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation & Primates

INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE)

The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) is an open Challenge dealing with states and traits of speakers as manifested in their speech signal’s properties. There have so far been twelve consecutive Challenges at INTERSPEECH since 2009 (cf. the repository), but there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant paralinguistic phenomena. Thus, we introduce four new tasks by the COVID-19 Cough Sub-Challenge, the COVID-19 Speech Sub-Challenge, the Escalation Sub-Challenge, and the Primates Sub-Challenge (see also for the data descriptions). For the tasks, the data are provided by the organisers. The COVID-19 related Sub-Challenges will only be open to academic research participation. The Escalation and Primates Sub-Challenges are generally open for participation.

The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE) shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results. The results of the Challenge were presented at Interspeech 2021 online. Prizes were awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. 

If you are interested and planning to participate in the Computational Paralinguistics Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest.

Last updated:
31 August 2021

Last addition:
Challenge closed. Winners are announced and final best fusion results are online. The session was held online at Interspeech 2021.

Organisers:
Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg, Germany / Imperial College London, UK / audEERING)
Anton Batliner (University of Augsburg, Germany) 
Christian Bergler (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany)
Cecilia Mascolo (University of Cambridge, UK)
Jing Han (University of Cambridge, UK)
Iulia Lefter (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Heysem Kaya (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Officially started:
4 February 2021 All Sub-Challenges

Deadlines:
26 March 2021 Paper submission at http://interspeech2021.org.
11 June 2021 Final result upload 
15 June 2021 Camera-ready paper 

To get started: 

COVID-19 Speech and COVID-19 Cough Sub-Challenges: The COVID-19 datasets are available now. This dataset is shared for non commercial purposes with academic institutions only: The University of Cambridge has prepared an agreement (no changes allowed) which will need to be signed by the legal entity representative of your University before we can share the data. Please email – only for these two Sub-Challenges – covid19-challenge@cst.cam.ac.uk  to obtain the agreement for signature if interested.One this is signed we will share the data package.

Escalation and Primates Sub-Challenges: please obtain the according License Agreements (Escalation, Primates) to get a password and further instructions for the download of the datasets: Please fill out electronically the PDF for the dataset(s) you wish to obtain, and print, sign, scan, and email – to the email addresses given on the agreements – both the electronic version and the scans accordingly to ease handling. The agreement(s) has/have to be signed by a permanent staff member.
After downloading the data you can directly start your experiments with the data sets. Once you found your best method you should write your paper for the Special Session. At the same time you can compute your results per instance and Sub-Challenge task on the test set and upload them: we will then let you know your performance result.

*Read about it:* Paper on the Challenge to be cited.
*Participate:* Result submission will open later during the Challenge. Participants will be contacted by email for the result submission procedure.  

Paper on the Challenge: The introductory Paper on the Challenge provides extensive descriptions and baseline results. All participants will be asked to avoid repetitions of Challenge, data, or feature descriptions in their submissions – of course, they have to describe shortly the essentials of the databases dealt with – but include the following citation:

Björn W. Schuller, Anton Batliner, Christian Bergler, Cecilia Mascolo, Jing Han, Iulia Lefter, Heysem Kaya, Shahin Amiriparian, Alice Baird, Lukas Stappen, Sandra Ottl, Maurice Gerczuk, Panaguiotis Tzirakis, Chloë Brown, Jagmohan Chauhan, Andreas Grammenos, Apinan Hasthanasombat, Dimitris Spathis, Tong Xia, Pietro Cicuta, Leon J. M. Rothkrantz, Joeri Zwerts, Jelle Treep, Casper Kaandorp: “The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation & Primates”, Proceedings INTERSPEECH 2021, ISCA, Brno, Czechia, 2021.

In bibtex, the reference is:

@inproceedings{Schuller21-TI2,
author = {Bj\”orn W.\ Schuller and Anton Batliner and Christian Bergler and Cecilia Mascolo and Jing Han and Iulia Lefter and Heysem Kaya and Shahin Amiriparian and Alice Baird and Lukas Stappen and Sandra Ottl and Maurice Gerczuk and Panaguiotis Tzirakis and Chloë Brown and Jagmohan Chauhan and Andreas Grammenos and Apinan Hasthanasombat and Dimitris Spathis and Tong Xia and Pietro Cicuta and Leon J.\,M.\ Rothkrantz and Joeri Zwerts and Jelle Treep and Casper Kaandorp},
title = {{The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation \& Primates}},
booktitle = {{Proceedings INTERSPEECH 2021, 22nd Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association}},
year = {2021},
address = {Brno, Czechia},
publisher = {ISCA},
month = {September},
note = {to appear},
}

Result Submission: Closed. Registered participants were contacted by email. 

Paper Submission (all participants): Please be reminded that a paper submission and at least one upload on the test set are mandatory for the participation in the Challenge. However, paper contributions within the scope are also welcome if the authors do not intend to participate in the Challenge itself. In any case, please submit your paper until 26 March 2021 (and final results by 11 June 2021) using the standard style info and respecting length limits, and submit to the regular submission system. Important: as topic you should choose only this Special Session (Computational Paralinguistics Challenge 2021). Remaining result upload trials can be saved for new Challenge results until 11 June 2021. The papers will undergo the normal review process. Papers shall not repeat the descriptions of database, labels, partitioning etc. of the Sub-Challenge corpora but cite the introductive paper (cf. above).

Participants may contribute in all Sub-Challenges at a time. A training and development partitioning will allow for tests and results to be reported by the participants apart from their results on the official test set. Papers may well report additional results on other databases. An additional publication is planned that summarises all results of the Challenge and results combination by ROVERING or ensemble techniques. However, this publication will be post INTERSPEECH 2021.

More Information will follow on a regular basis.