[Apologies for cross-posting]
Call for Participation
IEEE-MLSP Non-native Children’s Automatic Speech Assessment Challenge (NOCASA) https://teflon.aalto.fi/nocasa-2025/
The IEEE-MLSP Non-native Children’s Automatic Speech Assessment Challenge (NOCASA) is an open Challenge aiming to develop new Speech Assessment tools for young language learners. The data consists of recordings of children of 5 – 12 years repeating the words in Norwegian that were played to them. The children include L1 speakers, beginner learners of L2 Norwegian and children who had no previous exposure to Norwegian. For each recording in the data, we provide the expected word’s orthographic transcription and the speech accuracy assessment score of 1 – 5, which is given by human experts. The task of the participants is to develop an automatic speech assessment system and use it to predict the score of each utterance in the given test data. For more details, please visit https://teflon.aalto.fi/nocasa-2025/ The results of the Challenge will be presented at the IEEE MLSP 2025 (https://2025.ieeemlsp.org/en/ ) conference in Istanbul.
To participate in the Challenge, email the organisers mailto:mikko.kurimo@aalto.fi.
Organisers:
Mikko Kurimo: mikko.kurimo@aalto.fi (Aalto University, Finland) Tamas Grosz: tamas.grosz@aalto.fi (Aalto University, Finland) Giampiero Salvi: giampiero.salvi@ntnu.no (NTNU, Norway)
This challenge is supported by “Technology-enhanced foreign and second-language learning of Nordic languages (TEFLON)” https://teflon.aalto.fi/ NordForsk project nr. 103893.
Important Dates:
Team registration starts: March 19. Training and test data released: March 19. Evaluation system opens: April 2. Baseline paper (and code) released: April 27. Paper submission deadline: May 20. Evaluation system closes, and the leaderboard is public: May 20. Post-Challenge evaluation phase: from May 20 until July 15. Notification of paper acceptance: June 24. Camera-ready upload July 15.
To get started:
Please register your team by email to Mikko Kurimo: mikko.kurimo@aalto.fimailto:mikko.kurimo@aalto.fi.
Then, please obtain the End-User License Agreement (EULA) (from https://teflon.aalto.fi/nocasa-2025/ ) to get access and further instructions for the download of the datasets: Please fill out electronically the PDF for the dataset you wish to obtain, and print, sign, scan, and email - to the email addresses indicated on the website. The agreement has to be signed by a permanent staff member.
After downloading the data, you can start your experiments directly with the data sets. Once you have found the best method, you should write and submit a technical paper for the Challenge Session at IEEE-MLSP. At the same time, you can test your models by uploading the test predictions to the submission system, and we will let you know the results of your models.
If you have questions, contact all of the Organizers (see above).