Fearless Steps Challenge Phase-3 (FSC P3): Advancing SLT for Unseen Channel and Mission Data across NASA Apollo Audio

Published

June 14, 2021

Author(s)

Aditya Joglekar, Omid Sadjadi, Meena Chandra-Shekar, Christopher Cieri, John Hansen

Abstract

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 Robuts 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 SLT system generalizability across channel and mission diversity under the same training conditions as in Phase-2. The FSC P3 introduced 10h of a previously unseen channel audio from Apollo-11 and 5h of novel audio from Apollo-13 to be evaluated over 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 mis-matched challenge conditions. We also discuss the Phase-3 challenge results and evolution of system performance across the three Phases, and next steps in the Challenge Series.

Conference Dates

August 30-September 3, 2021

Conference Location

Brno, CZ

Conference Title

INTERSPEECH

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

NASA Apollo, speech activity detection, speaker diarization, speaker identification, speech recognition, conversational analysis

Citation

Joglekar, A. , Sadjadi, O. , Chandra-Shekar, M. , Cieri, C. and Hansen, J. (2021), Fearless Steps Challenge Phase-3 (FSC P3): Advancing SLT for Unseen Channel and Mission Data across NASA Apollo Audio, INTERSPEECH, Brno, CZ, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=932307 (Accessed October 9, 2025)