The ICME 2025 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge

This challenge aims to evaluate the capabilities of audio encoders, especially in the context of multi-task learning and real-world applications. Participants are invited to submit pre-trained audio encoders that map raw waveforms to continuous embeddings. These encoders will be tested across diverse tasks including speech, environmental sounds, and music, with a focus on real-world usability. The challenge features two tracks: Track A for parameterized evaluation, and Track B for parameter-free evaluation. This challenge provides a platform for evaluating and advancing the state-of-the-art in audio encoder design.

speechocean762: An Open-Source Non-native English Speech Corpus For Pronunciation Assessment

This paper introduces a new open-source speech corpus named "speechocean762" designed for pronunciation assessment use, consisting of 5000 English utterances from 250 non-native speakers, where half of the speakers are children. Five experts annotated each of the utterances at sentence-level, word-level and phoneme-level. A baseline system is released in open source to illustrate the phoneme-level pronunciation assessment workflow on this corpus. This corpus is allowed to be used freely for commercial and non-commercial purposes. It is available for free download from OpenSLR, and the corresponding baseline system is published in the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.