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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 Robust 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 speech and language technology (SLT) system generalizability across channel and mission diversity under the same training conditions as in Phase-2. The FSC P3 introduced 10 hours of previously unseen channel audio from Apollo-11 and 5 hours of novel audio from Apollo-13 to be evaluated over both 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 mismatched challenge conditions. We also discuss the Phase-3 challenge results, evolution of system performance across the three Phases, and next steps in the Challenge Series. 

This paper introduces the citizen science platform, LanguageARC, developed within the NIEUW (Novel Incentives and Workflows) project supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1730377. LanguageARC is a community- oriented online platform bringing together researchers and “citizen linguists” with the shared goal of contributing to linguistic research and language technology development. Like other Citizen Science platforms and projects, LanguageARC harnesses the power and efforts of volunteers who are motivated by the incentives of contributing to science, learning and discovery, and belonging to a community dedicated to social improvement. Citizen linguists contribute language data and judgments by participating in research tasks such as classifying regional accents from audio clips, recording audio of picture descriptions and answering personality questionnaires to create baseline data for NLP research into autism and neurodegenerative conditions. Researchers can create projects on Language ARC without any coding or HTML required using our Project Builder Toolkit.