2020 “Formosa Grand Challenge – Talk to AI”

Date: September 9, 2019

The 2020 “Formosa Grand Challenge – Talk to AI” officially kicks off today (September 9) to accept applications. The Ministry of Science and Technology invites experts to challenge the Band C Level of the Reading Comprehension Test for the “Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language,” or TOCFL for short, to compete for the first prize reward of NT$20 million.

Unlike the previous 1st “Talk to AI” competition, this challenge will be conducted in a single-choice mode, but will include voice reading and continuous dialogue tests to fully challenge AI’s ability to comprehend the Chinese language. The purpose is to allow AI to read the subject contents of different academic fields to test its comprehension and inference of the words and sentences, and further organize the entire dataset into application knowledge to achieve AI self-learning. The competition will be held in two stages, where the preliminary contest is scheduled for December 2019, and the final round in April 2020.

Dr. Wen Lian Hsu and his research team of the Academia Sinica Institute of Information Science is entrusted to work out the test dataset in conjunction with the National Academy for Educational Research to co-establish the dataset for training comprehension and dialogue. It is scheduled to be opened for use by the contestant teams in October 2019. On the other hand, the Speech-to-Text API uses Ya Ting Verbatim of AI Labs. Ya Ting Verbatim is developed by AI Labs led by Ethan Tu. It is indeed a great honor for Formosa Grand Challenge to cooperate with AI Labs.

To allow AI to take root, this “Talk to AI” competition is scheduled to hold a FUN CUP team event on November 16 to encourage general and vocational high school students as well as college students to participate. The FUN CUP team will work with the Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing to enable young students to understand the application of AI man-machine dialogue and use existing commercial AI tools to train the machine to learn and fully utilize existing voice materials and resources with the goal of achieving small-scale scientific research results of a certain quality.

The Ministry of Science and Technology will continue to enhance the scale of the voice dataset during the competition, allowing the teams to carry out technology development and testing. The research team of Associate Professor Yuan-Fu Liao of National Taipei University of Technology is invited to do the speech data transcription, releasing about 600 hours of the AI voice dataset to the data market of the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC DATA MARKET), which is to be used by paid authorized users. The fee is 2000 NTD per 150 hours.

The Ministry of Science and Technology hopes to encourage innovators to use the potential of AI development, technology, and creativity to solve the challenges of voice applications through the “Formosa Grand Challenge” competition, and looks forward to any possible progress and thinking. It also expects that the event will attract more enterprises as well as academic and research institutions to get involved and work together to promote the upswing of Taiwan’s AI voice recognition technology and assist Taiwanese enterprises in digital transformation.

2020 “Formosa Grand Challenge – Talk to AI”