Requirements And Specifications
Contents:
- Tender announcement
- Introduction
- Submission of tender
- Instructions to the tenderer
- Qualification criterias
- Specification of the product to be delivered
- Existing resources
- Speech synthesis technology
- Preprocessor
- Contract regulations
- Licensing issues
- Evaluation of the tenders
- Time frame for maintaining the tender
Tender announcement
On behalf of the Divvun TTS project
The Norwegian Saami Parliament is announcing an
Open tender
For the acquisition of Speech Synthesis for North Saami
- Enclosure 1: Price form
- Enclosure 2: Standard government agreement forms regarding it-acquisitions
- Enclosure 3: HMS
Introduction
The Divvun TTS project invites all interested parties to submit tenders for making such speech synthesis for the listed operating systems, based on computational linguistic resources provided by the Divvun TTS project.
The acquisition process will follow the procedure of an open tender, as regulated by the Norwegian law on public procurements and the Norwegian regulations for public procurements part II. The tender has been announced in DOFFIN (ref. XXX) and TED (Tender European Daily), ref. XXX.
Submission of tender
Personal delivery or by Mail:
Sámediggi · Sametinget Ávjovárgeaidnu 50 N-9730 Kárášjohka/Karasjok Norway
Time limit for receipt of tenders: 1.9.2011 15:00 Norwegian time
The tender should be delivered at the above address within this time limit. The receiver is not responsible for delayed mail, regardless of reasons. Tenders received after the time-limit will be rejected.
Instructions to the tenderer
- The bidder must fill in the enclosed price form. All prices should be quoted in NOK exclusive of VAT.
- The bidder should confirm the acceptance of the conditions for the contract as found in the enclosed Standard government agreement forms regarding it-acquisitions.
- The tender should be signed by a person with the authority to give a commiting bid.
- The tender can be written in English, Norwegian or Sámi.
All questions (technical, processual and contractual) concerning the tender process, should be directed to the Norwegian Saami Parliament, NN, xxx@samediggi.no.
Qualification criterias
If any work is to be performed in Norway, the tenderer should produce a statement to the effect that he will conform to the Norwegian laws and regulations concerning health, work environment and safety (cf. enclosed HMS-egenerklæring).
Financial qualifications
Technical qualifications
Specification of the product to be delivered
Overview
- North Saami synthetic voices for Windows, MacOS X and Linux (exact versions defined further down). Two voices should be developed, one male and one female voice.
- standard installation packages
The contractor should deliver all parts including installation packages such that end users will only have one installation to do, after which the computer will be able to read text aloud in North Saami.
Microsoft Windows
The exact list of deliverables for MS Windows is:
- one set of binary files to provide North Saami synthetic voices using the Speech API as found in MS Windows XP SP2 and newer.
- installation application to provide end users with a simple and automatized process of correctly installing the binary files listed above. Further details of the installer:
- The installation package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- The instalation package shall be prepared for the addition of North Sámi as an additional language of the installer
- The installer package shall be built using NSIS installer
- The installation package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- user documentation in English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- user documentation prepared for translation into North Saami
Possible translation costs of user documentation and installer interface languages should be specified in the tender. The Divvun TTS project will reserve the right to do the translation itself, or in cooperation with the selected company.
MacOS X
The exact list of deliverables for MacOS X is:
- one set of binary files to provide North Saami synthetic voices using the Speech API as found in MacOS X 10.4 and newer.
- installation application to provide end users with a simple and automatized process of correctly installing the binary files listed above. Further details of the installer:
- The installation package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- The installer package shall be built using Apple's own installer system
- The installation package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- user documentation in English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
- user documentation prepared for translation into North Saami
Possible translation costs of user documentation and installer interface languages should be specified in the tender. The Divvun TTS project will reserve the right to do the translation itself, or in cooperation with the selected company.
Existing resources
The Divvun TTS project has a set of resources available:
- trained linguists, a computational linguist and a software engineer
- large lexicons with proper inflectional class tagging
- transducers for:
- morphological analysis
- word-form generation
- orthography-to-IPA transciption
- morphological analysis
- disambiguator
- syntactic parser
- dependency tree parser
- voice recordings
- a corpus built specifically for the recordings
- a larger corpus with several types of texts (dominated by news and bureaucratic texts, as well as the bible); the corpus for North Saami is about 15 mill. words
- other resources, such as test beds for linguistic testing, documentation infrastructure, etc.
The tenderers should utilize these resources, and specify how they intend to do so in their application, as well as specify how the work-load will be shared between the Divvun TTS project group and the tenderer, and how the tenderer is envisaging the cooperation. It is obvious that the Divvun TTS project will conduct the linguistic testing of the final products, thus this does not need to be specified.
More detailed descriptions of some of the resources follow below.
Transducer resources
Parsing resources
Speech synthesis technology
The existing TTS-oriented resources are developed in close cooperation with the speech technology group at the Linguistics department, Helsinki university. Based on a number of considerations, we are primarily targeting synthetic voices using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) synthesis. Other synthesis technologies can be considered, depending on price, feasability wrt the existing resources and scaleability for new languages.
Preprocessor
So far in the TTS project there has been developed preprocessing resources based on the existing transducer technologies being used. The preprocessor is not yet finished, but the text-to-IPA part is quite close. The parts that should handle abbreviations, numbers and other non-textual content is not finished.
We assume that the tenderers will have their own preprocessing tools, and that using their tools will be the easiest and cheapest solution seen from the tenderers' point of view.
There are a couple of downsides to using the preprocessor of the tenderers. It means converting our preprocessor work to another formarlism. It also means relying on closed-source components. Further it moves the TTS preprocessing away from the rest of our text processing infrastructure and technologies.
The alternative solution would be to base the preprocessor on one or both of the following technologies:
- morphological analysis and generation using HFST (http: //hfst.sf.net/)
- disambiguation and syntactic analysis using VislCG3 (http: //visl.sdu.dk/)
Both technologies are open source, and both are also available in library versions that can easily be integrated into other systems.
The benefits of using existing solutions are tighter integration with the rest of the Divvun & Giellatechno echosystem, better linguistic processing (we know that it works quite well) and less work on the part of the TTS project, ...
What approach to take (tenderer's or Divvun's preprocessor technologies) is an open question, and in the the price form the tenderer should specify the cost of both options.
Contract regulations
Terms of payment
Time schedule
A beta version shall be delivered by 1st February.
Delivery of the final version to Samediggi shall happen within 31st May 2007. Acceptance test shall be excecuted by the customer in the course of one month after the delivery.
Further regulations
Licensing issues
License of the final products
Escrow
A written proof of an escrow deposit shall be delivered as part of the beta delivery as well as part of the final delivery. The proof shall be in such a form that it suffices to get access to the full source code, should the escrow conditions be met.
The escrow deposit proof must be received by the Divvun TTS project before payment can be done.
Evaluation of the tenders
Selection criteria
- Price and total costs
- Technical compatibility
- Willingness to license tools to Samediggi and the project group
- Quality, functionality and user-friendliness
- Terms and conditions
The selection criteria are not listed according to their order of importance..
Further information about the selection criterias
Price and total costs
Technical compatibility
Willingness to license tools to Samediggi
Quality, functionality and user-friendliness
Terms and conditions
Time frame for maintaining the tender