Tender announcement

On behalf of the Divvun Text-To-Speech (TTS) project, the Norwegian Sámi Parliament is announcing an Open tender for the acquisition of a Speech Synthesis Text-to-Speech for North Sámi.

* Enclosure 1: Price form
* Enclosure 2: Standard government agreement forms regarding it-acquisitions
* Enclosure 3: HMS
Introduction
The Divvun TTS project is run by the Sámi Parliament in order to produce high-quality speech synthesis for the North Sámi languages, one male and one female voice. The produced voices should work on Windows, Linux and MacOS X, using the native speech API's of each operating system.

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
Tenders can be delivered personally or by mail in a closed envelope marked ”Divvun TTS” to the following address:

Personal delivery or by Mail:
Sámediggi · Sametinget
Ávjovárgeaidnu 50
N-9730 Kárášjohka/Karasjok
Norway

Time limit for receipt of tenders:  16.4.2012 15:00 Norwegian time

The tender should be delivered at the above address within the time limit. The receiver is not responsible for delayed mail, regardless of reasons. Tenders received after the time-limit can be rejected.
Instructions to the tenderer
The tenderer should deliver a tender, which is in accordance with the instructions in this document. This is to secure a simple and fair comparison of the received tenders. Incomplete tenders, or tenders containing reservations, errors or unclearities, that can create doubts as to how the tender should be compared to other tenders, will be rejected.
●	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 North Sámi.
All questions (technical, processual and contractual) concerning the tender process, should be directed to the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, Joseph Fjellgren (e-mail: joseph.fjellgren@samediggi.no).
Qualification criteria
The bidder is obliged to submit tax and VAT certificate, no older than 6 months from the time limit for receipt of tenders, issued by the competent authority to the effect that the tenderer has fulfilled his obligations relating to the payment of taxes, social security contributions and VAT. Tax certificates are issued by the chief municipal treasurer in the municipality where the supplier has their head office and by the tax collector in the equivalent county.

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
The tenderer should have a sound financial and economic standing. This should be documented by the companies latest available balance sheets and a statement of the companies overall turnover and its turnover in respect of the services to which the contract relates for the previous 3 financial years.
Technical qualifications
It is a prerequisite that the tenderer has a high competence and experience within the subject of this tender. This should be documented with a list of completed assignments including name/telephone number/e-mail of clients who can confirm the quality of earlier projects and deliverables. In addition the tenderer must deliver an overview of the formal competence and work experience of the persons who will be involved in the assignment. The tenderer should convincingly document an ability to produce the desired voices with a high quality using the linguistic resources and recordings from the Divvun group at the University of Tromsø and the Sámi Parliament. It is a requirement that the tenderer can handle Unicode data and user input.
Specification of the product to be delivered
Overview
The goal of the tender part of the Divvun TTS project is to create the following product based on resources developed in cooperation between the selected tenderer and the Divvun and Giellatekno groups:
●	North Sámi synthetic voices and text-to-speech systems for Windows, MacOS X and Linux (exact OS versions defined further down). Two voices should be developed, one male and one female voice. The TTS system should be general-purpose, and suitable for at least but not restricted to the following purposes: reading out loud longer passages of texts (f.ex. sound book production), producing voice services on web pages, for proofreading texts in word processors, and as a component in assistive technologies and applications.
●	installation packages or distributions for easy installation by end users and integrators
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 Sámi. The resources available from the Sámi Parliament, and from the Divvun and Giellatekno groups are described further down.
Microsoft Windows
The Divvun TTS project is asking for a bid for the making and the integration of North Sámi synthetic voices and a full text-to-speech system for Microsoft Windows, based on the existing computational linguistic resources.

The exact list of deliverables for MS Windows is:
1.	one set of binary files to provide North Sámi synthetic voices and TTS support using the Speech API as found in MS Windows 7 and Windows 8.
2.	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:
a.	The installer package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish. 
b.	The installer package shall be prepared for the addition of North Sámi as an additional language of the installer
c.	The installer package shall be built using the open-source NSIS installer builder
3.	user documentation in English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
4.	user documentation prepared for translation into North Sámi

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:
1.	one set of binary files to provide North Sámi synthetic voices and TTS support using the Speech API as found in MacOS X 10.5 and newer.
2.	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:
a.	The installation package shall be provided in the following languages: English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish.
b.	The installer pack age shall be prepared for the addition of North Sámi as an additional language of the installer
c.	The installer package shall be built using Apple's own installer system
3.	user documentation in English, Norwegian bokmål, Swedish and Finnish. 
4.	user documentation prepared for translation into North Sámi

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.
Linux
tekst om Linux-pakka her. Spesifikasjon fra leverandør her, leverandør til Regjeringen.no for eksempel som bruker webbasert talesyntese. Joseph fyller i her. Serverkrav MÅ vi ha.
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
●	disambiguator
●	syntactic parser
●	dependency tree parser
●	voice recordings and the corresponsing texts
●	a larger corpus with several types of texts (dominated by news and bureaucratic texts, as well as the bible); the corpus for North Sámi 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.
Preprocessing / text-to-IPA conversion

XXX - start på gamal tekst

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 are 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 formalism. 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.

XXX - slutt på gamal tekst

By default the TTS system should use the text-to-IPA conversion routines developed by the Divvun group (it is assumed that the synthetic voice take a string of IPA symbols as input; conversion to another type of representation is trivial and can be easily added to the existing system). This conversion is further described on the web page http://www.divvun.no/ttsdoc/lang/sme/PreprocessingArchitecture.html, but a brief overview is given here. Very briefly it can be presented as the following:

Raw text in
 ⇒ segmentation and morphological analysis using a tailored HFST transducer
 ⇒ disambiguation using constraint grammar rules, processed by VISLCG3
 ⇒ expansion of abbreviated and numeral expressions using HFST transducers
 ⇒ conversion to IPA using HFST transducers
 ⇒ IPA out
Disambiguation is required to get proper length of certain consonant clusters and vowels in positions where the orthography does not make the distinction explicit. There are a number of consonant gradation cases where the orthography does not distinguish between grade 2 and grade 3, but where the distinction has a grammatical function (grade 3 is typically nominative in these cases, whereas grade 2 is genitive/accusative; example: “stáffu” = /stáf:fu/ Sg.Nom. AND /stáffu/ Sg.Gen/Sg.Acc). Similarly, in cases where a derivation or inflection has caused a diphthong in the word root to be monophthongised, it will not orthographically be distinct from a word having an original monophthong in the root vowel. In the spoken language these have different lengths, where the diphthong-origin monophthong is long, and the original monophthong is short. An example of such a minimal pair is a word such as ‘dihte’, which has the realisation /di:hte/ if it can be identified as a verb (infinitive=diehtit, “to know”), but /dihte/ if it is a postposition (“for” - XXX in the dictionary it says that even the postpos. has a long vowel; Joseph considers it long, we’ll still wait for the feedback from BÁ). In this case the morphosyntax is enough to distinguish the two. But there are other minimal pairs where only frequency or topic analysis will be able to correctly identify the proper length of the monophthong: ‘moai sohpe’. The word ‘sohpe’ can either be realised as /so:hpe/ with the meaning “we two agree (upon something)”, or as /sohpe/ with the meaning “we two are scraping meat from the bones”.

There exists relatively well-developed Constraint Grammar (CG) rules for disambiguating North Sámi texts, and these rules will be further developed as part of this work to achieve the disambiguation needed for proper realisation. The existing CG rules can even build a dependency tree, and via those provide a basis for prosodic markup for things that are not directly represented in the morphology or lexical content.
Transducer resources - HFST
HFST is an open-source transducer technology tool set, and used in a number of projects. It builds on a number of existing FST implementations, but for the TTS system only the runtime component is needed. The runtime component is written from the ground up by the HFST team, and is completely free of any licensing or other issues. It is available both as a command-line tool and a library.

For the morphological analysis and segmentation/tokenisation, a special variant of the hfst-lookup tool is used, called hfst-proc. It contains additional code to do on-the-fly tokenisation, and does as well do some output formatting to make sure the analysis result is suitable as input for the CG process. The tenderer should expect to need to modify this code as part of the project, to make it fit this project’s needs, and possibly to fix bugs as well. All changes to the code should be ported back to the source-code repository of the HFST tools. More details about HFST are available at hfst.sf.net.

Available resources:
●	tokenisation, morphological analysis & lemmatisation, including correct analysis and tokenisation of multiword expressions; the analyser exists in various variants, with different tag sets and analysing properties - it is relatively easy to add a new variant or adapt one of the existing ones
●	date2string conversion - case handling is missing
●	time2string conversion - case handling is missing
●	number2string conversion - case handling is missing
●	orthographic text to IPA conversion (fall-back solution for cases not handled by morphological generation)
●	word-form generation

Needs to be written:
●	word-form2IPA generation, taking the disambiguated lemma+tag string as input; this is needed to properly handle the cases where the orthographic form is not explicit about a phonetic length distinction
●	proper conversion of case-inflected numeral expressions
●	expansion of abbreviations (we already have a list of abbreviations)
●	numeral expressions not listed above
Parsing resources - VISLCG3
Because of the issues with ambiguity in North Sámi orthography, the TTS system needs both morphological disambiguation and syntactic parsing. For this we already use Constraint Grammar, specifically the variant supported by VISLCG3 (beta.visl.sdu.dk/cg3.html).

Even VISLCG3 is available as open source, and there exists a library version of the runtime. The tenderer should expect to need to modify some code, or add some wrapper code around the lbrary or runtime code. Except for possibly a very shallow level of API wrapping, all code additions or modifications should stay open source, under the same license as the original code.

VISLCG3 allows us to write rule-based disambiguation and parsing, and also allows us to augment the analysis results with additional info, info that can be used to improve the predictions of the prosody for the synthesis.
Speech recordings
A number of speech recordings are available for producing the synthetic voice, together with the texts used in the recordings. Transcriptions of the texts will be made, and should be more or less ready by the time the contract with the selected tenderer is signed.

The recordings have been made with an HMM synthesis in mind, although the quality should be fine for other types of syntheses as well. The recordings are:
●	2,5 hour male voice
●	2 hour female voice
The texts used for the recordings have been selected to provide coverage of all bigrams, and a vairety of texts and genres are included.

The text recordings were made in a studio with the following equipment and settings:
●	list opp punktvis her.
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 will be considered, depending on price, feasibility with respect to the existing resources and scalability for new languages. A pure Unit Selection synthesis has been deemed too expensive to produce.

It is a major goal for the project to be able to reuse the infrastructure we’ll build up for new languages, and synthesis technology that facilitates this goal will be preferred. For the same reason, technologies and solutions that can utilise all or most of our existing resources, including the text-to-IPA solution we have, will be preferred candidates.
Contract regulations
Terms of payment
The Sámediggi will pay a sum equivalent of 15 % of the total contract sum upon signing the contract. A further 35 % will be paid after the beta version is received and accepted. The remaining 50 % will be paid when the end product has been delivered, tested and accepted by the customer.
Time schedule
An alfa version of the proofing tools, shall be delivered to the customer by 15th September 2012. 

A beta version shall be delivered by 1st November.

Delivery of the final version to Sámediggi shall happen within 15th December 2012. Acceptance test shall be excecuted by the customer in the course of one month after the delivery.
Further regulations
For further information on contract regulations, see enclosed Standard government agreement forms regarding it-acquisitions.
Licensing issues
License of the final products
The Sámi Parliament will retain full rights to the final products, and is eligible to do whatever it wants with them, including giving them away for free to an unlimited number of end users. The individual copyright holders will retain their copyrights, and a list of copyright holders will be shipped to end users as part of the products, but the copyright holders will not be able to charge for their copyright beyond the one-time payment covered by this project.
The companies are not allowed to resell, bundle or otherwise distribute the final products without prior written consent from the Sámi Parliament.
Escrow
All source code needed to completely rebuild the product must be available through an escrow agreement.

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 
The Divvun TTS project will select the economically most advantageous offer, based on the following criteria:
●	Price and total costs
●	Technical compatibility
●	Willingness to license tools to Sámediggi 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 criteria
Price and total costs
In evaluating these selection criteria, we will consider the expected total cost over a longer time period, including maintenance cost.
Technical compatibility
We will evaluate the technical solution presented by the tenderers and compare it with our existing linguistic resources and language technology. A high degree of compatibility will have a positive influence on total costs.
Willingness to license tools to Sámediggi
It is important that the tenderer states whether or not it is willing to license the tools to compile the binary lexicon for the proofing tools to Sámediggi. It is the wish (but not an absolute demand) of the Sámediggi to be able to deliver linguistic, non-technical updates to end-users without the involvement from the cooperating companies.
Quality, functionality and user-friendliness
The evaluation of this criterion will be based on the description of the program solution as presented by the tenderer. The tenderer is welcome to support the verbal description with references to, or demonstrations of similar program solutions produced by the tenderer. Under this criterion we will also evaluate the user-friendliness of the solution and the usefulness of any extra functions that might be presented by the tenderer.
Terms and conditions
The tenderer should as far as possible conform to the terms and conditions described in this tender document, including the enclosed Standard government agreement forms regarding it-acquisitions. Any reservations or deviations must be specified and described sufficiently, allowing us to evaluate the objective cost (whether they be positive or negative). 
Time frame for maintaining the tender 
Minimum time frame during which the tenderer must maintain its tender is three (3) months from the time limit for receipt of tender.