Construction and Analysis of Japanese Parent-Child Dialogic Reading Corpus for Conversational Agents

Yuko Nakagi, Yuya Chiba, Sanae Fujita, Shoko Araki


Abstract
Dialogic reading, which involves interactive exchanges between a parent and a child during picture book reading, has been shown to effectively promote children’s language development. While many support systems for picture book reading have been developed to reduce the burden on parents, existing systems are not yet capable of handling dialogic reading, which requires dynamic parent-child interaction. To develop conversational agents capable of dialogic reading, we constructed a multimodal corpus of parent-child picture-book reading dialogues. The corpus comprises recordings from 36 Japanese parent-child pairs taken during actual picture book reading sessions. In this study, we annotated the corpus with dialogue acts relevant to parent-child communication and categorized the types of quizzes and questions used in the sessions, analyzing the linguistic aspects of parent-child interaction during dialogic reading. After dividing the dialogues into two groups based on the proportion of the child’s utterances, our analyses revealed that dialogue systems should adapt their interaction strategies according to individual child characteristics.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.213
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2724–2730
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.213/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuko Nakagi, Yuya Chiba, Sanae Fujita, and Shoko Araki. 2026. Construction and Analysis of Japanese Parent-Child Dialogic Reading Corpus for Conversational Agents. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:2724–2730.
Cite (Informal):
Construction and Analysis of Japanese Parent-Child Dialogic Reading Corpus for Conversational Agents (Nakagi et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.213.pdf