ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus

Francesco Cabiddu, Lewis Bott, Gary Jones, Chiara Gambi


Abstract
Language acquisition research has benefitted from the use of annotated corpora of child-directed speech to examine key questions about how children learn and process language in real-world contexts. However, a lack of sense-annotated corpora has limited investigations of child word sense disambiguation in naturalistic contexts. In this work, we sense-tagged 53 corpora of American and English speech directed to 958 target children up to 59 months of age, comprising a large-scale sample of 15,581 utterances for 12 ambiguous words. Importantly, we carefully selected target senses that we know - from previous investigations - young children understand. As such work was part of a project focused on investigating the role of verbs in child word sense disambiguation, we additionally coded for verb instances which took a target ambiguous word as verb object. We present experimental work where we leveraged our sense-tagged corpus ChiSense-12 to examine the role of verb-event structure in child word sense disambiguation, and we outline our plan to use Transformer-based computational architectures to test hypotheses on the role of different learning mechanisms underlying children word sense disambiguation performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.557
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5198–5205
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.557
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francesco Cabiddu, Lewis Bott, Gary Jones, and Chiara Gambi. 2022. ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5198–5205, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus (Cabiddu et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.lrec-1.557.pdf
Code
 francescocabiddu/chisense-12