Using a Serious Game to Collect a Child Learner Speech Corpus

Claudia Baur, Manny Rayner, Nikos Tsourakis

Abstract
We present an English-L2 child learner speech corpus, produced by 14 year old Swiss German-L1 students in their third year of learning English, which is currently in the process of being collected. The collection method uses a web-enabled multimodal language game implemented using the CALL-SLT platform, in which subjects hold prompted conversations with an animated agent. Prompts consist of a short animated Engligh-language video clip together with a German-language piece of text indicating the semantic content of the requested response. Grammar-based speech understanding is used to decide whether responses are accepted or rejected, and dialogue flow is controlled using a simple XML-based scripting language; the scripts are written to allow multiple dialogue paths, the choice being made randomly. The system is gamified using a score-and-badge framework with four levels of badges. We describe the application, the data collection and annotation procedures, and the initial tranche of data. The full corpus, when complete, should contain at least 5,000 annotated utterances.
Anthology ID:
L14-1611
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2726–2732
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/787_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claudia Baur, Manny Rayner, and Nikos Tsourakis. 2014. Using a Serious Game to Collect a Child Learner Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 2726–2732, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Using a Serious Game to Collect a Child Learner Speech Corpus (Baur et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/787_Paper.pdf
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