School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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AusKidTalk: An Auditory-Visual Corpus of 3- to 12-Year-Old Australian Children's Speech

Ahmed, B ; Ballard, KJ ; Burnham, D ; Sirojan, T ; Mehmood, H ; Estival, D ; Baker, E ; Cox, F ; Arciuli, J ; Benders, T ; Demuth, K ; Kelly, B ; Diskin-Holdaway, C ; Shahin, M ; Sethu, V ; Epps, J ; Lee, CB ; Ambikairajah, E (ISCA, 2021)

Here we present AusKidTalk [1], an audio-visual (AV) corpus of Australian children’s speech collected to facilitate the development of speech based technological solutions for children. It builds upon the technology and expertise developed through the collection of an earlier corpus of Australian adult speech, AusTalk [2,3]. This multi-site initiative was established to remedy the dire shortage of children’s speech corpora in Australia and around the world that are sufficiently sized to train accurate automated speech processing tools for children. We are collecting ~600 hours of speech from children aged 3–12 years that includes single word and sentence productions as well as narrative and emotional speech. In this paper, we discuss the key requirements for AusKidTalk and how we designed the recording setup and protocol to meet them. We also discuss key findings from our feasibility study of the recording protocol, recording tools, and user interface.