Using a Serious Game to Collect a Child Learner Speech Corpus
Claudia Baur, Manny Rayner, Nikos Tsourakis · 2014
We present an English-L2 child learner speech corpus, produced by 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.