TLT-school: a Corpus of Non Native Children Speech
This provides a resource for researchers in non-native speech recognition and automatic language proficiency assessment, but it is incremental as it focuses on data collection and baseline results.
The authors introduced TLT-school, a corpus of non-native children's speech from schools in northern Italy, recorded from students aged 9-16 learning English and German, with human-scored proficiency indicators and manual transcriptions for most 2017 utterances, and they reported results from an automatic speech recognition system they developed.
This paper describes "TLT-school" a corpus of speech utterances collected in schools of northern Italy for assessing the performance of students learning both English and German. The corpus was recorded in the years 2017 and 2018 from students aged between nine and sixteen years, attending primary, middle and high school. All utterances have been scored, in terms of some predefined proficiency indicators, by human experts. In addition, most of utterances recorded in 2017 have been manually transcribed carefully. Guidelines and procedures used for manual transcriptions of utterances will be described in detail, as well as results achieved by means of an automatic speech recognition system developed by us. Part of the corpus is going to be freely distributed to scientific community particularly interested both in non-native speech recognition and automatic assessment of second language proficiency.