skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Assessing Child Communication Engagement via Speech Recognition in Naturalistic Active Learning Spaces
The ability to assess children’s conversational interaction is critical in determining language and cognitive proficiency for typically developing and at-risk children. The earlier at-risk child is identified, the earlier support can be provided to reduce the social impact of the speech disorder. To date, limited research has been performed for young child speech recognition in classroom settings. This study addresses speech recognition research with naturalistic children’s speech, where age varies from 2.5 to 5 years. Data augmentation is relatively under explored for child speech. Therefore, we investigate the effectiveness of data augmentation techniques to improve both language and acoustic models. We explore alternate text augmentation approaches using adult data, Web data, and via text generated by recurrent neural networks. We also compare several acoustic augmentation techniques: speed perturbation, tempo perturbation, and adult data. Finally, we comment on child word count rates to assess child speech development.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2016725
PAR ID:
10180044
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ISCA ODYSSEY-2020
Page Range / eLocation ID:
396 to 401
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING SOCIETY (Ed.)
    This paper 1 presents a novel system which utilizes acoustic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and prosodic information for binary automatic dialect detection of African American English. We train this system utilizing adult speech data and then evaluate on both children’s and adults’ speech with unmatched training and testing scenarios. The proposed system combines novel and state-of-the-art architectures, including a multi-source transformer language model pre-trained on Twitter text data and fine-tuned on ASR transcripts as well as an LSTM acoustic model trained on self-supervised learning representations, in order to learn a comprehensive view of dialect. We show robust, explainable performance across recording conditions for different features for adult speech, but fusing multiple features is important for good results on children’s speech. 
    more » « less
  2. Assessing child growth in terms of speech and language is a crucial indicator of long term learning ability and life-long progress. Since the preschool classroom provides a potent opportunity for monitoring growth in young children’s interactions, analyzing such data has come into prominence for early childhood researchers. The foremost task of any analysis of such naturalistic recordings would involve parsing and tagging the interactions between adults and young children. An automated tagging system will provide child interaction metrics and would be important for any further processing. This study investigates the language environment of 3-5 year old children using a CRSS based diarization strategy employing an i-vector-based baseline that captures adult-to-child or childto- child rapid conversational turns in a naturalistic noisy early childhood setting. We provide analysis of various loss functions and learning algorithms using Deep Neural Networks to separate child speech from adult speech. Performance is measured in terms of diarization error rate, Jaccard error rate and shows good results for tagging adult vs children’s speech. Distinction between primary and secondary child would be useful for monitoring a given child and analysis is provided for the same. Our diarization system provides insights into the direction for preprocessing and analyzing challenging naturalistic daylong child speech recordings. 
    more » « less
  3. Understanding and assessing child verbal communication patterns is critical in facilitating effective language development. Typically speaker diarization is performed to explore children’s verbal engagement. Understanding which activity areas stimulate verbal communication can help promote more efficient language development. In this study, we present a two stage children vocal engagement prediction system that consists of (1) a near to real-time, noise robust system that measures the duration of child-to-adult and child-to-child conversations, and tracks the number of conversational turn-takings, (2) a novel child location tracking strategy, that determines in which activity areas a child spends most/least of their time. A proposed child–adult turn-taking solution relies exclusively on vocal cues observed during the interaction between a child and other children, and/or classroom teachers. By employing a threshold optimized speech activity detection using a linear combination of voicing measures, it is possible to achieve effective speech/non-speech segment detection prior to conversion assessment. This TO-COMBO-SAD reduces classification error rates for adult-child audio by 21.34% and 27.3% compared to a baseline i-Vector and standard Bayesian Information Criterion diarization systems, respectively. In addition, this study presents a unique location tracking system adult-child that helps determine the quantity of child–adult communication in specific activity areas, and which activities stimulate voice communication engagement in a child–adult education space. We observe that our proposed location tracking solution offers unique opportunities to assess speech and language interaction for children, and quantify the location context which would contribute to improve verbal communication. 
    more » « less
  4. Children’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) is always difficult due to, in part, the data scarcity problem, especially for kindergarten-aged kids. When data are scarce, the model might overfit to the training data, and hence good starting points for training are essential. Recently, meta-learning was proposed to learn model initialization (MI) for ASR tasks of different languages. This method leads to good performance when the model is adapted to an unseen language. How-ever, MI is vulnerable to overfitting on training tasks (learner overfitting). It is also unknown whether MI generalizes to other low-resource tasks. In this paper, we validate the effectiveness of MI in children’s ASR and attempt to alleviate the problem of learner overfitting. To achieve model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), we regard children’s speech at each age as a different task. In terms of learner overfitting, we propose a task-level augmentation method by simulating new ages using frequency warping techniques. Detailed experiments are conducted to show the impact of task augmentation on each age for kindergarten-aged speech. As a result, our approach achieves a relative word error rate (WER) improvement of 51% over the baseline system with no augmentation or initialization. 
    more » « less
  5. There has been growing interest in developing ubiquitous technologies to analyze adult-child speech in naturalistic settings such as free play in order to support children's social and academic development, language acquisition, and parent-child interactions. However, these technologies often rely on off-the-shelf speech processing tools that have not been evaluated on child speech or child-directed adult speech, whose unique characteristics might result in significant performance gaps when using models trained on adult speech. This work introduces the Playlogue dataset containing over 33 hours of long-form, naturalistic, play-based adult-child conversations from three different corpora of preschool-aged children. Playlogue enables researchers to train and evaluate speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition models on child-centered speech. We demonstrate the lack of generalizability of existing state-of-the-art models when evaluated on Playlogue, and show how fine-tuning models on adult-child speech mitigates the performance gap to some extent but still leaves considerable room for improvement. We further annotate over 5 hours of the Playlogue dataset with 8668 validated adult and child speech act labels, which can be used to train and evaluate models to provide clinically relevant feedback on parent-child interactions. We investigate the performance of state-of-the-art language models at automatically predicting these speech act labels, achieving significant accuracy with simple chain-of-thought prompting or minimal fine-tuning. We use inhome pilot data to validate the generalizability of models trained on Playlogue, demonstrating its utility in improving speech and language technologies for child-centered conversations. The Playlogue dataset is available for download at https://huggingface.co/datasets/playlogue/playlogue-v1. 
    more » « less