Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards Automatic Assessment Systems

Seonwoo Lee, Jihyun Mun, Sunhee Kim, Minhwa Chung


Abstract
Despite the growing demand for digital therapeutics for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there is currently no speech corpus available for Korean children with ASD. This paper introduces a speech corpus specifically designed for Korean children with ASD, aiming to advance speech technologies such as pronunciation and severity evaluation. Speech recordings from speech and language evaluation sessions were transcribed, and annotated for articulatory and linguistic characteristics. Three speech and language pathologists rated these recordings for social communication severity (SCS) and pronunciation proficiency (PP) using a 3-point Likert scale. The total number of participants will be 300 for children with ASD and 50 for typically developing (TD) children. The paper also analyzes acoustic and linguistic features extracted from speech data collected and completed for annotation from 73 children with ASD and 9 TD children to investigate the characteristics of children with ASD and identify significant features that correlate with the clinical scores. The results reveal some speech and linguistic characteristics in children with ASD that differ from those in TD children or another subgroup of ASD categorized by clinical scores, demonstrating the potential for developing automatic assessment systems for SCS and PP.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1318
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
15160–15170
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1318
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seonwoo Lee, Jihyun Mun, Sunhee Kim, and Minhwa Chung. 2024. Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards Automatic Assessment Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15160–15170, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards Automatic Assessment Systems (Lee et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1318.pdf