Spoken dialog systems for children

Abstract

We outline the main issues when designing interactive multimedia systems for children and propose a unified approach of acoustic, linguistic, and dialog modeling to system development. The acoustic, linguistic and dialog data collected in a Wizard of Oz experiment from 160 children ages 8-14 playing an interactive computer game are analyzed and children-specific modeling issues are presented. Age-dependent and modality-dependent dialog flow patterns are identified. Furthermore, extraneous speech patterns, linguistic variability and disfluencies are investigated in spontaneous children's speech, and important new results are reported. Finally, baseline automatic speech recognition results are presented for various tasks using simple acoustic and language models.