A Shared Task for Spoken CALL?

Abstract

We argue that the field of spoken CALL needs a shared task in order to facilitate comparisons between different groups and methodologies, and describe a concrete example of such a task, based on data collected from a speech-enabled online tool which has been used to help young Swiss German teens practise skills in English conversation. Items are prompt-response pairs, where the prompt is a piece of German text and the response is a recorded English audio file. The task is to label pairs as “accept” or “reject”, accepting responses which are grammatically and linguistically correct to match a set of hidden gold standard answers as closely as possible. Initial resources are provided so that a scratch system can be constructed with a minimal investment of effort, and in particular without necessarily using a speech recogniser. Training data for the task will be released in June 2016, and test data in January 2017.

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