Glawinette: a Linguistically Motivated Derivational Description of French Acquired from GLAWI

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 378–385 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 378 TLT-school: a Corpus of Non Native Children Speech R. Gretter, M. Matassoni, S. Bann`o, D. Falavigna Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) Trento, Italy {gretter, matasso, sbanno, falavi}@fbk.eu Abstract 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. Keywords: Children speech, Non-native speech, Language learning 1 Introduction A large set of both written and spoken data has been col- lected during the implementation of campaigns aimed at assessing the proficiency of Italian students learning both German and English. Part of these data has been included in a corpus, named “Trentino Language Testing” in schools (TLT-school), that will be described in the following. De- sign of the campaigns, involvement of schools, data collec- tion and annotation by human experts were carried out and coordinated by IPRASE, a research institute dealing with education which is located in Trentino, North Italy. All the collected sentences have been annotated by human experts in terms of some predefined “indicators” which, in turn, were used to assign the proficiency level to each student undertaking the assigned test. This level is ex- pressed according to the well-known Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Eu- rope, 2001) scale. The CEFR defines 6 levels of profi- ciency: A1 (beginner), A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. The levels considered in the evaluation campaigns where the data have been collected are: A1 (primary school), A2 (secondary school) and B1 (high school). The indicators measure the linguistic competence of test takers both in relation to the content (e.g. grammatical cor- rectness, lexical richness, semantic coherence, etc.) and to the speaking capabilities (e.g. pronunciation, fluency, etc.). Refer to Section 2 for a description of the adopted indica- tors. The learners are Italian students, between 9 and 16 years old. They took proficiency tests by answering question prompts provided in written form. The “TLT-school” cor- pus, that we are going to make publicly available, contains part of the spoken answers (together with the respective manual transcriptions) recorded during some of the above mentioned evaluation campaigns. We will release the writ- ten answers in future. Details and critical issues found …

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