README.md

metadata

configs:
  - config_name: asr
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: asr/train-*
  - config_name: general
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: general/train-*
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
extra_gated_prompt: >
  CHILDES-Aligned is derived from the CHILDES database (TalkBank) and is
  distributed under TalkBank's terms of use
  (https://talkbank.org/share/rules.html). Access is reviewed manually. By
  requesting access you agree to:


  1. Use the data for **non-commercial research** only.

  2. **Cite** the BEACON paper and **every source CHILDES corpus** you use (see
  `corpora.tsv`).

  3. Follow the TalkBank Ground Rules, including respecting participant privacy
  and **not redistributing** the audio.
extra_gated_fields:
  Name: text
  Email: text
  Affiliation: text
  Intended use: text
  I agree to the TalkBank/CHILDES terms and to cite BEACON and the source corpora: checkbox
extra_gated_button_content: Request access
license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0
language:
  - en
extra_gated_heading: Access CHILDES-Aligned
task_categories:
  - automatic-speech-recognition
tags:
  - speech
  - child-speech
  - childes
  - asr
  - forced-alignment
  - timestamp-curation
pretty_name: CHILDES-Aligned

CHILDES-Aligned: Curated Child-Speech Dataset (BEACON)

English child-speech audio clips with corrected utterance-level timestamps, curated from CHILDES with BEACON (Boundary Estimation via Alignment CONsensus): multiple ASR systems' word timestamps are aligned to the human CHAT transcripts and fused by consensus to recover reliable utterance boundaries, without altering the original transcripts.

• Speakers: target child (CHI) only.
• Audio: 16 kHz mono WAV, one clip per (merged) child turn.
• License/terms: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike), inherited from CHILDES, under the TalkBank ground rules. Cite the source corpora you use — see corpora.tsv.

Two released versions (paper Table 1)

	General (raw CHAT)	ASR (verbatim)
CHILDES corpora	49	49
Recordings (sessions)	5,533	5,344
Child age range	0;6–14;3	0;6–14;3
Utterances (clips)	501,880	310,983
Audio (hours)	413.3	282.6
Words / vocabulary	2.18 M / 20,581	1.63 M / 18,168
Transcript	raw CHAT	verbatim-normalized

Ages use CHILDES years;months notation (0;6 = 0 years 6 months).

• general/ — lossless, general-purpose. All clips keep their raw CHAT text (unintelligibility xxx, pauses, &=events, terminators, etc.), so it is not tied to any single downstream task: distribution, child-language analysis, custom pipelines.
• asr/ — a stricter subset of General for ASR training: transcripts are verbatim-normalized and each clip must pass an independent ASR agreement check (drops clips whose audio and transcript disagree). The ASR version is a labeled subset of the same audio — no separate audio store.

The ASR subset is derived from General in two passes: (1) verbatim normalization of the CHAT text (text_normalization.md), dropping empty / unintelligible (xxx/yyy/www) references; (2) an ASR-agreement filter — each clip is transcribed by a fixed out-of-ensemble ASR and dropped if it disagrees with the normalized reference beyond a threshold.

Label schema ({version}/manifest.jsonl, one JSON object per clip)

Fields per row, in order:

field	meaning
audio	the clip audio, 16 kHz mono, embedded (plays in the viewer)
text	transcript — raw CHAT (General) or verbatim-normalized (ASR)
text_original	(ASR only) the raw CHAT text before normalization
start_sec, end_sec	the clip's recovered span on the original recording timeline (seconds)
duration	clip length in seconds (equals end_sec − start_sec)
recording_id	source CHILDES recording/session the clip was cut from
corpus	source CHILDES corpus — cite it (see corpora.tsv)
child_age	child's age at recording in CHILDES years;months.days notation, e.g. 2;00.29 = 2 years, 0 months, 29 days (0;6 = 6 months). Empty where the source did not record it.
child_sex	child's sex (male / female); empty where unspecified
child_group	child's group / clinical status where annotated, e.g. TD = typically developing; empty (~80% of clips) where unspecified

(child fields come from the source .cha @ID header.) Labels carry the transcript plus minimal participant/provenance metadata only — no per-clip quality/confidence fields. All clips were recovered with the same BEACON configuration (quad_all ensemble, conservative 0.5/0.9 consensus, union spans, ≤1 s same-speaker turn merge, +0.5 s padding).

Method / provenance

English CHILDES recordings → recording-level QC (drop mislabeled non-English, silent, all-model-untranscribable) → per-recording multi-ASR word timestamps (WhisperX, Parakeet, Canary, Qwen3) → BEACON chunk-DP alignment to the CHAT reference utterances → IoU-consensus fusion → adjacent CHI turns with ≤1 s gaps merged (+0.5 s padding) → clip cutting. The ASR version adds normalization + the ASR-agreement filter. Text normalization spec: text_normalization.md.

Limitations

• Child-speaker only; adult turns are not released as clips.
• Timestamps are model-recovered, not hand-aligned; the hardest child utterances are disproportionately abstained on (no clip) or filtered.
• The ASR subset is biased toward judge-transcribable speech; do not use it as the sole source of hard child speech.
• English CHILDES only.

Citation

Please cite the paper and the individual source CHILDES corpora you use, listed in corpora.tsv (TalkBank requires citing the corpora):

@article{zheng2026childesaligned,
  title   = {CHILDES-Aligned: A Curated Children's Speech Dataset via Multi-Model Timestamp Ensembling},
  author  = {Zheng, Haolong and Hu, Yuanzhuo and Liang, Xinyu and Sunder, Vishal and Liu, Dancheng and Xiong, Jinjun and Thomas, Samuel and Kingsbury, Brian and Wu, Zhizheng and Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark A.},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.03670},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03670}
}