Spoken dialog systems for children

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