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ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5

Introduction

ChildMandarin is a comprehensive, open-source Mandarin Chinese speech dataset specifically designed for research on young children aged 3 to 5. This dataset addresses the critical lack of publicly available resources for this age group, enabling advancements in automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker verification (SV), and other related fields. The dataset is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, meaning it is available for non-commercial use.

Dataset Details

This dataset contains 41.25 hours of high-quality speech data collected from 397 children across 22 provinces in China. Key features of the dataset include:

Age Range: 3-5 years old (inclusive). This is a crucial age range often overlooked in speech datasets.
Speakers: 397 unique child speakers.
Geographic Diversity: Speakers from 22 of China's 34 provincial-level administrative divisions, capturing a range of regional accents.
Gender Balance: Approximately equal representation of male and female speakers across all age groups.
Recording Conditions: Recordings were made in quiet environments using a variety of smartphones (both Android and iPhone devices) to ensure real-world applicability.
Content: Natural, conversational speech during age-appropriate activities. The content is unrestricted, promoting spontaneous and natural interactions.
Audio Format: WAV files with a 16kHz sampling rate.
Transcriptions: Carefully crafted, character-level manual transcriptions.
Annotations: The dataset includes annotations for each utterance, and for the speakers level.
- Utterance-level: id, audio (file path), text (transcription).
- Speaker-level: speaker_id, age, gender, accent, location (province), device.

Dataset Structure

The dataset is split into three subsets:

Split	# Speakers	# Utterances	Duration (hrs)	Avg. Utterance Length (s)
`train`	317	32,658	33.35	3.68
`validation`	39	4,057	3.78	3.35
`test`	41	4,198	4.12	3.53
Total	397	40,913	41.25	3.52

The dataset file structure is as follows.

data/  
├── train/*.tar  
├── dev/*.tar  
└── test/*.tar   
speaker_info.xlsx  # summary of speaker information

Each WAV file has a corresponding JSON file with the same name, containing its annotations.

For more details, please refer to our paper ChildMandarin.

📚 Cite me

@article{zhou2024childmandarin,
  title={ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5},
  author={Zhou, Jiaming and Wang, Shiyao and Zhao, Shiwan and He, Jiabei and Sun, Haoqin and Wang, Hui and Liu, Cheng and Kong, Aobo and Guo, Yujie and Qin, Yong},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.18584},
  year={2024}
}

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