Enabling automatic transcription of child-centered audio recordings from real-world environments

Abstract: Longform audio recordings obtained with microphones worn by children-also known as child-centered daylong recordings-have become a standard method for studying children's language experiences and their impact on subsequent language development. Transcripts of longform speech audio would enable rich analyses at various linguistic levels, yet the massive scale of typical longform corpora prohibits comprehensive manual annotation. At the same time, automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based transcription faces significant challenges due to the noisy, unconstrained nature of real-world audio, and no existing study has successfully applied ASR to transcribe such data. However, previous attempts have assumed that ASR must process each longform recording in its entirety. In this work, we present an approach to automatically detect those utterances in longform audio that can be reliably transcribed with modern ASR systems, allowing automatic and relatively accurate transcription of a notable proportion of all speech in typical longform data. We validate the approach on four English longform audio corpora, showing that it achieves a median word error rate (WER) of 0% and a mean WER of 18% when transcribing 13% of the total speech in the dataset. In contrast, transcribing all speech without any filtering yields a median WER of 52% and a mean WER of 51%. We also compare word log-frequencies derived from the automatic transcripts with those from manual annotations and show that the frequencies correlate at r = 0.92 (Pearson) for all transcribed words and r = 0.98 for words that appear at least five times in the automatic transcripts. Overall, the work provides a concrete step toward increasingly detailed automated linguistic analyses of child-centered longform audio.