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Dijk, B.M.A. van; Duijn, M.J. van; Verberne, S.; Spruit, M. (2023)

ChiSCor: a corpus of freely-told fantasy stories by Dutch children for computational linguistics and cognitive science

Article in monograph or in proceedings
In this resource paper we release ChiSCor, a new corpus containing 619 fantasy stories, told freely by 442 Dutch children aged 4-12. ChiSCor was compiled for studying how children render character perspectives, and unravelling language and cognition in development, with computational tools. Unlike existing resources, ChiSCor’s stories were produced in natural contexts, in line with recent calls for more ecologically valid datasets. ChiSCor hosts text, audio, and annotations for character complexity and linguistic complexity. Additional metadata (e.g. education of caregivers) is available for one third of the Dutch children. ChiSCor also includes a small set of 62 English stories. This paper details how ChiSCor was compiled and shows its potential for future work with three brief case studies: i) we show that the syntactic complexity of stories is strikingly stable across children’s ages; ii) we extend work on Zipfian distributions in free speech and show that ChiSCor obeys Zipf’s...Show moreIn this resource paper we release ChiSCor, a new corpus containing 619 fantasy stories, told freely by 442 Dutch children aged 4-12. ChiSCor was compiled for studying how children render character perspectives, and unravelling language and cognition in development, with computational tools. Unlike existing resources, ChiSCor’s stories were produced in natural contexts, in line with recent calls for more ecologically valid datasets. ChiSCor hosts text, audio, and annotations for character complexity and linguistic complexity. Additional metadata (e.g. education of caregivers) is available for one third of the Dutch children. ChiSCor also includes a small set of 62 English stories. This paper details how ChiSCor was compiled and shows its potential for future work with three brief case studies: i) we show that the syntactic complexity of stories is strikingly stable across children’s ages; ii) we extend work on Zipfian distributions in free speech and show that ChiSCor obeys Zipf’s law closely, reflecting its social context; iii) we show that even though ChiSCor is relatively small, the corpus is rich enough to train informative lemma vectors that allow us to analyse children’s language use. We end with a reflection on the value of narrative datasets in computational linguistics.
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All authors
Dijk, B.M.A. van; Duijn, M.J. van; Verberne, S.; Spruit, M.
Editor(s)
Jing, J.; Reitter, D.; Deng, S.
Date
2023-12-07
Title of host publication
Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Edition
27
Pages
352–363
ISBN (print)
9798891760608
Link
https://aclanthology.org/2023.conll-1.23

Conference

Conference
27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Date
2023-12-06 - 2023-12-07
Location
Singapore, Singapore

Funding

Sponsorship
NWO
Grant number
VI.Veni.191C.051