37.903, FYI: Child Speech Word & Phonetic ASR Challenge

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-903. Thu Mar 05 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.903, FYI: Child Speech Word & Phonetic ASR Challenge

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Date: 03-Mar-2026
From: Christine Chung [christine at drivendata.org]
Subject: Child Speech Word & Phonetic ASR Challenge


DrivenData has launched the On Top of Pasketti: Children’s Speech
Recognition Challenge, which focuses on developing open, high-quality
ASR models designed specifically for children’s speech. These tools
have the potential to support early literacy, speech screening,
assessment, and other educational and accessibility applications.
A key feature of the challenge is the dataset itself: participants
will work with nearly 560k transcribed utterances representing 519
hours of child speech, including a substantial portion of speech newly
transcribed specifically for this challenge. The goal is to enable
research and methods that better reflect how children actually speak.
Challenge details
- Open now through April 6, 2026
- $120,000 total prize pool
- Two tracks: Word-level ASR and Phonetic ASR
- Emphasis on open data, open code, and broad community benefit
- Website: https://kidsasr.drivendata.org/
To support the challenge:
- Participate directly by signing up at
https://kidsasr.drivendata.org/, and/or
- Share this opportunity with colleagues, labs, students, or listservs
that might be interested
If you’d like to connect or have questions about the data or challenge
design, please feel free to reply directly or reach out at
info at drivendata.org.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Clinical Linguistics
                     Computational Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Phonetics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)




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