Metadata harmonisation: align spoken-data fields with UniDive naming conventions
Back to English CHILDES · Back to index
Repo: https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_English-CHILDES
Cross-posting from the UniDive WG1 T1.5 (spoken language guidelines) metadata harmonisation review. We compared UD_English-CHILDES’s current CoNLL-U metadata against the proposed naming conventions (see also the full treebank status table). This is a suggestion for maintainers to review - feel free to push back on anything that doesn’t fit the corpus.
1. Document-level (naming conventions)
The sentences appear to be shuffled: consecutive sentences jump between corpora at random (Brown, Brown, Braunwald, Brown, Providence, ...). We confirmed this is real by sorting by original_sent_id within each corpus_name - that recovers a coherent original order and a constant child_age, so it’s not just a split artifact.
| Field | Suggestion |
|---|---|
corpus_name |
recompose: sort sentences by original_sent_id within each corpus_name, then set corpus_name once per document as # newdoc id |
Please confirm: corpus_name is the CHILDES study name, not a single recording - e.g. Brown alone contains three different children (Adam, Eve, Sarah), and Providence contains three more (Lily, Naima, Violet). If a “document” should mean one recording session rather than an entire multi-year study, newdoc id may need to key on (corpus_name, child_name, child_age) instead - child_age looks constant within each original session.
2. Speaker-level (naming conventions)
| Field | Suggestion |
|---|---|
child_name |
rename to speaker_id |
child_age |
rename to speaker_age |
child_gender |
rename to speaker_gender |
chi l d |
this looks like a data bug rather than a real field: a single malformed line (# chi l d = 37.29..., 1 occurrence out of 48183 sentences) - almost certainly a corrupted child_age entry, could you check/fix the source export? |
3. Sentence-level (naming conventions)
| Field | Suggestion |
|---|---|
s_24_sent_id |
present on ~27% of sentences (12984/48183); the literal 24 looks like an unsubstituted template value - could you clarify what this represents? |
This issue was prepared as part of the UniDive WG1 T1.5 spoken language guidelines effort. Happy to help implement these changes ourselves if that’s easier than doing it on your end - just let us know.