*Introduction* First DIHARD Challenge Development - SEEDLingS was developed by Duke University and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains approximately two hours of English child language recordings along with corresponding annotations used in support of the First DIHARD Challenge. This release, when combined with First DIHARD Challenge Development - Eight Sources (LDC2019S09), contains the development set audio data and annotation as well as the official scoring tool. The First DIHARD Challenge was an attempt to reinvigorate work on diarization through a shared task focusing on "hard" diarization; that is, speech diarization for challenging corpora where there was an expectation that existing state-of-the-art systems would fare poorly. As such, it included speech from a wide sampling of domains representing diversity in number of speakers, speaker demographics, interaction style, recording quality, and environmental conditions, including, but not limited to: clinical interviews, extended child language acquisition recordings, YouTube recordings, and conversations collected in restaurants. *Data* The source data was drawn from the SEEDLingS (The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills) corpus, designed to investigate how infants' early linguistic and environmental input plays a role in their learning. Recordings were generated in the home environment of infants in the Rochester, New York area. A subset of that data was annotated by LDC for use in the First DIHARD Challenge. All audio is provided in the form of 16 kHz, mono-channel FLAC files. The diarization for each recording is stored as a NIST Rich Transcription Time Marked (RTTM) file. RTTM files are space-separated text files containing one turn per line. Segmentation files are stored as HTK label files. Each of these files contains one speech segment per line. Both of the annotation file types are encoded as UTF-8. More information about the file formats is provided in the included documentation.

Creator(s)

Christopher Cieri

Neville Ryant

Mark Liberman

James Fiumara

Distributor(s)

Linguistic Data Consortium

Right Holder(s)

Portions © 2019 Duke University, © 2019 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania