Background: Corpora of disordered speech (CDS) are invaluable resources for education and research but they are costly and hard to build and difficult to share due to privacy issues. DELAD, which means ‘shared’ in Swedish, is a project initiated by Professors Martin Ball and Nicole Müller in 2015 that aims to address this issue by establishing a platform for researchers to share disordered speech datasets with interested audiences (https://delad.ruhosting.nl/wordpress/). To date four workshops have been held, where selected researchers and data curation specialists discussed relevant issues in setting up such an archive. The poster will report the latest progress of the project since our last report at ICPLA 2018.
Methods: Since our last update, the fourth workshop (funded by CLARIN, Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) was held in Utrecht in Jan-2019. Twenty participants from 11 countries, covering various expertise including speech disorder researchers, infrastructure specialists, and intellectual property rights, ethics and General Data Protection Regulation specialists, participated the workshop. Small working groups were formed to follow up on the actions agreed at the workshop. The next workshop will be held in Helsinki in Jun-2020 on topics including Data Protection Impact Assessments, reviewing changes in ethics perspectives in academia on sharing CDS, and voice conversion as a mean to pseudonomise speech.
Results: The major latest development includes establishing a CLARIN K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (https://ace.ruhosting.nl/) where CDS can be hosted and accessed through the CLARIN B-Centres, The Language Archive (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/) and TalkBank (https://talkbank.org/); and refurbishing the DELAD website with information and application forms for researchers to join and share their datasets. The outcome of the Helsinki workshop will be reported.
Conclusion: Positive and steady progress in developing DELAD has been made since 2015. Directions for further advance of the initiative will be discussed and information about contributing to the repository will be available.