Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline Systems

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Speak & Improve Challenge 2025 focused on advancing spoken language assessment and feedback technologies, supported by a new comprehensive dataset of second language English learners and baseline systems for four shared tasks.

Contribution

It presents the challenge framework, the associated S&I Corpus 2025 dataset, and baseline systems for four tasks to foster research in spoken language assessment and error correction.

Findings

Baseline systems established for all four tasks.

The S&I Corpus 2025 includes 315 hours of L2 English speech data.

Open and closed tracks enable diverse research approaches.

Abstract

This paper presents the "Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Spoken Language Assessment and Feedback" -- a challenge associated with the ISCA SLaTE 2025 Workshop. The goal of the challenge is to advance research on spoken language assessment and feedback, with tasks associated with both the underlying technology and language learning feedback. Linked with the challenge, the Speak & Improve (S&I) Corpus 2025 is being pre-released, a dataset of L2 learner English data with holistic scores and language error annotation, collected from open (spontaneous) speaking tests on the Speak & Improve learning platform. The corpus consists of approximately 315 hours of audio data from second language English learners with holistic scores, and a 55-hour subset with manual transcriptions and error labels. The Challenge has four shared tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Assessment (SLA), Spoken Grammatical Error Correction (SGEC), and Spoken Grammatical Error Correction Feedback (SGECF). Each of these tasks has a closed track where a predetermined set of models and data sources are allowed to be used, and an open track where any public resource may be used. Challenge participants may do one or more of the tasks. This paper describes the challenge, the S&I Corpus 2025, and the baseline systems released for the Challenge.