serve-return

Count adult-child conversational turns from any speaker-labelled transcript, by the published five-second rule, and keep no words.

pip install serve-return

Source, tests and the evidence for every number: https://github.com/usv240/volley/tree/main/packages/serve-return

No speaker labels? serve_return.blind reads who is the child and who the adult from the transcript itself, with a model trained on the CHILDES Gleason corpus and shipped in the package. On families it never saw, the day's turn count came within 9.6 percent of the true count in the median session (harness/blind in the repository, https://github.com/usv240/volley/tree/main/harness/blind).

from serve_return import Roles, count_day
from serve_return.blind import relabel

day = count_day(relabel(unlabelled_utterances), Roles.of(adult=["adult"], child=["child"]))

from serve_return import Utterance, Roles, count_day

roles = Roles.of(adult=["Ujwal"], child=["Unknown"])
day = count_day([
    Utterance(start=1790714507.0, speaker="Ujwal", text="What did you build today?"),
    Utterance(start=1790714509.5, speaker="Unknown", text="A tower. It fell."),
    Utterance(start=1790714511.0, speaker="Ujwal", text="How tall was it?"),
], roles)

day.turns              # 2
day.questions_adult    # 2
day.words_discarded    # 13
day.to_dict()          # numbers only; nothing here can hold a word

A turn is one alternation between an adult and a child within five seconds: an adult utterance answered by a child within five seconds of its end, or the reverse. Same-role runs merge first. This is the conversational turn count the developmental studies used (Gilkerson et al., Pediatrics 2018; Romeo et al., Psychological Science 2018), as produced by the LENA system and as hand-counted under "the 5-second pause rule" in the manual comparison in Child Development (doi 10.1111/cdev.13495). LENA is a registered mark of the LENA Foundation; this package implements the published definition and is not affiliated.

What comes out, per hour and per day: turns, who served, responses within the window, median reply time, adult questions, the longest exchange, seconds spoken by each role, utterance counts, and the number of words read and discarded. The only text field in the output is a date.

Labels are yours: a Bee wristband labels the wearer one way and other voices another; CHILDES uses MOT, FAT, CHI. Anything you do not map is ignored, which is what a third adult in the room should be.

MIT. Part of Volley, built for the Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon.