Introducing MELI: the Mandarin-English Language Interview Corpus

arXiv cs.CL / 3/31/2026

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Key Points

The paper introduces MELI, an open-source Mandarin-English Language Interview corpus containing 29.8 hours of speech from 51 bilingual speakers.
MELI pairs matched Mandarin and English interview sessions featuring two speaking styles—read sentences and spontaneous interviews focused on language varieties, standardness, and learning experiences.
The dataset provides fully transcribed audio plus word- and phone-level force alignments, anonymized recordings, and supporting metadata including token/type statistics and code-switching patterns.
Recorded audio is captured at 44.1 kHz (16-bit, stereo), and the corpus is designed to enable cross-/within-language and cross-/within-speaker acoustic comparisons tied to speakers’ language attitudes.
MELI is set to be released with transcriptions, alignments, metadata, labeled map scans, and documentation under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

Abstract

We introduce the Mandarin-English Language Interview (MELI) Corpus, an open-source resource of 29.8 hours of speech from 51 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers. MELI combines matched sessions in Mandarin and English with two speaking styles: read sentences and spontaneous interviews about language varieties, standardness, and learning experiences. Audio was recorded at 44.1 kHz (16-bit, stereo). Interviews were fully transcribed, force-aligned at word and phone levels, and anonymized. Descriptively, the Mandarin component totals ~14.7 hours (mean duration 17.3 minutes) and the English component ~15.1 hours (mean duration 17.8 minutes). We report token/type statistics for each language and document code-switching patterns (frequent in Mandarin sessions; more limited in English sessions). The corpus design supports within-/cross-speaker, within/cross-language acoustic comparison and links acoustics to speakers' stated language attitudes, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The MELI Corpus will be released with transcriptions, alignments, metadata, scans of labelled maps and documentation under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.