# RealClass: A Framework for Classroom Speech Simulation with Public Datasets and Game Engines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01462 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01462/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01027/) (2021)
- [The NCTE Transcripts: A Dataset of Elementary Math Classroom Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11772/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Children's ASR with Supervised and Self-supervised Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10507/) (2024)
- [My Science Tutor (MyST) -- A Large Corpus of Children's Conversational Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13347/) (2023)
- [Kid-Whisper: Towards Bridging the Performance Gap in Automatic Speech Recognition for Children VS. Adults](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07927/) (2023)
- [Adapting Multilingual Speech Representation Model for a New, Underresourced Language through Multilingual Fine-tuning and Continued Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07295/) (2023)
- [Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02302/) (2024)
- [CPT-Boosted Wav2vec2.0: Towards Noise Robust Speech Recognition for Classroom Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14494/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The scarcity of large-scale classroom speech data has hindered the development of AI-driven speech models for education. Classroom datasets remain limited and not publicly available, and the absence of dedicated classroom noise or Room Impulse Response (RIR) corpora prevents the use of standard data augmentation techniques. In this paper, we introduce a scalable methodology for synthesizing classroom noise and RIRs using game engines, a versatile framework that can extend to other domains beyond the classroom. Building on this methodology, we present RealClass, a dataset that combines a synthesized classroom noise corpus with a classroom speech dataset compiled from publicly available corpora. The speech data pairs a children's speech corpus with instructional speech extracted from YouTube videos to approximate real classroom interactions in clean conditions. Experiments on clean and noisy speech show that RealClass closely approximates real classroom speech, making it a valuable asset in the absence of abundant real classroom speech.