The OSU Quake 2004 corpus of two-party situated problem-solving dialogs

This report describes the Ohio State University Quake 2004 corpus of English spontaneous task-oriented two-person situated dialog. The corpus was collected using a first-person display of an interior space (rooms, corridors, stairs) in which the partners collaborate on a treasure hunt task. The corpus contains exciting new features such as deictic and exophoric reference, language that is calibrated against the spatial arrangement of objects in the world, and partial-observability of the task world imposed by the perceptual limitations inherent in the physical arrangement of the world. The corpus differs from prior dialog collections which intentionally restricted the interacting subjects from sharing any perceptual context, and which allowed one subject (the direction-giver or system) to have total knowledge of the state of the task world. The corpus consists of audio/video recordings of each person's experience in the virtual world and orthographic transcriptions. The virtual world can also be used by other researchers who want to conduct additional studies using this stimulus.