The Margarita Dialogue Corpus: A Data Set for Time-Offset Interactions and Unstructured Dialogue Systems

Alberto Chierici, Nizar Habash, Margarita Bicec


Abstract
Time-Offset Interaction Applications (TOIAs) are systems that simulate face-to-face conversations between humans and digital human avatars recorded in the past. Developing a well-functioning TOIA involves several research areas: artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, question answering, and dialogue systems. The first challenges are to define a sensible methodology for data collection and to create useful data sets for training the system to retrieve the best answer to a user’s question. In this paper, we present three main contributions: a methodology for creating the knowledge base for a TOIA, a dialogue corpus, and baselines for single-turn answer retrieval. We develop the methodology using a two-step strategy. First, we let the avatar maker list pairs by intuition, guessing what possible questions a user may ask to the avatar. Second, we record actual dialogues between random individuals and the avatar-maker. We make the Margarita Dialogue Corpus available to the research community. This corpus comprises the knowledge base in text format, the video clips for each answer, and the annotated dialogues.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
476–484
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.60
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alberto Chierici, Nizar Habash, and Margarita Bicec. 2020. The Margarita Dialogue Corpus: A Data Set for Time-Offset Interactions and Unstructured Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 476–484, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Margarita Dialogue Corpus: A Data Set for Time-Offset Interactions and Unstructured Dialogue Systems (Chierici et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.60.pdf