Collecting Visually-Grounded Dialogue with A Game Of Sorts

Bram Willemsen, Dmytro Kalpakchi, Gabriel Skantze


Abstract
An idealized, though simplistic, view of the referring expression production and grounding process in (situated) dialogue assumes that a speaker must merely appropriately specify their expression so that the target referent may be successfully identified by the addressee. However, referring in conversation is a collaborative process that cannot be aptly characterized as an exchange of minimally-specified referring expressions. Concerns have been raised regarding assumptions made by prior work on visually-grounded dialogue that reveal an oversimplified view of conversation and the referential process. We address these concerns by introducing a collaborative image ranking task, a grounded agreement game we call “A Game Of Sorts”. In our game, players are tasked with reaching agreement on how to rank a set of images given some sorting criterion through a largely unrestricted, role-symmetric dialogue. By putting emphasis on the argumentation in this mixed-initiative interaction, we collect discussions that involve the collaborative referential process. We describe results of a small-scale data collection experiment with the proposed task. All discussed materials, which includes the collected data, the codebase, and a containerized version of the application, are publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.242
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
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, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2257–2268
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.242
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bram Willemsen, Dmytro Kalpakchi, and Gabriel Skantze. 2022. Collecting Visually-Grounded Dialogue with A Game Of Sorts. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2257–2268, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Collecting Visually-Grounded Dialogue with A Game Of Sorts (Willemsen et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.242.pdf
Code
 willemsenbram/a-game-of-sorts
Data
A Game Of SortsPhotoBook