The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings

Yanchao Yu, Arash Eshghi, Gregory Mills, Oliver Lemon


Abstract
We motivate and describe a new freely available human-human dialogue data set for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings through ostensive definition by a tutor to a learner. The data has been collected using a novel, character-by-character variant of the DiET chat tool (Healey et al., 2003; anon.) with a novel task, where a Learner needs to learn invented visual attribute words (such as “burchak” for square) from a tutor. As such, the text-based interactions closely resemble face-to-face conversation and thus contain many of the linguistic phenomena encountered in natural, spontaneous dialogue. These include self- and other-correction, mid-sentence continuations, interruptions, turn overlaps, fillers, hedges and many kinds of ellipsis. We also present a generic n-gram framework for building user (i.e. tutor) simulations from this type of incremental dialogue data, which is freely available to researchers. We show that the simulations produce outputs that are similar to the original data (e.g. 78% turn match similarity). Finally, we train and evaluate a Reinforcement Learning dialogue control agent for learning visually grounded word meanings, trained from the BURCHAK corpus. The learned policy shows comparable performance to a rule-based system built previously.
Anthology ID:
W17-2001
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Vision and Language
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Anya Belz, Erkut Erdem, Katerina Pastra, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Venue:
VL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2001
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanchao Yu, Arash Eshghi, Gregory Mills, and Oliver Lemon. 2017. The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Vision and Language, pages 1–10, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings (Yu et al., VL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2001.pdf