Our research is concerned with the development of robotic systems which can support people in household environments, such as taking care of elderly people. A central goal of our research consists in creating robot systems which are able to learn and communicate about a given environment without the need of a specially trained user. For the communication with such users it is necessary that the robot is able to communicate multimodally, which especially includes the ability to communicate in natural language. Our research is concerned with the development of robotic systems which can support people in household environments, such as taking care of elderly people. A central goal of our research consists in creating robot systems which are able to learn and communicate about a given environment without the need of a specially trained user. For the communication with such users it is necessary that the robot is able to communicate multimodally, which especially includes the ability to communicate in natural language. We believe that the ability to communicate naturally in multimodal communication must be supported by the ability to access contextual information, with topical knowledge being an important aspect of this knowledge. Therefore, we currently develop a topic tracking system for situated human-robot communication on our robot systems. This paper describes the BITT (Bielefeld Topic Tracking) corpus which we built in order to develop and evaluate our system. The corpus consists of human-robot communication sequences about a home-like environment, delivering access to the information sources a multimodal topic tracking system requires.

The paper describes an annotation scheme for coreference developed within the application context of text-to-hypertext conversion. In this context coference is used (1) for generating document-internal and cross-document hyperlinks, and (2) for resolving anaphoric expressions in order to achieve cohesive closedness in hypertext nodes. We will argue that for the purpose of cross-document linking it is necessary to separate the annotation of coreference relations from the annotation of anaphoric relations. To account for this requirement, we developed a knowledge-based annotation scheme that relates referential expressions in the text to entities in a knowledge representation, which is modeled using XML Topic Maps.