TRAINS Dialogue Corpus
Home |
People |
Projects |
Publications |
Resources
As part of the TRAINS
project, a corpus of problem solving dialogues was collected. The dialogues
involve two participants: one who plays the role of a user and has a
certain task to accomplish, and another who plays the role of the
system by acting as a planning assistant.
The first collection
The first dialogue collection was done for the purpose of studying the
prosody of discourse structure, and is briefly documented in the
technical note ``A study on prosody and discourse structure in
cooperative dialogues'' (
text ,
figures ). The collection was not very extensive, but it was the
first one using the Trains domain.
The second set of dialogues were collected in 1991. The manner in
which these dialogues were collected is described in the technical
note
``The Trains 91 Dialogues''. The
transcriptions of these dialogues are also available.
In 1992 and 1993, more dialogues were collected, this time using the
Waves software (Entropic Research Laboratories), which allows
time-aligned word transcriptions to be produced. These dialogues along
with the word transcriptions, are available on CD-ROM from the LDC.
Altogether, this corpus includes 98 dialogs included, collected using
20 different tasks and 34 different speakers. This amounts to six and
a half hours of speech, about 5900 speaker turns, and 55,000
transcribed words. The collection and transcription of the dialogues
is documented in the technical note ``The
Trains 93 Dialogues''. The transcriptions themselves are available
here.
In collecting and annotating ``The Trains 93 Dialogues'', we developed
a set of tools for converting a DAT recording into a fully segmented
and annotated dialogue. These tools allow the user to progress
stepwise through this process, from creating the initial dialogue
audio file, breaking up the dialogue into a sequence of single-speaker
utterance files that preserve the sequentially of the dialogue,
annotating the utterance files, printing the contents of the dialogue,
and updating the breakup of the dialogue. These tools are described
in the Trains technical note,
``Dialogue Transcription Tools'', and will be available through
ftp, as well as on the CD-ROM. The toolset itself is available in a
tar
file.
Uses of the Corpus
The dialogues that we have been collecting have played
an integral part in the Trains project. They have supplied us with
empirical evidence of the types of phenomena that can occur in spoken
dialogues. They have also provided us with data for our empirically
based work. For instance, we have used it to train a parser that uses
statistical preferences, and to train a part-of-speech tagger that
models speech repairs
(Heeman and Allen, 1994).
Last change: 1 Dec 2000 by stent