The Indiana "Cooperative Remote Search Task" (CReST) Corpus

This paper introduces a novel corpus of natural language dialogues obtained from humans performing a cooperative, remote, search task (CReST) as it occurs naturally in a variety of scenarios (e.g., search and rescue missions in disaster areas). This corpus is unique in that it involves remote collaborations between two interlocutors who each have to perform tasks that require the other’s assistance. In addition, one interlocutor’s tasks require physical movement through an indoor environment as well as interactions with physical objects within the environment. The multi-modal corpus contains the speech signals as well as transcriptions of the dialogues, which are additionally annotated for dialog structure, disfluencies, and for constituent and dependency syntax. On the dialogue level, the corpus was annotated for separate dialogue moves, based on the classification developed by Carletta et al. (1997) for coding task-oriented dialogues. Disfluencies were annotated using the scheme developed by Lickley (1998). The syntactic annotation comprises POS annotation, Penn Treebank style constituent annotations as well as dependency annotations based on the dependencies of pennconverter.