MDC-R: The Minecraft Dialogue Corpus with Reference

TL;DR

The paper introduces MDC-R, a richly annotated Minecraft dialogue corpus with references, designed to support research in reference resolution within dynamic, multi-turn, situated dialogues, and demonstrates its utility through an initial experiment.

Contribution

It presents a new annotated dialogue corpus with reference annotations, enhancing resources for studying linguistic phenomena in interactive environments.

Findings

MDC-R contains expert annotations of anaphoric and deictic references.

Quantitative and qualitative analyses validate the corpus quality.

An experiment shows the corpus's usefulness for referring expression comprehension.

Abstract

We introduce the Minecraft Dialogue Corpus with Reference (MDC-R). MDC-R is a new language resource that supplements the original Minecraft Dialogue Corpus (MDC) with expert annotations of anaphoric and deictic reference. MDC's task-orientated, multi-turn, situated dialogue in a dynamic environment has motivated multiple annotation efforts, owing to the interesting linguistic phenomena that this setting gives rise to. We believe it can serve as a valuable resource when annotated with reference, too. Here, we discuss our method of annotation and the resulting corpus, and provide both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the data. Furthermore, we carry out a short experiment demonstrating the usefulness of our corpus for referring expression comprehension.