Characterizing Language Use in a Collaborative Situated Game

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Portal Dialogue Corpus, a large dataset of spoken dialogue from a cooperative video game, revealing unique linguistic phenomena in collaborative, situated problem-solving scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a new, publicly available corpus of in-game dialogue with detailed annotations, enabling future research on language in complex collaborative environments.

Findings

Identification of complex spatial references in dialogue

Analysis of clarification and repair behaviors

Discovery of ad-hoc convention formation in game communication

Abstract

Cooperative video games, where multiple participants must coordinate by communicating and reasoning under uncertainty in complex environments, yield a rich source of language data. We collect the Portal Dialogue Corpus: a corpus of 11.5 hours of spoken human dialogue in the co-op mode of the popular Portal 2 virtual puzzle game, comprising 24.5K total utterances. We analyze player language and behavior, identifying a number of linguistic phenomena that rarely appear in most existing chitchat or task-oriented dialogue corpora, including complex spatial reference, clarification and repair, and ad-hoc convention formation. To support future analyses of language use in complex, situated, collaborative problem-solving scenarios, we publicly release the corpus, which comprises player videos, audio, transcripts, game state data, and both manual and automatic annotations of language data.