The Margarita Dialogue Corpus: A Data Set for Time-Offset Interactions and Unstructured Dialogue Systems

Time-Offset Interaction Applications (TOIAs) are systems that simulate face-to-face conversations between humans and digital human avatars recorded in the past. Developing a well-functioning TOIA involves several research areas: artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, question answering, and dialogue systems. The first challenges are to define a sensible methodology for data collection and to create useful data sets for training the system to retrieve the best answer to a user’s question. In this paper, we present three main contributions: a methodology for creating the knowledge base for a TOIA, a dialogue corpus, and baselines for single-turn answer retrieval. We develop the methodology using a two-step strategy. First, we let the avatar maker list pairs by intuition, guessing what possible questions a user may ask to the avatar. Second, we record actual dialogues between random individuals and the avatar-maker. We make the Margarita Dialogue Corpus available to the research community. This corpus comprises the knowledge base in text format, the video clips for each answer, and the annotated dialogues.