Annotation of joint projects and information states in human-NPC dialogues

We present a corpus of human-NPC interactions in a virtual environment. The corpus has been obtained through a Wizard-of-Oz experiment simulating a scenario where the user furnishes a room with the help of a virtual interior designer. With the aim of extracting useful information for the development of a dialogue model, an annotation scheme and representation format have been designed. The unit of annotation is the minimal joint project. Minimal joint projects are represented as feature-structures containing information on their goals, the information state shared by the dialogue participants and the actions composing the projects. The representation format is suitable for describing dialogues independently of the task and domain and can serve as representation of dialogue states in dialogue models. A methodology for the generation of project representations relying on manual and automatic annotation has also been developed. The annotated corpus allows for the automatic extraction of dialogue transitions and delivers useful information for the development of the natural language understanding and generation modules.