The DBOX Corpus Collection of Spoken Human-Human and Human-Machine Dialogues

This paper describes the data collection and annotation carried out within the DBOX project ( Eureka project, number E! 7152). This project aims to develop interactive games based on spoken natural language human-computer dialogues, in 3 European languages: English, German and French. We collect the DBOX data continuously. We first start with human-human Wizard of Oz experiments to collect human-human data in order to model natural human dialogue behaviour, for better understanding of phenomena of human interactions and predicting interlocutors actions, and then replace the human Wizard by an increasingly advanced dialogue system, using evaluation data for system improvement. The designed dialogue system relies on a Question-Answering (QA) approach, but showing truly interactive gaming behaviour, e.g., by providing feedback, managing turns and contact, producing social signals and acts, e.g., encouraging vs. downplaying, polite vs. rude, positive vs. negative attitude towards players or their actions, etc. The DBOX dialogue corpus has required substantial investment. We expect it to have a great impact on the rest of the project. The DBOX project consortium will continue to maintain the corpus and to take an interest in its growth, e.g., expand to other languages. The resulting corpus will be publicly released.