Developing and evaluating an emergency scenario dialogue corpus

AbstractThe present paper describes the development and evaluation of the Polish emergency dialogue corpus recorded for studying alignment phenomena in stress scenarios. The challenge is that emergency dialogues are more complex on many levels than standard information negotiation dialogues, different resources are needed for differential investigation, and resources for this kind of corpus are rare. Currently there is no comparable corpus for Polish. In the present context, alignment is meant as adaptation on the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels of communication between the two interlocutors, including choice of similar lexical items and speaking style. Four different dialogue scenarios were arranged and prompt speech material was created. Two maps for the map-tasks and one emergency diapix were design to prompt semi-spontaneous dialogues simulating stress and natural communicative situations. The dialogue corpus was recorded taking into account the public character of conversations in the emergency setting. The linguistic study of alignment in this kind of dialogue made it possible to design and implement a prototype of a Polish adaptive dialogue system to support stress scenario communication (not described in this paper).