The restaurant booking corpus – content-identical comparative human-human and humancomputer simulated telephone conversations

Authors: Ingo Siegert, Jannik Nietzold, Ralph Heinemann, Andreas Wendemuth

Abstract:

A new dataset, the Restaurant Booking Corpus (RBC) is introduced,comprising 90 telephone dialogs of 30 German speaking students (10 males, 20females) interacting either with one out of two different technical dialogue systemsor with a human conversational partner. The aim of the participants was to reservea table each at three different restaurants for four persons under certain constraints(late dinner time for one day, sitting outside, reachable via public transport, avail-ability of vegetarian food, getting the directions to the restaurant). The purpose ofthis constraints was to enable a longer and realistic conversation over all three calls.This dataset is explicitly designed to eliminate certain factors influencing the rolemodel of the interlocutor: the effect of a visible counterpart, the speech content,and the dialog domain. Furthermore, AttrakDiff is used to evaluate the correct im-plementation of the conversational systems. A human annotation and an automaticrecognition is pursued to verify that the speech characteristics are indistinguishablefor the human-directed and the device-directed calls.