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Coordinating Communication in the Wild: The Artwalk Dialogue Corpus of Pedestrian Navigation and Mobile Referential Communication

The Artwalk Corpus is a collection of 48 mobile phone conversations between 24 pairs of friends and 24 pairs of strangers performing a novel, naturalistically-situated referential communication task. This task produced dialogues which, on average, are just under 40 minutes. The task requires the identification of public art while walking around and navigating pedestrian routes in the downtown area of Santa Cruz, California. The task involves a Director on the UCSC campus with access to maps providing verbal instructions to a Follower executing the task. The task provides a setting for real-world situated dialogic language and is designed to: (1) elicit entrainment and coordination of referring expressions between the dialogue participants, (2) examine the effect of friendship on dialogue strategies, and (3) examine how the need to complete the task while negotiating myriad, unanticipated events in the real world ― such as avoiding cars and other pedestrians ― affects linguistic coordination and other dialogue behaviors. Previous work on entrainment and coordinating communication has primarily focused on similar tasks in laboratory settings where there are no interruptions and no need to navigate from one point to another in a complex space. The corpus provides a general resource for studies on how coordinated task-oriented dialogue changes when we move outside the laboratory and into the world. It can also be used for studies of entrainment in dialogue, and the form and style of pedestrian instruction dialogues, as well as the effect of friendship on dialogic behaviors.