2025/12/03 by Nicholas Tomlin, Tomlin, Nicholas, Naitian Zhou +25 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Language and cultural evolution #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Speech and dialogue systems #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.03381
openalex publication_date 2025/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/12/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cooperative video games, where multiple participants must coordinate by communicating and reasoning under uncertainty in complex environments, yield a rich source of language data. We collect the Portal Dialogue Corpus: a corpus of 11.5 hours of spoken human dialogue in the co-op mode of the popular Portal 2 virtual puzzle game, comprising 24.5K total utterances. We analyze player language and behavior, identifying a number of linguistic phenomena that rarely appear in most existing chitchat or task-oriented dialogue corpora, including complex spatial reference, clarification and repair, and ad-hoc convention formation. To support future analyses of language use in complex, situated, collaborative problem-solving scenarios, we publicly release the corpus, which comprises player videos, audio, transcripts, game state data, and both manual and automatic annotations of language data.