The BladeMistress Corpus: From Talk to Action in Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds (VW) are online environments where people come together to interact and perform various tasks. The chat transcripts of interactions in VWs pose unique opportunities and challenges for language analysis: Firstly, the language of the transcripts is very brief, informal, and task-oriented. Secondly, in addition to chat, a VW system records users’ in-world activities. Such a record could allow us to analyze how the language of interactions is linked to the users actions. For example, we can make the language analysis of the users dialogues more effective by taking into account the context of the corresponding action or we can predict or detect users actions by analyzing the content of conversations. Thirdly, a joined analysis of both the language and the actions would empower us to build effective modes of the users and their behavior. In this paper we present a corpus constructed from logs from an online multiplayer game BladeMistress. We describe the original logs, annotations that we created on the data, and summarize some of the experiments.