Spatial AMR: Expanded Spatial Annotation in the Context of a Grounded Minecraft Corpus

Julia Bonn, Martha Palmer, Jon Cai, Kristin Wright-Bettner

Abstract:

This paper presents an expansion to the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation schema that captures fine-grained
semantically and pragmatically derived spatial information in grounded corpora. We describe a new lexical category conceptualization
and set of spatial annotation tools built in the context of a multimodal corpus consisting of 185 3D structure-building dialogues
between a human architect and human builder in Minecraft. Minecraft provides a particularly beneficial spatial relation-elicitation
environment because it automatically tracks locations and orientations of objects and avatars in the space according to an absolute
Cartesian coordinate system. Through a two-step process of sentence-level and document-level annotation designed to capture implicit
information, we leverage these coordinates and bearings in the AMRs in combination with spatial framework annotation to ground the
spatial language in the dialogues to absolute space.