Action Verb Corpus

The Action Verb Corpus comprises multimodal data of 12 humans conducting in total 390 simple actions ( TAKE, PUT, and PUSH). Recorded are audio, video and motion data while participants perform an action and describe what they do. The dataset is annotated with the following information: orthographic transcriptions of utterances, part-of-speech tags, lemmata, information which object is currently moved, information whether a hand touches an object, information whether an object touches the ground/table. Transcription, and information whether an object is in contact with a hand and which object moves where to were manually annotated, the rest was automatically annotated and manually corrected. In addition to the dataset, we present an algorithm for the challenging task of segmenting the stream of words into utterances, segmenting the visual input into a series of actions, and then aligning visual action information and speech. This kind of modality rich data is particularly important for crossmodal and cross-situational word-object and word-action learning in human-robot interactions, and is comparable to parent-toddler communication in early stages of child language acquisition.