The IBL Corpus

The IBL Corpus was collected by the University of Plymouth and the University of Edinburgh as part of the EPSRC funded project IBL, Instruction-based Learning for Mobile Robots (GR/M90023, GR/M90160). IBL focused on the problem of how natural language instructions can be used by an intelligent embodied agent to build a hierarchy of complex functions based on a limited set of low-level perceptual, motor and cognitive functions. The collected corpus consists of human instructions (in English, of 24 different native speakers) that explain a robot, situated in a miniature town, how to navigate from its current location to a certain destination.

Download

The distribution comprises a gzipped tarfile of all wavefiles (58780334 KB) and a file with transcriptions.

Documentation

Each audio file is named uN_GX_YZ.wav, using the following convention:
  • N specifies the speaker (a number ranging from 1 to 24)
  • X indicates the type of discourse (A: monologues, B: monologues, C: dialogues)
  • Y specifies the starting point
  • Z specified the destination.

These audio files cover the entire instruction. The distribution also contains segmented files covering individual utterances. These are marked by extending the original file names uN_GX_YZ_I.wav, where I is a number indicating the segment.

The codes used for locations are as follows: Museum (M), University (W), Post Office (X and Z), Boots (C), Library (Y), The Grand Hotel (E), Safeway (D), The Queen's Pub (L), Tesco (G), Car Park (P), and Hospital (H). The following top view of the minature town shows the actual locations of these landmarks:

IBL CORPUS MAP

Licence

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute copies of the IBL Corpus for research or educational purpose only. This License applies to any audio and text files described in this document (IBL Corpus) which the members of this project make publicly available.

References to the IBL Corpus

  • Stanislao Lauria, Guido Bugmann, Theocharis Kyriacou, Johan Bos, Ewan Klein (2001): Training Personal Robots Using Natural Language Instruction. IEEE Intelligent Systems, September/October 2001. Pages 38-45. Download: pdf.

Johan Bos, 5 Feb 2003