M2ATS: A Real-world Multimodal Air Traffic Situation Benchmark Dataset and Beyond

Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a complicated, time-evolving, and real-time procedure to direct flight operations in a safer and ordered manner. Although enormous data storages are available during air traffic operations for over 40 years, data-driven intelligent application in aviation is still an emerging task due to the safety-critical issue. With the prevalence of the Next Generation ATC system, artificial intelligence (AI) -empowered research topics are attracting increasing attention from both industrial and academic domains and a high-quality dataset naturally becomes the prerequisite for such practices. However, almost all ATC-related datasets are only unimodal for certain tasks, which fails to comprehensively illustrate the traffic situation to further support real-world studies. To address this gap, a multimodal air traffic situation (M2ATS) dataset is constructed to advance AI-related research in the ATC domain, including airspace information, flight plan, trajectory, and speech. M2ATS covers 10362 flights ATC situation data, involving 110000+ utterances (104 hours) with diversity golden text annotations, 16 intents, and 51 slots. Considering the real-world ATC requirements, a total of 10 multimedia-related tasks (24 baselines) are designed to validate the proposed dataset, covering automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and spatial-temporal data processing. New ATC-related metrics corresponding to ATC applications are proposed in addition to the common metrics to evaluate task performance. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the selective baselines can achieve designed tasks on this new dataset, and further investigations are also required to address task and data specificities. It is believed that the proposed new dataset is a new practice to advance AI applications to an industrial scene, which not only promotes ATC-related applications but also provides diverse research topics in the common multimedia community.