A comparison of addressee detection methods for multiparty conversations

Several algorithms have recently been proposed for recognizing addressees in a group conversational setting. These algorithms can rely on a variety of factors including previous conversational roles, gaze and type of dialogue act. Both statistical supervised machine learning algorithms as well as rule based methods have been developed. In this paper, we compare several algorithms developed for several different genres of muliparty dialogue, and propose a new synthesis algorithm that matches the performance of machine learning algorithms while maintaning the transparancy of semantically meaningfull rule-based algorithms

How Do I Address You? Modelling addressing behavior based on an analysis of a multi-modal corpora of conversational discourse

Addressing is a special kind of referring and thus principles of multi-modal referring expression generation will also be basic for generation of address terms and addressing gestures for conversational agents. Addressing is a special kind of referring because of the different (second person instead of object) role that the referent has in the interaction. Based on an analysis of addressing behaviour in multi-party face-to-face conversations (meetings, TV discussions as well as theater plays), we present outlines of a model for generating multi-modal verbal and non-verbal addressing behaviour for agents in multi-party interactions

MOG 2007:Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation: CTIT Proceedings

This volume brings together presents a wide variety of work offering different perspectives on multimodal generation. Two different strands of work can be distinguished: half of the gathered papers present current work on embodied conversational agents (ECA’s), while the other half presents current work on multimedia applications. Two general research questions are shared by all: what output modalities are most suitable in which situation, and how should different output modalities be combined

Gesture and Speech in Interaction - 4th edition (GESPIN 4)

International audienceThe fourth edition of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) was held in Nantes, France. With more than 40 papers, these proceedings show just what a flourishing field of enquiry gesture studies continues to be. The keynote speeches of the conference addressed three different aspects of multimodal interaction:gesture and grammar, gesture acquisition, and gesture and social interaction. In a talk entitled Qualitiesof event construal in speech and gesture: Aspect and tense, Alan Cienki presented an ongoing researchproject on narratives in French, German and Russian, a project that focuses especially on the verbal andgestural expression of grammatical tense and aspect in narratives in the three languages. Jean-MarcColletta's talk, entitled Gesture and Language Development: towards a unified theoretical framework,described the joint acquisition and development of speech and early conventional and representationalgestures. In Grammar, deixis, and multimodality between code-manifestation and code-integration or whyKendon's Continuum should be transformed into a gestural circle, Ellen Fricke proposed a revisitedgrammar of noun phrases that integrates gestures as part of the semiotic and typological codes of individuallanguages. From a pragmatic and cognitive perspective, Judith Holler explored the use ofgaze and hand gestures as means of organizing turns at talk as well as establishing common ground in apresentation entitled On the pragmatics of multi-modal face-to-face communication: Gesture, speech andgaze in the coordination of mental states and social interaction.Among the talks and posters presented at the conference, the vast majority of topics related, quitenaturally, to gesture and speech in interaction - understood both in terms of mapping of units in differentsemiotic modes and of the use of gesture and speech in social interaction. Several presentations explored the effects of impairments(such as diseases or the natural ageing process) on gesture and speech. The communicative relevance ofgesture and speech and audience-design in natural interactions, as well as in more controlled settings liketelevision debates and reports, was another topic addressed during the conference. Some participantsalso presented research on first and second language learning, while others discussed the relationshipbetween gesture and intonation. While most participants presented research on gesture and speech froman observer's perspective, be it in semiotics or pragmatics, some nevertheless focused on another importantaspect: the cognitive processes involved in language production and perception. Last but not least,participants also presented talks and posters on the computational analysis of gestures, whether involvingexternal devices (e.g. mocap, kinect) or concerning the use of specially-designed computer software forthe post-treatment of gestural data. Importantly, new links were made between semiotics and mocap data

Annotation of negotiation processes in joint-action dialogues

Situated dialogic corpora are invaluable resources for understanding the complex relationship between language, perception, and action as they are based on naturalistic dialogue situations in which the interactants are given shared goals to be accomplished in the real world. In such situations, verbal interactions are intertwined with actions, and shared goals can only be achieved via dynamic negotiation processes based on common ground constructed from discourse history as well as the interactants' knowledge about the status of actions. In this paper, we propose four major dimensions of collaborative tasks that affect the negotiation processes among interactants, and, hence, the structure of the dialogue. Based on a review of available dialogue corpora and annotation manuals, we show that existing annotation schemes so far do not adequately account for the complex dialogue processes in situated task-based scenarios. We illustrate the effects of specific features of a scenario using annotated samples of dialogue taken from the literature as well as our own corpora, and end with a brief discussion of the challenges ahead

Rethinking constructed action

We aim to demonstrate the importance of defining linguistic phenomena by using constructed action or CA (i.e. a stretch of discourse that represents one role or combination of roles depicting actions, utterances, thought, attitudes and/or feelings of one or more referents) as an example. The problem is that different assumptions about CA have led to some apparent contradictions about the nature of this phenomenon. Based on observations and analyses of the British Sign Language narrative data, we outline criteria and recommendations for defining and analysing CA. We show that, in carefully defining the phenomenon in question and providing criteria for its identification, applying these criteria to usage data leads to emergence of particular types of Constructed Action. We also show how identifying these types can help resolve some of the apparent contradictions in the literature