Multi-level Annotations of Nonverbal Behaviors in French Spontaneous Conversation

Overview & Synopsis

During spontaneous conversations, multiple modalities such as gesture, posture and gaze are combined in sophisticated ways for different functions such as spatial references. In the French research community, there is a lack of spontaneous multimodal corpora for the French language. This paper describes the multi-level scheme that we have defined for the annotation of gesture, posture and gaze. We explain how we applied it for the annotation of a corpus of spontaneous French conversations. Two types of analyses were made on the resulting annotations. Firstly, intercoder agreement was computed on the annotations of gesture space. Secondly, we clustered chunks of postures into categories. Such research will enable the joint study of multiple nonverbal modalities such as the relations between gesture semantics and posture.