Transcript First ideas

Towards a definition of GestBase
- an open database of gestures
Milan Rusko
Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences, Bratislava
Motivation
Publishing studies on gestures
 face_and_body gestures
 voice gestures
Video – often not included in the electronic publication, no widely
accepted form of annotation suitable for basic comparisons etc.
Photos – occupy too much space in the printed publication , no
standard or widely accepted annotation suitable for basic
comparisons
Audio – not available in the printed publications =>replaced by
ambiguous orthographic code (mhm, oooh, etc. )
Text (periphrastic) description – ambiguous, insufficient, no
standard form
All suffer from lack of comprehensive method of referencing.
It is hard for the reader to imagine the gesture.
COST 2102 DUBLIN 2009
Vision of solution - GestBase
Possible solution - an open database of Gestures
Such a database should
 have standardized format of entries
 allow for storage of gestures in multiple modalities
and their annotations
 allow for storage of gestures in context
 allow for search, comparison, and other database
operations
 be accessible for all potential users
 be open for new submissions
Database structure
Visual gestures
database
pictures (photos)
textual description of the
gesture
coded description of the
picture
...
Semantic & Pragmatic
content (meaning)
Comments
R
E
L
A
T
I
O
N
S
Nonverbal speech
gestures database
sounds (recordings)
orthoepic (IPA)
transcription
orthographic (text) trsc.
Automatically derived
acoustical chars (F0
contour, ...)
Coded acoustical char.
Para and Extra-linguistic
Semantic & Pragmatic
content
Function in the dialogue
Comments
Pilot study:
first submisson – GestBase_Sk ver0.1
Standard procedure:
Procedure in ver0.1:
Natural communication
recordings
Recording of speakers
(stimuli induced gestures)
Annotation using
existing ann. conventions
Collecting prototype gestures,
developing annot. and class.
schemes
Classification using
existing class. schemes
Annotation
GestBase file
Prototype GestBase files
Collection of stimuli induced gestures
The speaker gets a stimulus – a gesture represented in one
modality, and he has to add other modalities and additional
information.
1. stimulus=photo, speaker ads sound (or several sounds),
context (creates a sentence) his own description of the
meaning and typical usage.(initial set of photos taken from
Ruzickova)
2. stimulus=text (orthographic form of the gesture etc.)
speaker adds sound (in future we plan also video recording)
(list of interjections and particles taken from Slovak National
Corpus)
3. stimulus=sound (nonverbal speech gesture, possibly in
context)
Ideas on usability of GestBase
Possible usage of GestBase could be a photo-sound-text
electronic upgraded version of Ružičková: American,
Slovak, Japanese and Chinese Picture dictionary of
Gestures. (possibly extended with other languages)
This is a publication which is aimed at giving information to
the foreign language learners on the gestures in the given
language and their comparison with the ones in his mother
tongue.
Inter-lingual and inter-cultural comparison studies:
Slovak – Hungarian (one culture, very different languages)
Slovak – Japanese (very different cultures) etc.
Thank you for your attention
thank you in advance for your oppinion
Milan Rusko