Linguistic data often inherits characteristics that limit open science practices such as data publication, sharing, and reuse. Part of the problem is researchers’ uncertainty about the legal requirements, which need to be considered at the beginning of study planning, when consent forms for participants, ethics applications, and data management plans need to be written. This paper presents a newly funded project that will develop a research data management infrastructure that will provide automated support to researchers in the planning, collection, storage, use, reuse, and sharing of data, taking into account ethical and legal aspects to encourage open science practices.

According to the Entropy Rate Constancy (ERC) principle, the information density of a text is approximately constant over its length. Whether this principle also applies to nonverbal communication signals is still under investigation. We perform empirical analyses of video-recorded dialogue data and investigate whether listener gaze, as an important nonverbal communication signal, adheres to the ERC principle. Results show (1) that the ERC principle holds for listener gaze; and (2) that the two linguistic factors syntactic complexity and turn transition potential are weakly correlated with local entropy of listener gaze.

Scripted dialogues such as movie and TV subtitles constitute a widespread source of training data for conversational NLP models. However, there are notable linguistic differences between these dialogues and spontaneous interactions, especially regarding the occurrence of communicative feedback such as backchannels, acknowledgments, or clarification requests. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of such feedback phenomena in both subtitles and spontaneous conversations. Based on conversational data spanning eight languages and multiple genres, we extract lexical statistics, classifications from a dialogue act tagger, expert annotations and labels derived from a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM). Our main empirical findings are that (1) communicative feedback is markedly less frequent in subtitles than in spontaneous dialogues and (2) subtitles contain a higher proportion of negative feedback. We also show that dialogues generated by standard LLMs lie much closer to scripted dialogues than spontaneous interactions in terms of communicative feedback.

It is generally assumed that language (written and spoken) follows the entropy rate constancy (ERC) principle, which states that the information density of a text is constant over time. Recently, this has also been found for nonverbal gestures used in monologue, but it is still unclear whether the ERC principle also applies to listeners’ nonverbal signals. We focus on listeners’ gaze behaviour extracted from video-recorded conversations and trained a transformer-based neural sequence model to process the gaze data of the dialogues and compute its information density. We also compute the information density of the corresponding speech using a pre-trained language model. Our results show (1) that listeners’ gaze behaviour in dialogues roughly follows the ERC principle, as well as (2) a congruence between information density of speech and listeners’ gaze behaviour.

Recent work has adopted models of pragmatic reasoning for the generation of informative language in, e.g., image captioning. We propose a simple but highly effective relaxation of fully rational decoding, based on an existing incremental and character-level approach to pragmatically informative neural image captioning. We implement a mixed, ‘fast’ and ‘slow’, speaker that applies pragmatic reasoning occasionally (only word-initially), while unrolling the language model. In our evaluation, we find that increased informativeness through pragmatic decoding generally lowers quality and, somewhat counter-intuitively, increases repetitiveness in captions. Our mixed speaker, however, achieves a good balance between quality and informativeness.

The Active Listening Corpus (ALICO) is a multimodal database of spontaneous dyadic conversations with diverse speech and gestural annotations of both dialogue partners. The annotations consist of short feedback expression transcription with corresponding communicative function interpretation as well as segmentation of interpausal units, words, rhythmic prominence intervals and vowel-to-vowel intervals. Additionally, ALICO contains head gesture annotation of both interlocutors. The corpus contributes to research on spontaneous human–human interaction, on functional relations between modalities, and timing variability in dialogue. It also provides data that differentiates between distracted and attentive listeners. We describe the main characteristics of the corpus and present the most important results obtained from analyses in recent years.