Encoding Gesture in Multimodal Dialogue: Creating a Corpus of Multimodal AMR

Kenneth Lai, Richard Brutti, Lucia Donatelli, James Pustejovsky


Abstract
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a general-purpose meaning representation that has become popular for its clear structure, ease of annotation and available corpora, and overall expressiveness. While AMR was designed to represent sentence meaning in English text, recent research has explored its adaptation to broader domains, including documents, dialogues, spatial information, cross-lingual tasks, and gesture. In this paper, we present an annotated corpus of multimodal (speech and gesture) AMR in a task-based setting. Our corpus is multilayered, containing temporal alignments to both the speech signal and to descriptions of gesture morphology. We also capture coreference relationships across modalities, enabling fine-grained analysis of how the semantics of gesture and natural language interact. We discuss challenges that arise when identifying cross-modal coreference and anaphora, as well as in creating and evaluating multimodal corpora in general. Although we find AMR’s abstraction away from surface form (in both language and gesture) occasionally too coarse-grained to capture certain cross-modal interactions, we believe its flexibility allows for future work to fill in these gaps. Our corpus and annotation guidelines are available at https://github.com/klai12/encoding-gesture-multimodal-dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.515
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
5806–5818
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.515
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kenneth Lai, Richard Brutti, Lucia Donatelli, and James Pustejovsky. 2024. Encoding Gesture in Multimodal Dialogue: Creating a Corpus of Multimodal AMR. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5806–5818, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Encoding Gesture in Multimodal Dialogue: Creating a Corpus of Multimodal AMR (Lai et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.515.pdf