Towards a definition of GestBase

- an open database of gestures

Milan Rusko

Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

COST 2102 DUBLIN 2009

MotivationPublishing 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.

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 structureVisual gestures

database

pictures (photos)

textual description of the gesture

coded description of the picture

...

Semantic & Pragmatic content (meaning)

Comments

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

RELATIONS

Pilot study: first submisson – GestBase_Sk ver0.1Standard procedure:

Natural communicationrecordings

Classification usingexisting class. schemes

Annotation usingexisting ann. conventions

GestBase file

Recording of speakers(stimuli induced gestures)

Annotation

Collecting prototype gestures,developing annot. and class.

schemes

Prototype GestBase files

Procedure in ver0.1:

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