Spontal Multimodal database of spontaneous speech in dialog Massively multimodal (HD video, hifi sound, and motion capture) database of spontaneous speech in dialog. In everyday, face-to-face communicative interaction, we make use of rich repertories of both vocal signals and facial gestures in addition to speech segments. While the auditory modality is generally seen as primary concerning phonetic information, the visual modality can also provide segmental cues for articulation. Moreover, the visual cues such as head nods, gaze and eye movements and the movements and shaping of the eyebrows can provide prosodic information such as signals for prominence and phrasing. Such visual cues can also provide important communicative interaction information such as signals for turn-taking, feedback giving or seeking, and emotions and attitudes. The goal of this project is the creation of a Swedish multimodal spontaneous speech database rich enough to capture important variations among speakers and speaker styles to be of great value for current speech research. The database will make it possible to test hypotheses on the visual and verbal features employed in communicative behavior covering a variety of functions. To increase our understanding of traditional prosodic functions such as prominence lending and grouping and phrasing, the database will enable researchers to study visual and acoustic interaction and timing differences over several subjects and dialog partners. Moreover, human communicative functions such as the signaling of turn-taking, feedback, attitudes and emotion can be studied from a multimodal, dialog perspective. In Spontal, we capture two channels of HD video, four channels of hifi sound, and OptiTrack motion capture of torso and head in 120 half-hour long dialogues. Group: Speech Communication and Technology Staff: David House (Project leader) Jens Edlund Jonas Beskow Kahl Hellmer Kjell Elenius Sofia Strömbergsson Funding: VR, KFI (VR2006-7482) Duration: 2007-07-01 - 2010-12-31 Website: http://www.speech.kth.se/spontal/ KTH research database: http://researchprojects.kth.se/index.php/kb_1/io_9945/io.html Keywords: massively multimodal corpora, audiovisual speech, dialogue, feedback, gesture, human communication, motion capture, prosody, interaction control Related publications: 2011 Edlund, J. (2011). In search of the conversational homunculus - serving to understand spoken human face-to-face interaction. Doctoral dissertation, KTH. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: In the group of people with whom I have worked most closely, we recently attempted to dress our visionary goal in words: “to learn enough about human face-to-face interaction that we are able to create an artificial conversational partner that is humanlike”. The “conversational homunculus” figuring in the title of this book represents this “artificial conversational partner”. The vision is motivated by an urge to test computationally our understandings of how human-human interaction functions, and the bulk of my work leads towards the conversational homunculus in one way or another. This book compiles and summarizes that work: it sets out with a presenting and providing background and motivation for the long-term research goal of creating a humanlike spoken dialogue system, and continues along the lines of an initial iteration of an iterative research process towards that goal, beginning with the planning and collection of human-human interaction corpora, continuing with the analysis and modelling of the human-human corpora, and ending in the implementation of, experimentation with and evaluation of humanlike components for in human-machine interaction. The studies presented have a clear focus on interactive phenomena at the expense of propositional content and syntactic constructs, and typically investigate the regulation of dialogue flow and feedback, or the establishment of mutual understanding and grounding. Laskowski, K., Edlund, J., & Heldner, M. (2011). Incremental Learning and Forgetting in Stochastic Turn-Taking Models. In Proc. of Interspeech 2011 (pp. 2069-2072). Florence, Italy. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: We present a computational framework for stochastically mod- eling dyad interaction chronograms. The framework’s most novel feature is the capacity for incremental learning and for- getting. To showcase its flexibility, we design experiments an- swering four concrete questions about the systematics of spoken interaction. The results show that: (1) individuals are clearly affected by one another; (2) there is individual variation in in- teraction strategy; (3) strategies wander in time rather than con- verge; and (4) individuals exhibit similarity with their interlocu- tors. We expect the proposed framework to be capable of an- swering many such questions with little additional effort. 2010 Beskow, J., Edlund, J., Granström, B., Gustafson, J., & House, D. (2010). Face-to-face interaction and the KTH Cooking Show. In Esposito, A., Campbell, N., Vogel, C., Hussain, A., & Nijholt, A. (Eds.), Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony (pp. 157 - 168). Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer. [pdf] Beskow, J., Edlund, J., Gustafson, J., Heldner, M., Hjalmarsson, A., & House, D. (2010). Research focus: Interactional aspects of spoken face-to-face communication. In Proc. of Fonetik 2010 (pp. 7-10). Lund, Sweden. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: We have a visionary goal: to learn enough about human face-to-face interaction that we are able to create an artificial conversational partner that is human-like. We take the opportunity here to present four new projects inaugurated in 2010, each adding pieces of the puzzle through a shared research focus: interactional aspects of spoken face-to-face communication. Edlund, J., & Beskow, J. (2010). Capturing massively multimodal dialogues: affordable synchronization and visualization. In Kipp, M., Martin, J-C., Paggio, P., & Heylen, D. (Eds.), Proc. of Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality (MMC 2010) (pp. 160 - 161). Valetta, Malta. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: In this demo, we show (a) affordable and relatively easy-to-implement means to facilitate synchronization of audio, video and motion capture data in post processing, and (b) a flexible tool for 3D visualization of recorded motion capture data aligned with audio and video sequences. The synchronisation is made possible by the use of two simple and analogues devices: a turntable and an easy to build electronic clapper board. The demo shows examples of how the signals from the turntable and the clapper board are traced over the three modalities, using the 3D visualisation tool. We also demonstrate how the visualisation tool shows head and torso movements captured by the motion capture system. Edlund, J., Beskow, J., Elenius, K., Hellmer, K., Strömbergsson, S., & House, D. (2010). Spontal: a Swedish spontaneous dialogue corpus of audio, video and motion capture. In Calzolari, N., Choukri, K., Maegaard, B., Mariani, J., Odjik, J., Piperidis, S., Rosner, M., & Tapias, D. (Eds.), Proc. of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 2992 - 2995). Valetta, Malta. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: We present the Spontal database of spontaneous Swedish dialogues. 120 dialogues of at least 30 minutes each have been captured in high-quality audio, high-resolution video and with a motion capture system. The corpus is currently being processed and annotated, and will be made available for research at the end of the project. Oertel, C., Cummins, F., Campbell, N., Edlund, J., & Wagner, P. (2010). D64: A corpus of richly recorded conversational interaction. In Kipp, M., Martin, J-C., Paggio, P., & Heylen, D. (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2010 Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality (pp. 27 - 30). Valetta, Malta. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: Rich non-intrusive recording of anaturalistic conversation was conducted in a domestic setting. Four (sometimes five) participants engaged in lively conversation over two 4-hour sessions on two successive days. Conversation was not directed, and ranged widely over topics both trivial and technical. The entire conversation, on both days, was richly recorded using 7 video cameras, 10 audio microphones, and the registration of 3-D head,torso and arm motion using an Optitrack system. To add liveliness to the conversation, several bottles of wine were consumed during the final two hours of recording. The resulting corpus will be of immediate interest to all researchers interested in studying naturalistic, ethologically situated, conversational interaction. Sikveland, R-O., Öttl, A., Amdal, I., Ernestus, M., Svendsen, T., & Edlund, J. (2010). Spontal-N: A Corpus of Interactional Spoken Norwegian. In Calzolari, N., Choukri, K., Maegaard, B., Mariani, J., Odjik, J., Piperidis, S., Rosner, M., & Tapias, D. (Eds.), Proc. of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 2986 - 2991). Valetta, Malta. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of thematerial on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail. 2009 Beskow, J., Edlund, J., Elenius, K., Hellmer, K., House, D., & Strömbergsson, S. (2009). Project presentation: Spontal – multimodal database of spontaneous dialog. In Fonetik 2009 (pp. 190-193). Stockholm. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: We describe the ongoing Swedish speech database project Spontal: Multimodal database of spontaneous speech in dialog (VR 2006-7482). The project takes as its point of departure the fact that both vocal signals and gesture involving the face and body are important in every- day, face-to-face communicative interaction, and that there is a great need for data with which we more precisely measure these. Edlund, J., Heldner, M., & Hirschberg, J. (2009). Pause and gap length in face-to-face interaction. In Proc. of Interspeech 2009. Brighton, UK. [abstract] [pdf] Abstract: It has long been noted that conversational partners tend to exhibit increasingly similar pitch, intensity, and timing behavior over the course of a conversation. However, the metrics developed to measure this similarity to date have generally failed to capture the dynamic temporal aspects of this process. In this paper, we propose new approaches to measuring interlocutor similarity in spoken dialogue. We define similarity in terms of convergence and synchrony and propose approaches to capture these, illustrating our techniques on gap and pause production in Swedish spontaneous dialogues.