Multimodal Interaction in First Acquaintance Conversations

In this talk I will present the Danish NOMCO Corpus, an annotated multimodal collection of video-recorded first acquaintance conversations between Danish speakers. The annotation includes speech transcription complete of word boundaries, and formal as well as functional coding of gestural behaviours, specifically head movements, facial expressions, and body posture. The corpus has served as the empirical basis for a number of studies of communication phenomena related to turn management, feedback exchange, information packaging and the expression of emotional attitudes. I will describe the annotation scheme, procedure, and annotation results. Then I will summarise a number of studies conducted on the corpus.