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The ALICO corpus: analysing the active listener

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Abstract

The Active Listening Corpus (ALICO) is a multimodal data set of spontaneous dyadic conversations in German with diverse speech and gestural annotations of both dialogue partners. The annotations consist of short feedback expression transcriptions with corresponding communicative function interpretations as well as segmentations of interpausal units, words, rhythmic prominence intervals and vowel-to-vowel intervals. Additionally, ALICO contains head gesture annotations 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 briefly present the most important results obtained from analyses in recent years.

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Notes

  1. Four annotators in total worked on the feedback function interpretation in ALICO, namely the first four authors of this paper, out of which JS, MW and ZM are competent but not native speakers of German. Annotation tasks were assigned in rotation to three annotators per recorded session.

  2. While it would be preferable to use a multi-annotator agreement measure, such as Fleiss’s \(\kappa \), this is somewhat problematic on the present dataset given that each dialogue was annotated by a different subset of annotators. For this reason, we resort to pairwise comparisons between individual annotators.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the Collaborative Research Center 673 “Alignment in Communication” and the Center of Excellence EXC 277 “Cognitive Interaction Technology” (CITEC), as well as the Swedish Research Council (VR) projects “Samtalets rytm” (2009–1766) and “Andning i samtal” (2014–1072).

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

      Zofia Malisz

    2. Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

      Zofia Malisz

    3. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

      Marcin Włodarczak

    4. Faculty of Technology and CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

      Hendrik Buschmeier & Stefan Kopp

    5. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

      Joanna Skubisz

    6. Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

      Petra Wagner

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    1. Zofia Malisz
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    Correspondence to Zofia Malisz.

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    Zofia Malisz, Marcin Włodarczak, Hendrik Buschmeier and Joanna Skubisz have contributed equally to this article.

    Appendix

    Appendix

    See Fig. 11 and Tables 13, 14.

    Table 13 ALICO data overview
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    Fig. 11
    figure 11

    Confusion matrices for each annotator pair annotating core feedback functions categories: P1, P2, P3, and A. Labels were stripped off all modifiers (e.g. C or E or A in modifier role). The shades of the cells indicate relative frequency for each label combination and can be compared across confusion matrices. The numbers in each cell show absolute frequencies and are not comparable across confusion matrices

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    Table 14 Frequency of specific short feedback expressions (SFEs) found in ALICO as classified into three semantic categories (see Table 7)
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    Malisz, Z., Włodarczak, M., Buschmeier, H. et al. The ALICO corpus: analysing the active listener. Lang Resources & Evaluation 50, 411–442 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9355-6

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