Abstract
In this paper we propose a study of co-verbal gesture expressivity during a conversational interaction. The work is based on the analysis of gesture expressivity over time, that we have conducted on two clips of 2D animations. The first results point out two types of modulations in gesture expressivity that we relate to the rhetorical functions of the discourse. These results extend the knowledge about gesture expressivity from emotion and personality issues to pragmatical ones. An evaluation study is proposed to measure the effects of the modulations.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Produced in the middle of World War II, this cartoon is a short propaganda film. The animators are displaying the Big Bad Wolf with A. Hitler’s features and are warning how dangerous he is. The main pig represents the judgment value of the American state. Animators are using this pig to display to the American people what kind of behavior they have to adopt towards WWII. That is, they have to support the war effort. The title of Blitz Wolf directly refers to the “Blitz Krieg” practiced by Hitler.
Refers to George and Lennie, characters from J. Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men” (1937).
Thus, 80 gesture phases are annotated. This total differs from the previous amount of gesture phases we have segmented (127, see previous section): since there is no movement in the “hold” phases, we glue the hold phases with their preceding phase. For instance, if a stroke is produced with a high power and this stroke is followed by an hold, we annotate this “stroke + hold” with a high power.
References
Barrier, G., Caelen, J., & Meillon, B. (2005). La visibilité des gestes: Paramètres directionnels, intentionnalité du signe et attribution de pertinence. In Workshop Francophone sur les Agents Conversationnels Animés. Grenoble, France, pp. 113–123.
Beckman, M. E., & Elam, G. A. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI labelling, version 3.0. The Ohio State University Research Foundation.
Bouvet, D. (2001). La dimension corporelle de la parole. Paris: Peeters.
Bregler, C., Loeb, L., Chuang, E., & Desphande, H. (2002). Turning to masters: Motion capturing cartoons. SIGGRAPH 2002.
Cassell, J. (1999). Embodied conversation: Integrating face and gesture into automatic spoken dialogue systems. In S. Luperfoy (Ed.), Spoken dialogue systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cassell, J., & McNeill, D. (1991). Gesture and the poetics of prose. Poetics Today, 12(3), 375–404.
Choi, J., Kim, D., & Lee, I. (2004). Anticipation for facial animation. CASA’04. Geneva, Switzerland: CGS.
de Carolis, B., Pelachaud, C., Poggi, I., & Steedman, M. (2004). APML, a mark-up language for believable behavior generation. In H. Prendinger (Ed.), Life-like characters. Tools, affective functions and applications. Springer.
Feyereisen, P. (1997). La compréhension des gestes référentiels. Geste, cognition et communication, PULIM, 20–48.
Gullberg, M., & Holmqvist, K. (1999). Keeping an eye on gestures: Visual perception of gestures in face-to-face communication. Pragmatics and Cognition, 7, 35–63.
Gussenhoven, C. (2002). Intonation and interpretation: Phonetics and phonology. In Speech Prosody 2002: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Speech Prosody. Aix-en-Provence, France, pp. 47–57.
Hartmann, B., Mancini, M., & Pelachaud, C. (2005). Implementing expressive gesture synthesis for embodied conversational agents. In Gesture Workshop.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge University Press.
Kipp, M. (2004). Gesture generation by imitation: From human behaviour to computer character animation. Boca Raton, Florida: Faculties of Natural Sciences and Technology.
Kita, S., Van Gijn, I., & Van der Hulst, H. (1997). Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders. Gesture Workshop. Bielefeld, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
Kochanek, D. H. U., & Bartels, R. H. (1984). Interpolating splines with local tension, continuity, and bias control. Computer Graphics of SIGGRAPH’84, ACM.
Kopp, S., & Wachsmuth, I. (2002). Model-based animation of coverbal gesture. In Proceedings of Computer Animation 2002. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press, pp. 252–257.
Lance, B., Marsella, S., & Koizumi, D. (2004). Towards expressive gaze manner in embodied virtual agents. New York: AAMAS Workshop on Empathic Agents.
Lasseter, J. (1987). Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation. ACM Computer Graphics, 21, 4.
Mann, W., & Thompson, S. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory. Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243–281.
Mcneill, M. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Pelachaud, C. (2005). Multimodal expressive embodied conversational agent. Singapore: ACM Multimedia, Brave New Topics Session.
Poggi, I. (2001). From a typology of gestures to a procedure for gesture production. In Gesture Workshop (pp. 158–168). Springer Verlag.
Poggi, I., & Pelachaud, C. (2000). Performative facial expressions in animated faces. In J. Cassell, S. Prevost, & E. Churchill (Eds.), Embodied conversational agents (pp. 155–188). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986, trad: 1989). La pertinence, Communication et cognition. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Thomas, F., & Johnston, O. (1981). Disney animation, the illusion of life. New York, USA: Abbeville Press.
Acknowledgement
This research is partially supported by the FP6 Network of Excellence HUMAINE (IST-2002-2.3.1.6).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chafai, N.E., Pelachaud, C. & Pelé, D. A case study of gesture expressivity breaks. Lang Resources & Evaluation 41, 341–365 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9051-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9051-7