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A case study of gesture expressivity breaks

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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.

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Notes

  1. 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.

  2. Refers to George and Lennie, characters from J. Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men” (1937).

  3. 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.

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Acknowledgement

This research is partially supported by the FP6 Network of Excellence HUMAINE (IST-2002-2.3.1.6).

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Correspondence to Nicolas Ech Chafai.

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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

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