A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations

Camila Antonio Barros, Jorge Francisco Ciprián-Sánchez, Saulo Mendes Santos


Abstract
Comparing annotations is a constant and necessary step in corpus analysis. Although the nature of these annotations is normally research-specific, the tools used for this purpose do not have to be. Here, we present a tool for extracting and comparing annotations from ELAN, despite their idiosyncrasies. The intention behind this tool is to provide a handy way to analyze ELAN annotated files, by comparing tiers to a reference unit. Using the presented tool, it is possible to see how tiers overlap (even if they are of symbolic type), to which ratio, and the displacement regarding a reference unit. We present an example of multimodal corpus analysis, regarding the coordination between speech and gesture units based on a pragmatic reference. We argue that looking into overlap ratios can be more informative of the association between speech and gestures, and that considering a time buffer between speech and gestural events can be misleading.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.150
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
1705–1714
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.150
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Camila Antonio Barros, Jorge Francisco Ciprián-Sánchez, and Saulo Mendes Santos. 2024. A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 1705–1714, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations (Barros et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.150.pdf