Gaze Behaviour & Conversation Unfolding in the HCRC Map Task Corpus

Anaïs Claire Murat, Carl Vogel


Abstract
Dialogue interactions have varied internal structure, with flow varying, inter alia, in face of both difficulty and agreement. This study investigates eye-gaze in the linguistic progression of interactions. We observe the relation of gaze to illocutionary functions of turns through dialogue acts, and to how turns present “new” or “old” content, through lexical entropy and repetition. Results on the HCRC Map Task corpus, enabled by an event alignment annotation method described, show how gaze is related to linguistic progression. A gaze towards the conversation partner at the end of a turn tends to align with complexity and difficulties being expressed in the turn, while keeping gaze down at the map is more typical of obstacle- and disagreement-free interactions. Addressees who look up or off at the start of a turn show evidence of lexicon adaptation to gaze values.
Anthology ID:
2026.isa-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation and Representation (ISA-22) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editor:
Harry Bunt
Venues:
ISA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
99–110
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-isa-11
DOI:
10.63317/33muut9zdprh
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anaïs Claire Murat and Carl Vogel. 2026. Gaze Behaviour & Conversation Unfolding in the HCRC Map Task Corpus. In Proceedings of the 22nd Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation and Representation (ISA-22) @ LREC 2026, pages 99–110, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Gaze Behaviour & Conversation Unfolding in the HCRC Map Task Corpus (Murat & Vogel, ISA 2026)
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