Multimodal Entrainment and Feedback in Online Group Meetings

Patrizia Paggio, Manex Agirrezabal, Giulia Di Cristina, Bart Jongejan, Costanza Navarretta


Abstract
This paper presents the results of a study on multimodal speaker behaviour in a corpus of online Zoom meetings. We investigate two questions: i) whether speakers display a higher degree of head movement when they exchange verbal feedback than when they don’t, as would be expected if verbal and gestural feedback reinforce one other, and ii) whether they move more or less similarly under the same conditions. Several linear mixed models were fitted to test the difference in head movement values in target and control intervals of two different durations. The results indicate that speakers indeed entrain by moving their heads more in target intervals where verbal feedback is present. This result confirms our expectations. However, speakers also appear to move in less similar ways in the same target intervals. This dissimilarity can be explained by the fact that not all speakers give the same type of gestural feedback, but also by noise created by non-communicative movements in which speakers adjust their positions or reach out for objects during the meeting.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.718
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
9139–9149
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-718
DOI:
10.63317/3e7gn6grbki4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrizia Paggio, Manex Agirrezabal, Giulia Di Cristina, Bart Jongejan, and Costanza Navarretta. 2026. Multimodal Entrainment and Feedback in Online Group Meetings. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 9139–9149, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Entrainment and Feedback in Online Group Meetings (Paggio et al., LREC 2026)
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