Feedback in Nordic First-Encounters: a Comparative Study

Costanza Navarretta, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Patrizia Paggio


Abstract
The paper compares how feedback is expressed via speech and head movements in comparable corpora of first encounters in three Nordic languages: Danish, Finnish and Swedish. The three corpora have been collected following common guidelines, and they have been annotated according to the same scheme in the NOMCO project. The results of the comparison show that in this data the most frequent feedback-related head movement is Nod in all three languages. Two types of Nods were distinguished in all corpora: Down-nods and Up-nods; the participants from the three countries use Down- and Up-nods with different frequency. In particular, Danes use Down-nods more frequently than Finns and Swedes, while Swedes use Up-nods more frequently than Finns and Danes. Finally, Finns use more often single Nods than repeated Nods, differing from the Swedish and Danish participants. The differences in the frequency of both Down-nods and Up-Nods in the Danish, Finnish and Swedish interactions are interesting given that Nordic countries are not only geographically near, but are also considered to be very similar culturally. Finally, a comparison of feedback-related words in the Danish and Swedish corpora shows that Swedes and Danes use common feedback words corresponding to yes and no with similar frequency.
Anthology ID:
L12-1369
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2494–2499
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/639_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Costanza Navarretta, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, and Patrizia Paggio. 2012. Feedback in Nordic First-Encounters: a Comparative Study. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2494–2499, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Feedback in Nordic First-Encounters: a Comparative Study (Navarretta et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/639_Paper.pdf