Methods for investigating multi-modality in human interactions remain open to refinement. Although the annotation process has been facilitated by tools like Elan, synchronising exported cross-tier data for further quantitative analyses remains challenging. We present the BME method: a new approach to data alignment. The idea is straightforward: instead of comparing exact times of onsets, durations, etc., the BME method focuses on their organisation. First, the method describes every annotation by at least two events: its beginning (B) and end (E). Then, it aligns them in chronological order. Middles (M) are precipitated to track events from other tiers which might occur between Bs and Es. We explore three cases in which such an arrangement of multi-modal data can benefit the scientific community: first, in getting insights about the dynamics and dependencies between tiers, second, in contemplating event-based duration rather than time-based ones, and, third, in contributing cross-annotator agreement assessment methods.

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.