Elisabeth Ahlsén

Also published as: Elisabeth Ahlsen


2012

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Feedback in Nordic First-Encounters: a Comparative Study
Costanza Navarretta | Elisabeth Ahlsén | Jens Allwood | Kristiina Jokinen | Patrizia Paggio
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

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.

2011

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Creating Comparable Multimodal Corpora for Nordic Languages
Costanza Navarretta | Elisabeth Ahlsén | Jens Allwood | Kristiina Jokinen | Patrizia Paggio
Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2011)

2010

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The NOMCO Multimodal Nordic Resource - Goals and Characteristics
Patrizia Paggio | Jens Allwood | Elisabeth Ahlsén | Kristiina Jokinen | Costanza Navarretta
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

This paper presents the multimodal corpora that are being collected and annotated in the Nordic NOMCO project. The corpora will be used to study communicative phenomena such as feedback, turn management and sequencing. They already include video material for Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Estonian, and several social activities are represented. The data will make it possible to verify empirically how gestures (head movements, facial displays, hand gestures and body postures) and speech interact in all the three mentioned aspects of communication. The data are being annotated following the MUMIN annotation scheme, which provides attributes concerning the shape and the communicative functions of head movements, face expressions, body posture and hand gestures. After having described the corpora, the paper discusses how they will be used to study the way feedback is expressed in speech and gestures, and reports results from two pilot studies where we investigated the function of head gestures ― both single and repeated ― in combination with feedback expressions. The annotated corpora will be valuable sources for research on intercultural communication as well as for interaction in the individual languages.

2001

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Annotations and Tools for an Activity Based Spoken Language Corpus
Jens Allwood | Leif Groenqvist | Elisabeth Ahlsen | Magnus Gunnarsson
Proceedings of the Second SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue