Saulo Mendes Santos


2024

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A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations
Camila Antonio Barros | Jorge Francisco Ciprián-Sánchez | Saulo Mendes Santos
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Comparing annotations is a constant and necessary step in corpus analysis. Although the nature of these annotations is normally research-specific, the tools used for this purpose do not have to be. Here, we present a tool for extracting and comparing annotations from ELAN, despite their idiosyncrasies. The intention behind this tool is to provide a handy way to analyze ELAN annotated files, by comparing tiers to a reference unit. Using the presented tool, it is possible to see how tiers overlap (even if they are of symbolic type), to which ratio, and the displacement regarding a reference unit. We present an example of multimodal corpus analysis, regarding the coordination between speech and gesture units based on a pragmatic reference. We argue that looking into overlap ratios can be more informative of the association between speech and gestures, and that considering a time buffer between speech and gestural events can be misleading.