Discourse Topic and Gestural Form

Coverbal gesture provides a channel for the visual expression of ideas. While some gestural emblems have culturally predefined forms (e.g., "thumbs up"), the relationship between gesture and meaning is, in general, not conventionalized. It is natural to ask whether such gestures can be int...

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Main Authors: Eisenstein, Jacob, Barzilay, Regina, Davis, Randall
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87042
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2921-8201
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5232-7281
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author Eisenstein, Jacob
Barzilay, Regina
Davis, Randall
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Eisenstein, Jacob
Barzilay, Regina
Davis, Randall
author_sort Eisenstein, Jacob
collection MIT
description Coverbal gesture provides a channel for the visual expression of ideas. While some gestural emblems have culturally predefined forms (e.g., "thumbs up"), the relationship between gesture and meaning is, in general, not conventionalized. It is natural to ask whether such gestures can be interpreted in a speaker-independent way, or whether gestural form is determined by the speaker's idiosyncratic view of the discourse topic. We address this question using an audiovisual dataset across multiple speakers and topics. Our analysis employs a hierarchical Bayesian author-topic model, in which gestural patterns are stochastically generated by a mixture of speaker-specific and topic-specific priors. These gestural patterns are characterized using automatically-extracted visual features, based on spatio-temporal interest points. This framework detects significant cross-speaker patterns in gesture that are governed by the discourse topic, suggesting that even unstructured gesticulation can be interpreted across speakers. In addition, the success of this approach shows that the semantic characteristics of gesture can be detected via a low-level, interest point representation.
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spelling mit-1721.1/870422022-10-02T08:33:16Z Discourse Topic and Gestural Form Eisenstein, Jacob Barzilay, Regina Davis, Randall Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Eisenstein, Jacob Barzilay, Regina Davis, Randall Coverbal gesture provides a channel for the visual expression of ideas. While some gestural emblems have culturally predefined forms (e.g., "thumbs up"), the relationship between gesture and meaning is, in general, not conventionalized. It is natural to ask whether such gestures can be interpreted in a speaker-independent way, or whether gestural form is determined by the speaker's idiosyncratic view of the discourse topic. We address this question using an audiovisual dataset across multiple speakers and topics. Our analysis employs a hierarchical Bayesian author-topic model, in which gestural patterns are stochastically generated by a mixture of speaker-specific and topic-specific priors. These gestural patterns are characterized using automatically-extracted visual features, based on spatio-temporal interest points. This framework detects significant cross-speaker patterns in gesture that are governed by the discourse topic, suggesting that even unstructured gesticulation can be interpreted across speakers. In addition, the success of this approach shows that the semantic characteristics of gesture can be detected via a low-level, interest point representation. 2014-05-16T18:49:51Z 2014-05-16T18:49:51Z 2008 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 978-1-57735-368-3 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87042 Jacob Eisenstein, Regina Barzilay, and Randall Davis. 2008. Discourse topic and gestural form. In Proceedings of the 23rd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2 (AAAI'08), Anthony Cohn (Ed.), Vol. 2. AAAI Press 836-841. © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2921-8201 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5232-7281 en_US http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1620163.1620202 Proceedings of the 23rd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2 (AAAI '08) Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ACM
spellingShingle Eisenstein, Jacob
Barzilay, Regina
Davis, Randall
Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title_full Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title_fullStr Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title_full_unstemmed Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title_short Discourse Topic and Gestural Form
title_sort discourse topic and gestural form
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87042
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2921-8201
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5232-7281
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