This paper concerns the different ways in which hesitation, and hesitation related phenomena like uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena where lack of knowledge is involved are expressed in different cultures. The paper focuses especially on shoulder shrugging as a signal of hesitation or uncertainty, and starts from the observation that shoulder shrugging has different interpretations depending on the interlocutor’s cultural background. It is not commonly used in Eastern cultures while in Western cultures it is a sign of uncertainty and ignorance. The paper reports a small study on the differences in interpretation of a particular video tape gesture, and draws some preliminary conclusions of how this affects intercultural communication between human interlocutors and between humans and conversational agents.

his 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.

This paper describes past, ongoing and planned work on the collection and transcription of spoken language samples for all the South African official languages and as part of this the training of researchers in corpus linguistic research skills. More specifically the work has involved (and still involves) establishing an international corpus linguistic network linked to a network hub at a UNISA website and the development of research tools, a corpus research guide and workbook for multimodal communication and spoken language corpus research. As an example of the work we are doing and hope to do more of in the future, we present a small pilot study of the influence of English and Afrikaans on the 100 most frequent words in spoken Xhosa as this is evidenced in the corpus of spoken interaction we have gathered so far. Other planned work, besides work on spoken language phenomena, involves comparison of spoken and written language and work on communicative body movements (gestures) and their relation to speech.

In this paper, we describe the construction of the 14-million-word Nepali National Corpus (NNC). This corpus includes both spoken and written data, the latter incorporating a Nepali match for FLOB and a broader collection of text. Additional resources within the NNC include parallel data (English–Nepali and Nepali–English) and a speech corpus. The NNC is encoded as Unicode text and marked up in CES-compatible XML. The whole corpus is also annotated with part-of-speech tags. We describe the process of devising a tagset and retraining tagger software for the Nepali language, for which there were no existing corpus resources. Finally, we explore some present and future applications of the corpus, including lexicography, NLP, and grammatical research.