To Beat or Not to Beat: Beat Gestures in Direction Giving

Mariet Theune, Chris J. Brandhorst

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

    10 Citations (Scopus)
    196 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Research on gesture generation for embodied conversational agents (ECA’s) mostly focuses on gesture types such as pointing and iconic gestures, while ignoring another gesture type frequently used by human speakers: beat gestures. Analysis of a corpus of route descriptions showed that although annotators show very low agreement in applying a ‘beat filter’ aimed at identifying physical features of beat gestures, they are capable of reliably distinguishing beats from other gestures in a more intuitive manner. Beat gestures made up more than 30% of the gestures in our corpus, and they were sometimes used when expressing concepts for which other gesture types seemed a more obvious choice.Based on these findings we propose a simple, probabilistic model of beat production for ECA’s. However, it is clear that more research is needed to determine why direction givers in some cases use beats when other gestures seem more appropriate, and vice versa.
    Original languageUndefined
    Title of host publicationGesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction
    EditorsS. Kopp, I. Wachsmuth
    Place of PublicationBerlin Heidelberg
    PublisherSpringer
    Pages195-206
    Number of pages12
    ISBN (Print)978-3-642-12552-2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2010
    Event8th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2008 - Bielefeld, Germany
    Duration: 25 Feb 200927 Feb 2009

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
    PublisherSpringer Verlag
    Number5934
    Volume5934
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Workshop

    Workshop8th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2008
    Period25/02/0927/02/09
    OtherFebruary 25-27, 2009

    Keywords

    • IR-71442
    • METIS-270816
    • EWI-17884
    • EC Grant Agreement nr.: FP7/231287
    • Gesture and speech - gesture analysis - beats - direction giving

    Cite this