A Cross-cultural Corpus of Annotated Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviors in Receptionist Encounters
This provides a new resource for the human-robot interaction community, addressing a domain-specific gap in service encounter data.
The researchers tackled the lack of annotated nonverbal behavior datasets by creating the first freely available corpus of annotated verbal and nonverbal behaviors in receptionist encounters, involving American English and Arabic speakers in naturalistic role plays in Qatar and the USA.
We present the first annotated corpus of nonverbal behaviors in receptionist interactions, and the first nonverbal corpus (excluding the original video and audio data) of service encounters freely available online. Native speakers of American English and Arabic participated in a naturalistic role play at reception desks of university buildings in Doha, Qatar and Pittsburgh, USA. Their manually annotated nonverbal behaviors include gaze direction, hand and head gestures, torso positions, and facial expressions. We discuss possible uses of the corpus and envision it to become a useful tool for the human-robot interaction community.