An empirical user-study of text-based nonverbal annotation systems for human-human conversations
This work addresses the need for automated multimodal transcription systems to analyze online conversations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The study evaluated three text-based nonverbal annotation systems for human-human conversations, finding that MONAH was more usable than Jefferson and that visualizing machine attention confused users as loudness.
the substantial increase in the number of online human-human conversations and the usefulness of multimodal transcripts, there is a rising need for automated multimodal transcription systems to help us better understand the conversations. In this paper, we evaluated three methods to perform multimodal transcription. They were (1) Jefferson -- an existing manual system used widely by the linguistics community, (2) MONAH -- a system that aimed to make multimodal transcripts accessible and automated, (3) MONAH+ -- a system that builds on MONAH that visualizes machine attention. Based on 104 participants responses, we found that (1) all text-based methods significantly reduced the amount of information for the human users, (2) MONAH was found to be more usable than Jefferson, (3) Jefferson's relative strength was in chronemics (pace / delay) and paralinguistics (pitch / volume) annotations, whilst MONAH's relative strength was in kinesics (body language) annotations, (4) enlarging words' font-size based on machine attention was confusing human users as loudness. These results pose considerations for researchers designing a multimodal annotation system for the masses who would like a fully-automated or human-augmented conversational analysis system.