A cross-cultural, multimodal, affective corpus for gesture expressivity analysis

A multimodal, cross-cultural corpus of affective behavior is presented in this research work. The corpus construction process, including issues related to the design and implementation of an experiment, is discussed along with resulting acoustic prosody, facial expressions and gesture expressivity features. However, research work presented here focuses more on the cross-cultural aspect of gestural behavior defining a common corpus construction protocol aiming to identify cultural patterns within non-verbal behavior across cultures i.e. German, Greek and Italian. Culture specific findings regarding gesture expressivity are derived from the affective analysis performed. Additionally, the multimodal aspect, including prosody and facial expressions, is researched in terms of fusion techniques. Finally, a release plan of the corpus to the public domain is discussed aiming to establish the current corpus as a benchmark multimodal, cross-cultural standard and reference point.