Capturing Chat: Annotation and Tools for Multiparty Casual Conversation

Casual multiparty conversation is an understudied but very common genre of spoken interaction, whose analysis presents a number of challenges in terms of data scarcity and annotation. We describe the annotation process used on the d64 and DANS multimodal corpora of multiparty casual talk, which have been manually segmented, transcribed, annotated for laughter and disfluencies, and aligned using the Penn Aligner. We also describe a visualization tool, STAVE, developed during the annotation process, which allows long stretches of talk or indeed entire conversations to be viewed, aiding preliminary identification of features and patterns worthy of analysis. It is hoped that this tool will be of use to other researchers working in this field.