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Talking and Looking: the SmartWeb Multimodal Interaction Corpus

Nowadays portable devices such as smart phones can be used to capture the face of a user simultaneously with the voice input. Server based or even embedded dialogue system might utilize this additional information to detect whether the speaking user addresses the system or other parties or whether the listening user is focused on the display or not. Depending on these findings the dialogue system might change its strategy to interact with the user improving the overall communication between human and system. To develop and test methods for On/Off-Focus detection a multimodal corpus of user-machine interactions was recorded within the German SmartWeb project. The corpus comprises 99 recording sessions of a triad communication between the user, the system and a human companion. The user can address/watch/listen to the system but also talk to his companion, read from the display or simply talk to herself. Facial video is captured with a standard built-in video camera of a smart phone while voice input in being recorded by a high quality close microphone as well as over a realistic transmission line via Bluetooth and WCDMA. The resulting SmartWeb Video Corpus (SVC) can be obtained from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals.