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The NOMCO Multimodal Nordic Resource - Goals and Characteristics

This paper presents the multimodal corpora that are being collected and annotated in the Nordic NOMCO project. The corpora will be used to study communicative phenomena such as feedback, turn management and sequencing. They already include video material for Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Estonian, and several social activities are represented. The data will make it possible to verify empirically how gestures (head movements, facial displays, hand gestures and body postures) and speech interact in all the three mentioned aspects of communication. The data are being annotated following the MUMIN annotation scheme, which provides attributes concerning the shape and the communicative functions of head movements, face expressions, body posture and hand gestures. After having described the corpora, the paper discusses how they will be used to study the way feedback is expressed in speech and gestures, and reports results from two pilot studies where we investigated the function of head gestures ― both single and repeated ― in combination with feedback expressions. The annotated corpora will be valuable sources for research on intercultural communication as well as for interaction in the individual languages.