10. Prosody Enhances Cognitive Infocommunication: Materials from the HuComTech Corpus

The multimodal HuComTech corpus aims at annotating, studying and publishing data related to a wide spectrum of markers of human behavior in human-human spoken dialogues. By doing so the final goal is to both understand human cognitive behavior in conversational settings and contribute to the enhancement of human-machine interaction systems. One of the main issues still leaving wide spaces for further development is related to speech prosody, the understanding of its association with possible cognitive processes for the expression of emotions as well as the online production of speech utterances. Since the latter often results in incomplete structures, the study of the relation between grammatical incompleteness and prosody can both contribute to a better understanding of human cognition and the enhancement of cognitive infocommunication systems. The data and analyses presented in this paper are intended to serve both these purposes. Two different approaches will be presented as methods of data exploration: the study of static temporal alignments within the ELAN annotation tool, and the discovery of dynamic temporal patterns using the Theme framework.