Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours COST Action 2102 International Workshop, Vietri sul Mare, Italy, March 29-31, 2007, Revised Selected and Invited Papers

This volume brings together the invited papers and selected participants’ contributions presented at the COST 2102 International Workshop on “Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours”, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, March 29–31, 2007. The workshop was jointly organized by the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Psychology of the Second University of Naples, Caserta, Italy, and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies “Eduardo R. Caianiello”(IIASS), Vietri sul Mare, Italy. The workshop was a COST 2102 event, and it was mainly sponsored by the COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action 2102 in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), as well as by the above-mentioned organizing Institutions. The main theme of the workshop was to discuss the fundamentals of verbal and nonverbal communication features and their relationships with the identification of a person, his/her socio-cultural background and personal traits. In the past decade, a number of different research communities within the psychological and computational sciences have tried to characterize human behaviour in face-to-face communication by several features that describe relationships between facial, prosodic/voice quality, formal and informal communication modes, cultural differences, individual and socio-cultural variations, stable personality traits and degrees of expressiveness and emphasis, as well as the individuation of the interlocutor’s emotional and psychological states.

COST 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (CAVeNC).- I – Verbal and Noverbal Coding Schema.- Annotation Schemes for Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication: Some General Issues.- Presenting in Style by Virtual Humans.- Analysis of Nonverbal Involvement in Dyadic Interactions.- II – Emotional Expressions.- Children’s Perception of Musical Emotional Expressions.- Emotional Style Conversion in the TTS System with Cepstral Description.- Meaningful Parameters in Emotion Characterisation.- III – Gestural Expressions.- Prosodic and Gestural Expression of Interactional Agreement.- Gesture, Prosody and Lexicon in Task-Oriented Dialogues: Multimedia Corpus Recording and Labelling.- Egyptian Grunts and Transportation Gestures.- IV – Analysis and Algorithms for Verbal and Nonverbal Speech.- On the Use of NonVerbal Speech Sounds in Human Communication.- Speech Spectrum Envelope Modeling.- Using Prosody in Fixed Stress Languages for Improvement of Speech Recognition.- Single-Channel Noise Suppression by Wavelets in Spectral Domain.- Voice Source Change During Fundamental Frequency Variation.- A Gesture-Based Concept for Speech Movement Control in Articulatory Speech Synthesis.- A Novel Psychoacoustically Motivated Multichannel Speech Enhancement System.- Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Acoustic Signals with the Dresden UASR System.- V – Machine Multimodal Interaction.- VideoTRAN: A Translation Framework for Audiovisual Face-to-Face Conversations.- Spoken and Multimodal Communication Systems in Mobile Settings.- Multilingual Augmentative Alternative Communication System.- Analysis and Synthesis of Multimodal Verbal and Non-verbal Interaction for Animated Interface Agents.- Generating Nonverbal Signals for a Sensitive Artificial Listener.- Low-Complexity Algorithms for Biometric Recognition.- Towards to Mobile Multimodal Telecommunications Systems and Services.- Embodied Conversational Agents in Wizard-of-Oz and Multimodal Interaction Applications.- Telling Stories with a Synthetic Character: Understanding Inter-modalities Relations.