@inproceedings{barros-etal-2024-tool,
    title = "A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations",
    author = "Barros, Camila Antonio  and
      Cipri{\'a}n-S{\'a}nchez, Jorge Francisco  and
      Santos, Saulo Mendes",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.150",
    pages = "1705--1714",
    abstract = "Comparing annotations is a constant and necessary step in corpus analysis. Although the nature of these annotations is normally research-specific, the tools used for this purpose do not have to be. Here, we present a tool for extracting and comparing annotations from ELAN, despite their idiosyncrasies. The intention behind this tool is to provide a handy way to analyze ELAN annotated files, by comparing tiers to a reference unit. Using the presented tool, it is possible to see how tiers overlap (even if they are of symbolic type), to which ratio, and the displacement regarding a reference unit. We present an example of multimodal corpus analysis, regarding the coordination between speech and gesture units based on a pragmatic reference. We argue that looking into overlap ratios can be more informative of the association between speech and gestures, and that considering a time buffer between speech and gestural events can be misleading.",
}

Comparing annotations is a constant and necessary step in corpus analysis. Although the nature of these annotations is normally research-specific, the tools used for this purpose do not have to be. Here, we present a tool for extracting and comparing annotations from ELAN, despite their idiosyncrasies. The intention behind this tool is to provide a handy way to analyze ELAN annotated files, by comparing tiers to a reference unit. Using the presented tool, it is possible to see how tiers overlap (even if they are of symbolic type), to which ratio, and the displacement regarding a reference unit. We present an example of multimodal corpus analysis, regarding the coordination between speech and gesture units based on a pragmatic reference. We argue that looking into overlap ratios can be more informative of the association between speech and gestures, and that considering a time buffer between speech and gestural events can be misleading.
Barros, Camila Antonio Cipri{\'a}n-S{\'a}nchez, Jorge Francisco Santos, Saulo Mendes
A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations