The Rovereto Emotion and Cooperation Corpus: a new resource to investigate cooperation and emotions

Abstract

The Rovereto Emotion and Cooperation Corpus (RECC) is a new resource collected to investigate the relationship between cooperation and emotions in an interactive setting. Previous attempts at collecting corpora to study emotions have shown that this data are often quite difficult to classify and analyse, and coding schemes to analyse emotions are often found not to be reliable. We collected a corpus of task-oriented (MapTask-style) dialogues in Italian, in which the segments of emotional interest are identified using psycho-physiological indexes (Heart Rate and Galvanic Skin Conductance) which are highly reliable. We then annotated these segments in accordance with novel multimodal annotation schemes for cooperation (in terms of effort) and facial expressions (an indicator of emotional state). High agreement was obtained among coders on all the features. The RECC corpus is to our knowledge the first resource with psycho-physiological data aligned with verbal and nonverbal behaviour data.

(Non)cooperative Dialogues

“…Regarding facial expressions, any movements produced by the upper and lower part of the face were marked on different layers of the annotation tool and synchronized with the dialogue transcription. Six Italian native speakers independently coded a part of the collected corpus following the coding scheme guidelines (Cavicchio & Poesio, 2012). Annotation of cooperation.…”