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Agreement and its Multimodal Communication in Debates: A Qualitative Analysis

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Abstract

The paper defines the notion of agreement from a cognitive point of view and analyses types of agreement signals in TV debates. Agreement is defined as a relation of identity, similarity or congruence between the opinions of two or more persons, by contrasting it with confirmation and admission, and the connected notions of proposal, assessment and opinion are overviewed. Research is then presented on the multimodal signals of agreement in debates from the Canal 9 and the AMI corpora; different ways to express agreement are singled out in extensive discourse, single words and body signals, and analysed through an annotation scheme of multimodal data. Different types of agreement are illustrated, including true, indirect and apparent agreement.

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Notes

  1. In Italian, these two meanings of “to agree” respectively correspond to two different verb phrases: essere d’accordo—the stative meaning, a preceding steady state—and mettersi d’accordo—a social action aimed at coming to an agreement. A third Italian phrase including “d’accordo” is “andare d’accordo”, meaning that two persons generally have the same goals, they have consonant feelings, they are empathic to each other, so they generally need not argue or discuss to make shared decisions. If I say: “Maria ed io andiamo d’accordo” (Maria and I have a feeling with each other), it means that we feel well together, we have similar feelings, and that there is no conflict between us; so, no reason of striving to come to an agreement. In this case, the similarity is not one of opinions nor of goals, but one of emotions or feelings.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Seventh Framework Program, European Network of Excellence SSPNet (Social Signal Processing Network), Grant Agreement Number 231287.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Roma Tre University, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico & Laura Vincze

Authors
  1. Isabella Poggi
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  2. Francesca D’Errico
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  3. Laura Vincze
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Correspondence to Francesca D’Errico.

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Poggi, I., D’Errico, F. & Vincze, L. Agreement and its Multimodal Communication in Debates: A Qualitative Analysis. Cogn Comput 3, 466–479 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-010-9068-x

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