Disfluency in Multiparty Social Talk

Much research on disfluencies in spontaneous spoken interaction has been carried out on corpora of task-based conversations, resulting in greater understanding of the role of several phenomena. Modern multimodal corpora allow the full spectrum of signals in face to face communication to be analysed. However, the ‘unmarked’ case of casual conversation or social talk with no obvious short-term instrumental goal has been less studied in this manner. Corpus-based work on social talk tends to deal with short dyadic interactions, although the norm for social conversation is for longer multiparty interaction. In this paper, we outline our programme of exploratory studies of disfluency in a longer multiparty conversation. We briefly describe the background to our research goals, and then report on the collection, transcription, and annotation of the data for our experiments. We present and discuss some of our early results.