Abstract Meaning Representation for Gesture

Abstract

This paper presents Gesture AMR, an extension to Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), that captures the meaning of gesture. In developing Gesture AMR, we consider how gesture form and meaning relate; how gesture packages meaning both independently and in interaction with speech; and how the meaning of gesture is temporally and contextually determined. Our case study for developing Gesture AMR is a focused human-human shared task to build block structures. We develop an initial taxonomy of gesture act relations that adheres to AMR’s existing focus on predicate-argument structure while integrating meaningful elements unique to gesture. Pilot annotation shows Gesture AMR to be more challenging than standard AMR, and illustrates the need for more work on representation of dialogue and multimodal meaning. We discuss challenges of adapting an existing meaning representation to non-speech-based modalities and outline several avenues for expanding Gesture AMR.

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