Human, All Too Human: Towards a Disfluent Virtual Tourist Guide

Abstract

Investigating the multimodal communication of Tourist Guides to implement a Virtual Tourist Guide leading tourists in three Italian Charterhouses, the paper focuses on an aspect of the human guide's speech that would be useful to create a very realistic Virtual Guide: linguistic disfluencies. On a corpus of three guided tours in S. Martino Charterhouse (Naples) an analysis is presented of the guides' pauses and their concomitant gestures.