A conversational paradigm for multimodal human interaction

We present an alternative to the manipulative and semaphoric gesture recognition paradigms. Human multimodal communicative behaviors form a tightly integrated whole. We present a paradigm multimodal analysis in natural discourse based on a feature decompositive psycholinguistically derived model that permits us to access the underlying structure and intent of multimodal communicative discourse. We outline the psycholinguistics that drive our paradigm, the Catchment concept that facilitates our getting a computational handle on discourse entities, and summarize some approaches and results that realize the vision. We show examples of such discourse-structuring features as handedness, types of symmetry, gaze-at-interlocutor and hand 'origos'. Such analysis is an alternative to the 'recognition of one discrete gesture out of k stylized whole gesture models' paradigm.