Affirm or Negate

Agreeing is not an autonomous
state of mind of an individual: it

is a behavioral event that
necessarily involves an
interaction requiring at least two
actors and a subject. It comes
about as a reflection on the
truthfulness of some statement,
view or opinion and can evolve
under at least two conditions: (a)
in the course of the interaction
the actors realize that they share
the same view independently
from one another, or (b) one or
more of the actors get convinced
by the argument of the other
actor(s). The process of agreeing
takes different forms depending
on these two different conditions:
when the actors A and B share the
same view independently,
agreement by actor B usually
follows a statement or elaboration
by actor A as a backchannel of
some sort (such as Yes, indeed!).
When actor B gets convinced by
actor A about the truthfulness of a
given view, the act of agreeing by
actor B may follow a question or
some inquiry by actor A (such
as What do you think? or Do you
agree?), but other scenarios (such
as those involving nonverbal
events or pauses, virtually
anything that prompts for a turn
change) are also possible.
Similarly to agreement,
disagreement also evolves as a
reaction act to a preceding
prompt (Kakavá, 1993; Locher,
2004). Disagreement is often
described as a behavior that
reflects some kind of
confrontation which, being
understood as a function of face
and politeness, should be avoided
(cf. Sacks, 1973/1987; Brown and
Levinson, 1978/1987; Leech,
1983; Pomerantz, 1984). Schiffrin
(1984) shows, however, that it can
also signal sociability, i.e.,
disagreement can even strengthen
social relations. The role of
context in the interpretation of
these behaviors is widely
recognized in pragmatics, even
though the term itself is not
sufficiently defined. Sifianou
(2012) notes that, for proper
interpretation, one even needs to
consider longer periods of time
allowing for the recognition of the
development of personal traits
and relational histories.
Agreeing and disagreeing are not
in a simple binary relation: there
can be several shades, degrees of
this behavior (full or partial),
indecision about what opinion to
adhere to or advocate
(uncertainty), or even a total lack
of it (indifference). The
recognition of these variants of
agreeing/disagreeing is a key
factor in conveying a successful
conversation: not recognizing, or
misinterpreting events of
agreement can even lead to the
total failure of the given
interaction. Even though
languages usually possess a
number of lexical and syntactic
means for the expression of this
behavior, relying solely on the
linguistic form may still be
misleading. When, for example,
actor B agrees with actor A,
he/she would say “yes”; however,
the same “yes” can also be used to
suggest just the opposite, i.e., to
mean disagreement—depending
on the way “yes” is pronounced.
Alternatively, one can agree or
disagree by not even saying a
word, just by keeping silent:
again, it is the nonverbal behavior
that contributes to the
understanding of the context,
effectively to the pragmatic
interpretation of the event.
Accordingly, in order to properly
identify the instances of the
pragmatic functions of
agreement/disagreement, one has
to consider all available
modalities, both verbal and
nonverbal, either audio or visual.
However, there is one more
challenge here. When someone
expresses agreement by saying
“yes” and nodding at the same
time, this agreement is identified
as the co-occurrence, the virtual
temporal alignment of the two
(verbal and gestural) events. But
how can the wisdom of the
proverb “silence gives consent” be
justified, i.e., how can agreement
be interpreted on the basis of the
lack of the co-occurrence of any
behavioral events? In fact, it is
not the case that we face zero
input here. We assume that we
actually arrive at the
interpretation of (some degree of)
agreement after a certain period
of observation, during which we
collect pieces of data from all the
available (verbal and nonverbal)
modalities. In this process we go
beyond just searching for simple
temporal alignments of certain
events, we rather try to identify
behavioral patterns composed of
events over a longer observation
period. This is, in fact, a cognitive
process in which the patterns
identified in this way are matched
against stereotypical patterns of
behavior we are already aware of
(either as innate or acquired
ones), and the pragmatic function
of the best match is assigned to
the given pattern found in the
observation period, in our case to
the one associated with
agreement/disagreement.
When designing the HuComTech

Corpus, we wished to identify a
variety of multimodal patterns of
behavior across a given
observation period. Using data
from the resulted database, this
paper has a focus on the discovery
of temporal patterns related to
agreement/disagreement. It
describes the methodological
basis of both building the corpus
and analyzing and interpreting
the data. Special emphasis is
given to the research tool Theme:
we both describe its theoretical
foundations that facilitate the
analysis of multimodal behavioral
data and specify certain
methodological questions of its
application to the HuComTech
Corpus. Finally, we present a
selection of the most frequent
temporal patterns associated with
the pragmatic function of
agreement discovered in the
corpus and demonstrate their
actual context in the recorded
interactions.

Affirm or Negate

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Agreeing is not an autonomous

state of mind of an individual: it

When designing the HuComTech

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