This paper describes data collection and the first explorative research on the AICO Multimodal Corpus. The corpus contains eye-gaze, Kinect, and video recordings of human-robot and human-human interactions, and was collected to study cooperation, engagement and attention of human participants in task-based as well as in chatty type interactive situations. In particular, the goal was to enable comparison between human-human and human-robot interactions, besides studying multimodal behaviour and attention in the different dialogue activities. The robot partner was a humanoid Nao robot, and it was expected that its agent-like behaviour would render humanrobot interactions similar to human-human interaction but also high-light important differences due to the robot’s limited conversational capabilities. The paper reports on the preliminary studies on the corpus, concerning the participants’ eye-gaze and gesturing behaviours,which were chosen as objective measures to study differences in their multimodal behaviour patterns with a human and a robot partner.

We conducted preliminary comparison of human-robot (HR) interaction with human-human (HH) interaction conducted in English and in Japanese. As the result, body gestures increased in HR, while hand and head gestures decreased in HR. Concerning hand gesture, they were composed of more diverse and complex forms, trajectories and functions in HH than in HR. Moreover, English speakers produced 6 times more hand gestures than Japanese speakers in HH. Regarding head gesture, even though there was no difference in the frequency of head gestures between English speakers and Japanese speakers in HH, Japanese speakers produced slightly more nodding during the robot’s speaking than English speakers in HR. Furthermore, positions of nod were different depending on the language. Concerning body gesture, participants produced body gestures mostly to regulate appropriate distance with the robot in HR. Additionally, English speakers produced slightly more body gestures than Japanese speakers.