Past event
Grand Challenge — Annotating social interaction with ELAN: Lessons from the past and future directions
GMT (UK)
ELAN has been a cornerstone of research on language and communication for 25 years. This session looks at both traditional approaches to annotating audiovisual data with ELAN and emerging ways to combine it with speech-to-text, motion capture, and computer vision.
Host
- Anita Slonimska — MPI for Psycholinguistics
Speakers
- Ezgi Mamus — MPI for Psycholinguistics
“Practical introduction to ELAN” - Sho Akamine — MPI for Psycholinguistics
“Current innovations and future directions for ELAN”
Agenda
- 15:00–15:03 MOSAIC opening (Rachael Jack)
- 15:03–15:10 Introduction (Anita Slonimska, MPI for Psycholinguistics)
- 15:10–15:25 Practical introduction to ELAN (Ezgi Mamus)
- 15:25–15:30 Q&A on Ezgi’s part
- 15:30–15:45 Current innovations and future directions for ELAN (Sho Akamine)
- 15:45–15:50 Q&A on Sho’s part
- 15:50–16:30 General discussion
ELAN is a free multimedia annotation tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Over the past 25 years, it has become a cornerstone in research on language and communication — especially in fields that require detailed, time-aligned annotation of audiovisual data, such as gesture studies, sign language research, and conversation analysis, as well as research on interaction in both naturalistic and experimental settings.
Today, ELAN is expanding beyond manual annotation. With recent advances in automatic speech-to-text transcription, motion-capture technology, and computer-vision tools, ELAN is increasingly integrated into workflows that combine human expertise with automated processing. This opens up new possibilities for more robust, faster, and richer analyses of multimodal interaction. In this session, we look at both traditional approaches to working with ELAN and emerging opportunities to combine it with current technological developments.