A new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) on “Linguistic Creativity in Communication” funded by DFG is about to start in 2024. We are part of it with a project on multimodal creativity in speech-gesture production. In collaboration with Joana Cholin (Psycholinguistics) we will investigate how humans and AI models can use gesture to accompany newly created linguistic constructions, when given communicative resources are not available or not adequate.

Our paper “AQ-GT: a temporally aligned and quantized GRU-Transformer for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis” by Hendric Voss and Stefan Kopp won the Best Paper Award of the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2023) held in Paris.