RoomReader: A Multimodal Corpus of Online Multiparty Conversational Interactions

We present RoomReader, a corpus of multimodal, multiparty conversational interactions in which participants followed a collaborative student-tutor scenario designed to elicit spontaneous speech. The corpus was developed within the wider RoomReader Project to explore multimodal cues of conversational engagement and behavioural aspects of collaborative interaction in online environments. However, the corpus can be used to study a wide range of phenomena in online multimodal interaction. The publicly-shared corpus consists of over 8 hours of video and audio recordings from 118 participants in 30 gender-balanced sessions, in the "in-the-wild" online environment of Zoom. The recordings have been edited, synchronised, and fully transcribed. Student participants have been continuously annotated for engagement with a novel continuous scale. We provide questionnaires measuring engagement and group cohesion collected from the annotators, tutors and participants themselves. We also make a range of accompanying data available such as personality tests and behavioural assessments. The dataset and accompanying psychometrics present a rich resource enabling the exploration of a range of downstream tasks across diverse fields including linguistics and artificial intelligence. This could include the automatic detection of student engagement, analysis of group interaction and collaboration in online conversation, and the analysis of conversational behaviours in an online setting.