Promoting free dialog video corpora: the IFADV corpus example

Research into spoken language has become more visual over the years. Both fundamental and applied research have progressively included gestures, gaze, and facial expression. Corpora of multi-modal conversational speech are rare and frequently difficult to use due to
privacy and copyright restrictions. In contrast, Free-and-Libre corpora would allow anyone to add incremental annotations and improvement, distributing the cost of construction and maintenance. A freely available annotated corpus is presented with high quality video recordings of face-to-face conversational speech. An effort has been made to remove copyright and use restrictions. Annotations have been processed to RDBMS tables that allow SQL queries and direct connections to statistical software. A few simple examples are presented to illustrate the use of a databases of annotated speech. From our experiences we would like to advocate the formulation of "best practises" for both legal handling and database storage of recordings and annotations.