The work defines the sigh as a type of breath expressing or communicating specific mental or emotional states.
To
investigate the meanings of the sigh, after
overviewing preliminary analyses of
written and oral corpora, the paper focuses
on a peculiar use of it as a “discrediting
body comment” often exploited in
political debates to imply the opponent’s
stupidity or obsessive repetition, by
displaying frustration or boredom. In a
perception study on some uses of this sigh,
participants’ interpretations are not
significantly shared, but agreement
emerges when considering their
perception of sighs in terms of valence and
arousal.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and natural user interfaces,the need for multimedia material that can be semantically interpreted in real time becomes critical. In