We would like to draw your attention to the 6th European and 9th Nordic Symposium on Multimodality (MMSYM 2019). This year’s edition is hosted by the University of Leuven (Belgium) and will be held on September, 9-10. In this two-day workshop, we will approach multimodality from different angles, by inviting talks on co-speech gesture, prosody, multimodal language acquisition and sign linguistics, among others. With this e-mail, we cordially invite you to our symposium. You can still register until the end of this month. We are also happy to inform you that we will provide Flemish Sign Language and British Sign Language interpretation. The final program and more information can be found on our website: http://mmsym.org.?

We hope to invite many of you in Leuven!

All the best,

The organizing committee?

6th European and 9th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication
Research group MIDI (Multimodality, Interaction & Discourse)
University of Leuven
September 9-10, 2019

The 6th European and 9th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication aims to provide a multidisciplinary forum for researchers from different disciplines who study multimodality in human communication as well as in human-computer interaction. The 2019 edition of the MMSYM symposium is organized by the MIDI research group (Multimodality, Interaction & Discourse) based at the Linguistics Department of the University of Leuven, Belgium.
The symposium follows up on a tradition established by the Swedish Symposia on Multimodal Communication held from 1997 until 2000, and continued by the Nordic Symposia on Multimodal Communication held from 2003 to 2012. Since 2013 the symposium has acquired a broader European dimension, with editions held in Malta, Estonia, Ireland, Denmark and Germany. This year the symposium will be held in Belgium for the first time.

The past ten years have witnessed a spectacular increase in research on multimodal communication from a variety of perspectives and (sub)disciplines, including (corpus) linguistics, conversation analysis, human-computer interaction research, and (critical) discourse analysis. This has not only led to a range of novel insights into the dynamics of embodied and situated communication (see e.g. Müller et al. 2013, 2014 for an overview), but has also been the catalyst for the development and implementation of methodological innovations, including the use of high-quality (including multi-angle) video recordings, the integration of input from motion capturing systems, biometric sensor systems and eye-tracking into a multimodal analysis pipeline, the exploration of (semi-)automatic annotation techniques for large-scale corpora, and the implementation of multimodal interaction in computer interfaces. Despite the rapid development of the fields involved, many questions still need to be resolved and new challenges emerge for research on multimodal communication. The MMSYM symposium aims to provide a forum for the discussion of these challenges.