---
title: "Multimodal Reference by Means of the — Navarretta 2026"
description: "This paper asks whether politicians use hand gestures to signal which group they mean when they say \"we.\" In political talk, the Danish pronoun vi can…"
authors: ["Costanza Navarretta"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.720/"
doi: "10.63317/27nvrmnnxgqh"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/navarretta-2026-multimodal-reference-means-pronoun-we/"
---
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# Multimodal Reference by Means of the Pronoun We and Hand Gestures in a Novel Corpus of Parliamentary Opening Debates

**Authors:** [Costanza Navarretta](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/costanza-navarretta/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.720/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.720.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/27nvrmnnxgqh](https://doi.org/10.63317/27nvrmnnxgqh) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7160117405)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This paper asks whether politicians use hand gestures to signal which group they mean when they say "we." In political talk, the Danish pronoun vi can stand for the government, the parliament, the nation, a party, or larger entities such as the EU. This ambiguity matters especially in Denmark, where governments often seek broad cross-party consensus.

The author presents a newly built multimodal corpus that pairs video and audio recordings of the Folketinget's opening debates, spanning 2013–2024. The official Hansards are edited toward written style, so the corpus instead uses verbatim transcripts. These are generated with Whisper and then manually corrected.

For the study, 219 answers by two prime ministers to opposition questions were annotated. Each occurrence of vi was labelled with its referent and linked to co-occurring hand gestures, especially pointing. The analysis tests whether pointing direction varies with the intended referent.

This hypothesis held for the most frequent referent types. Pointing helped listeners identify and emphasise the referent, and some gestures also conveyed the speaker's attitude. The findings add to research on multimodal political persuasion and could inform systems that generate multimodal behaviour. However, the author notes they offer limited help for automatic pronoun resolution.

## Key points
- **New resource:** a multimodal corpus of Danish parliamentary opening debates from 2013–2024. Transcripts and annotations are planned for release through the CLARIN-DK repository.
- **Transcription:** Whisper was used, with a reported WER of around 34%. Outputs are manually corrected with help from ParlaMint-DK, which covers October 2014 to June 2022. So far, only the material used in this study has been corrected.
- **Study data:** 219 speeches by Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Mette Frederiksen, taken from the debates of 2013, 2014 and 2021–2024.
- **Main result:** the trajectory of pointing gestures differs by referent for the most common referents of vi. Gestures support identifying and emphasising the referent and sometimes show the speaker's stance.
- **Limitations and future work:** the study covers only two speakers and only hand gestures. Planned extensions include gaze, head movements and body posture, other referring expressions, and semi-automatic annotation of the full corpus.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{navarretta2026multimodal,
  title = {{Multimodal Reference by Means of the Pronoun We and Hand Gestures in a Novel Corpus of Parliamentary Opening Debates}},
  author = {Navarretta, Costanza},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/27nvrmnnxgqh},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/27nvrmnnxgqh}
}
```

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