Laughter in French Spontaneous Conversational Dialogs (original) (raw)
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A comparative cross-domain study of the occurrence of laughter in meeting and seminar corpora
2008
Laughter is an intrinsic component of human-human interaction, and current automatic speech understanding paradigms stand to gain significantly from its detection and modeling. In the current work, we produce a manual segmentation of laughter in a large corpus of interactive multi-party seminars, which promises to be a valuable resource for acoustic modeling purposes. More importantly, we quantify the occurrence of laughter in this new domain, and contrast our observations with findings for laughter in multi-party meetings. Our analyses show that, with respect to the majority of measures we explore, the occurrence of laughter in both domains is quite similar.
2020
Cheese! is a conversational corpus. It consists of 11 French face-to-face conversations lasting around 15 minutes each. Cheese! is a duplication of an American corpus (ref) in order to conduct a cross-cultural comparison of participants’ smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous sequences in American English and French conversations. In this article, the methodology used to collect and enrich the corpus is presented: experimental protocol, technical choices, transcription, semi-automatic annotations, manual annotations of smiling and humor. An exploratory study investigating the links between smile and humor is then proposed. Based on the analysis of two interactions, two questions are asked: (1) Does smile frame humor? (2) Does smile has an impact on its success or failure? If the experimental design of Cheese! has been elaborated to study specifically smiles and humor in conversations, the high quality of the dataset obtained, and the methodology used are also replicable and c...
Laughter in Conversation: Features of Occurrence and Acoustic Structure
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2000
Although human laughter mainly occurs in social contexts, most studies have dealt with laughter evoked by media. In our study, we investigated conversational laughter. Our results show that laughter is much more frequent than has been described previously by self-report studies. Contrary to the common view that laughter is elicited by external stimuli, participants frequently laughed after their own verbal utterances. We thus suggest that laughter in conversation may primarily serve to regulate the flow of interaction and to mitigate the meaning of the preceding utterance. Conversational laughter bouts consisted of a smaller number of laughter elements and had longer interval durations than laughter bouts elicited by media. These parameters also varied with conversational context. The high intraindividual variability in the acoustic parameters of laughter, which greatly exceeded the parameter variability between subjects, may thus be a result of the laughter context.
Multi-layered analysis of laughter
This paper presents a multi-layered classification of laughter in French and Chinese dialogues (from the DUEL corpus). Analysis related to the form, the semantic meaning and the function of laughter and its context provides a detailed study of the range of uses of laughter and their distributions. A similar distribution was observed in most of the data collected for French and Chinese. We ground our classification in a formal semantic and pragmatic analysis. We propose that most functions of laughter can be analyzed by positing two main meanings, which when aligned with rich contextual reasoning, yields a wide range of functions. However, we also argue that a proper treatment of laughter involves a significant conceptual modification of information state account of dialogue to incorporate emotive aspects of interaction.
A multi-layered analysis Laughter
2016
This paper presents a multi-layered classification of laughter in French and Chinese dialogues (from the DUEL corpus). Analysis related to the form, the semantic meaning and the function of laughter and its context provides a detailed study of the range of uses of laughter and their distributions. A similar distribution was observed in most of the data collected for French and Chinese. We ground our classification in a formal semantic and pragmatic analysis. We propose that most functions of laughter can be analyzed by positing a unified meaning with two dimensions, which when aligned with rich contextual reasoning, yields a wide range of functions. However, we also argue that a proper treatment of laughter involves a significant conceptual modification of information state account of dialogue to incorporate emotive aspects of interaction.
Integrating laughter into spoken dialogue systems: preliminary analysis and suggested programme
FAIM/ISCA Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Multimodal Human Robot Interaction
This paper presents an exploratory scheme, which aims at investigating perceptual features that characterise laughables (the arguments laughter is related to) in dialogue context. We present the results of a preliminary study and sketch an updated questionnaire on laughables types and laughter functions aimed to be used for Amazon Mechanical Turk experiments. Furthermore we present preliminary programme for integrating laughter into spoken dialogue systems.
Analysis of the occurrence of laughter in meetings
Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, 2007
Automatic speech understanding in natural multiparty conversation settings stands to gain from parsing not only verbal but also non-verbal vocal communicative behaviors. In this work, we study the most frequently annotated non-verbal behavior, laughter, whose detection has clear implications for speech understanding tasks, and for the automatic recognition of affect in particular. To complement existing acoustic descriptions of the phenomenon, we explore the temporal patterning of laughter over the course of conversation, with a view towards its automatic segmentation and detection. We demonstrate that participants vary extensively in their use of laughter, and that laughter differs from speech in its duration and in the regularity of its occurrence. We also show that laughter and speech are quite dissimilar in terms of the degree of simultaneous vocalization by multiple participants, and in terms of the probability of transitioning into and out of vocalization overlap states.
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2018
The present article is part of a larger cross-cultural research project on speaker-hearer smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous conversations in American English and French. The American corpus consists of eight computer-mediated interactions between English native speakers, and the French one consists of four face-to-face interactions between French native speakers. The goal of the study is twofold: first, we analyze the link between smiling and humor, focusing on the degree of synchronicity of smiling and the intensity of smiling during humorous and non-humorous segments; second, we investigate the various targets mobilized in conversational humor. The results obtained comparing the two data-sets show a correlation between the presence of humor, an increased smiling intensity, and an increase in the synchronized smiling behaviors displayed by participants. However, the two corpora also differ in terms of the displayed smiling behaviors: French participants display more non...
Sharing a laugh at others: Humorous convergence in French conversation
The European Journal of Humour Research
The aim of this article is to clarify the fuzzy notion of “successful humour”. It focuses on humorous sequences in French face-to-face interactions which are both successful and have a same type of target: a collective “Other” (foreign culture, a French or foreign institution, a French or foreign socio-professional group). It will be shown that laughing about/at others (with all the aggressiveness this could imply) is not inconsistent with the necessary collaborative aspect of the conversation.On the contrary, the necessary collaboration between the participants will be highlighted through analysing humour in two different but complementary ways. Firstly, analysing humour through one specific target (the collective “Other”) will show that the participants rely on shared knowledge to display fictitious identities allowing them to construct humour. Secondly, a structural analysis of successful humorous sequences will deepen the notion of successful humour, highlighting two different s...
Identifying action: Laughter in non-humorous reported speech
Journal of Pragmatics, 2012
This paper examines the construction of a single action in interaction by means of one of its characteristic features: laughter. It examines laughter in a particular sequential context: direct reported speech which is itself not humorous. It emerges that the laughter plays a pivotal role in the construction of this particular action; furthermore, there is striking evidence pointing to the fine calibration of the production of laughter. There are clear methodological implications for Pragmatics in this consideration of a non-linguistic but pervasive feature of interaction.