We report on our explorations of laughter in multiparty spoken interaction. Laughter is universally observed in human interaction. It is multimodal in nature: a stereotyped exhalation from the mouth in conjunction with rhythmic head and body movement. Predominantly occurring in company rather than solo, it is believed to aid social bonding. Spoken interaction is widely studied through corpus an...

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a goal oriented psychotherapy counseling that aims to instill positive change in a client through discussion. Since the discourse is in the form of semi-structured natural conversation, it often involves a variety of non-verbal social and affective behaviors such as laughter. Laughter carries information related to affect, mood and personality and can offer a w...

Conversational speech not only contains several variants of neutral speech but is also prominently interlaced with several speaker generated non-speech sounds such as laughter and breath. A robust speaker recognition system should be capable of recognizing a speaker irrespective of these variations in his speech. An understanding of whether the speaker-specific information represented by these ...

Pseudobulbar affect-such as pathological laughter or crying-is associated with several different neurologic diseases and is most frequently seen in patients with Alzheimer disease. However, many physicians do not recognize it as a symptom associated with multiple sclerosis. The present report describes a case of pathological laughter in a 56-year-old man who was diagnosed as having multiple scl...

Identifying laughter and filled pauses is important to understanding spontaneous human speech. These are two common vocal expressions that are non-lexical and incredibly communicative. In this paper, we use a two-tiered system for identifying laughter and filled pauses. We first generate frame level hypotheses and subsequently rescore these based on features derived from acoustic syllable segme...

In this study, we investigated automatic laughter segmentation in meetings. We first performed laughterspeech discrimination experiments with traditional spectral features and subsequently used acousticphonetic features. In segmentation, we used Gaussian Mixture Models that were trained with spectral features. For the evaluation of the laughter segmentation we used time-weighted Detection Error...

A new core hypothesis on laughter is presented. It has been built by putting together ideas from several disciplines: neurodynamics, evolutionary neurobiology, paleoanthropology, social networks, and communication studies. The hypothesis contributes to ascertain the evolutionary origins of human laughter in connection with its cognitive emotional signaling functions. The new behavioral and neur...

We present ongoing work in the DUEL project, which focuses on the study of disfluencies, exclamations, and laughter in dialogue. Here we focus on the multimodal aspects of disfluent vocalizations, namely laughter and laughed speech, filled pauses, and breathing noises. We exemplify these phenomena in the rich multimodal Dream Apartment Corpus, a natural dialogue corpus, which, in addition to co...