We present the implementation of a data collection tool of multicultural and multi-modal laughter for the 14th Interspeech conference. The application will automatically record and analyze audio and video stream to provide realtime feedback. Using this tool, we expect to collect multimodal cues of different kind of laughers elicited in participants with funny videos, as well as jokes and tongue...

Social interaction at work has been shown to enhance creativity and productivity. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a large, interactive display that aims to stimulate social interaction amongst co-workers by providing food for talk in the form of activities, jokes, and music. User and system requirements were collected using Cultural Probes and Focus groups. The evaluation of o...

This paper describes a method for automatically learning effective dialogue strategies, generated from a library of dialogue content, using reinforcement learning from user feedback. This library includes greetings, social dialogue, chit-chat, jokes and relationship building, as well as the more usual clarification and verification components of dialogue. We tested the method through a motivati...

Linguistic ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in language. It occurs when word, phrase, or sentence has more than one meaning. Although it often considered problem since may cause confusion and hinder the precise understanding of language, its own value. enriches language produces positive effects such as creating irony adding sort humor. This study focuses on how lexical ambiguity, type lingu...

Folk narratives are a valuable resource for humanities and social science researchers. This paper focuses on automatically recognizing folk narrative genres, such as urban legends, fairy tales, jokes and riddles. We explore the effectiveness of lexical, structural, stylistic and domain specific features. We find that it is possible to obtain a good performance using only shallow features. As da...

"It was a Saturday night in the month of February, 1953. The moon was shining bright in a cloudless sky and cold breeze was blowing. A camp fire was burning in the lawn of the S. N. Mullick Health Centre in the village of Singur. Sixty students from all over India, who had come for training in rural public health work were sitting round the camp fire after dinner. Some were in a joyful state, c...