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 quant...

In this paper, we focus on the development of new methods to detect and analyze laughter, in order to enhance human-computer interactions. First, the general architecture of such a laughter-enabled application is presented. Then, we propose the use of two new modalities, namely body movements and respiration, to enrich the audiovisual laughter detection and classification phase. These additiona...

This paper reports on the acoustic features of the laugh-speech continuum, specifically dealing with formant space, pitch range and voice quality. Results show that laugh vowels are generally reduced and there is a tendency for them to be produced more back and low in the vowel space when compared to speech. The large open quotient and shallow spectral tilt measurements for laughter is consiste...

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation...

This paper presents the results of the analysis of laughter expressive behavior. First we present the intensity annotation study of an audiovisual corpus of spontaneous laughter. In the second part of the paper we present the analysis of audio and visual cues that influence the perception of laughter intensity, as well as the study of audio and visual features that differ in laughter inhalation...

This study explores laughter distribution around topic changes in multiparty conversations. The distribution of shared and solo laughter around topic changes was examined in corpora containing two types of spoken interaction; meetings and informal conversation. Shared laughter was significantly more frequent in the 15 seconds leading up to topic change in the informal conversations. A sample of...

In natural conversations, significant part of laughter co-occurs with speech which is referred to as speech-laugh. Hence, speech-laugh will have characteristics of both laughter and neutral speech. But it is not clearly evident how acoustic properties of neutral speech are influenced by its co-occurring laughter. The objective of this study is to analyze the acoustic variations between vowel re...

The insular cortex is fundamentally involved in the processing of interoceptive information. It has been postulated that the integrative monitoring of the bodily responses to environmental stimuli is crucial for the recognition and experience of emotions. Because emotional arousal is known to be closely coupled to functions of the anterior insula, we suspected laughter to be associated primaril...

This cross-cultural study explored along with various personality factors the relationship between laughter and disease prevalence. Previous studies have only determined the effect of laughter on various health dimensions, whereas, this study quantified the level of laughter that was beneficial or detrimental to health. There were a total of 730 participants between the ages of eighteen and thi...

A number of recent hypotheses have attempted to explain the ultimate evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. However most of these have lacked breadth in their evolutionary frameworks while neglecting the empirical existence of two distinct types of laughter--Duchenne and non-Duchenne--and the implications of this distinction for the evolution of laughter as a signal. Most of these hypothes...