Laughter in Conversation: Form, Function and Multimodality

• Applicants: Dr. Ioan Bogdan Ludusan; Professorin Dr. Petra Wagner
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461442180

Laughter is a ubiquitous phenomenon occurring in spontaneous conversations, being recognized cross-culturally and playing various roles in human communication. For these reasons, it has received considerable interest in the research community, having been studied from the prism of its form, its function, as well as its multi-modal realization. Nevertheless, each of these aspects tend to be investigated by different disciplines and previous work has mainly focused on only one aspect at a time, neglecting any possible interaction between them. We intend to fill this gap, by aiming to offer a more connected view of the use of laughter in conversation, one which takes into account the three aspects together with their interplay, in an interactive setting. First, we will investigate the laughter dimensions in which the partners become more similar during their interaction, whether this process varies with conversational context, and whether it has a functional role in conversation. Next, we will complement existing knowledge on multimodal laughter production with an analysis of the co-occurring gestures and their relation to the type of laughter. Then, we will study acoustic-prosodic cues able to discriminate laughter from speech, which are robust to variability sources present in laughter. Finally, we will perform an exploratory investigation to evaluate the findings of the project, by means of interaction experiments with a dialogue system implementing laughter. We believe that a more complete view of laughter in interaction would open new directions of study in relevant fields, such as linguistics, phonetics or conversation analysis, as well as in technology, by enabling more naturalistic human-machine interactions in applications.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants