A Comparative Cross-Domain Study of the Occurrence of Laughter in Meeting and Seminar Corpora

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Susanne Burger, Kornel Laskowski, Matthias Wölfel
• Keywords: Education, Interactive Multi-party Seminars, Laughter, LREC 2008, Speech Understanding Paradigms