Abstract
This paper presents a first attempt to develop an annotation scheme for laughter in dialogue operationalising the previously reported idea of laughter being caused by incongruity, and based on violations of Grice’s maxims. This exploratory scheme is intended to form the basis of a spoken dialogue system that can laugh during dialogue in a human like manner and can understand why users laugh. We present the scheme and discuss preliminary results.
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Notes
- 1.
See [19, Chap. 6] for analysis of similar content in jokes.
- 2.
The annotators were not native English speakers, which may mean they did not pick up on all the subtleties of the laughter and laughable. However examples in the BNC are also not necessarily produced by native speakers, and there are also cultural differences which are known to affect interpretations of humour and laughter even between native speakers (e.g. between American and British speakers of English). In future studies (see Discussion, below) we intend to involve a wide range of annotators, including native and non-native speakers of English.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council for the establishment of the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP) at the University of Gothenburg. We would also like to thank Staffan Larsson, Jonathan Ginzburg, Chiara Mazzocconi and our anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
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Maraev, V., Howes, C. (2019). Towards an Annotation Scheme for Causes of Laughter in Dialogue. In: D'Haro, L., Banchs, R., Li, H. (eds) 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 579. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9443-0_24
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