A Comparative Cross-Domain Study of the Occurrence of Laughter in Meeting and Seminar Corpora
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
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.