Introducing MULAI: A Multimodal Database of Laughter during Dyadic Interactions

Michel-Pierre Jansen, Khiet P. Truong, Dirk K.J. Heylen, Deniece S. Nazareth


Abstract
Although laughter has gained considerable interest from a diversity of research areas, there still is a need for laughter specific databases. We present the Multimodal Laughter during Interaction (MULAI) database to study the expressive patterns of conversational and humour related laughter. The MULAI database contains 2 hours and 14 minutes of recorded and annotated dyadic human-human interactions and includes 601 laughs, 168 speech-laughs and 538 on- or offset respirations. This database is unique in several ways; 1) it focuses on different types of social laughter including conversational- and humour related laughter, 2) it contains annotations from participants, who understand the social context, on how humourous they perceived themselves and their interlocutor during each task, and 3) it contains data rarely captured by other laughter databases including participant personality profiles and physiological responses. We use the MULAI database to explore the link between acoustic laughter properties and annotated humour ratings over two settings. The results reveal that the duration, pitch and intensity of laughs from participants do not correlate with their own perception of how humourous they are, however the acoustics of laughter do correlate with how humourous they are being perceived by their conversational partner.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.534
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4333–4342
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.534
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michel-Pierre Jansen, Khiet P. Truong, Dirk K.J. Heylen, and Deniece S. Nazareth. 2020. Introducing MULAI: A Multimodal Database of Laughter during Dyadic Interactions. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4333–4342, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Introducing MULAI: A Multimodal Database of Laughter during Dyadic Interactions (Jansen et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.534.pdf