When to Laugh and How Hard? A Multimodal Approach to Detecting Humor and Its Intensity

Peer reviewe

Prosodic contrast in non-scripted humorous communication

En el presente artículo se recogen los resultados de un análisis prosódico de enunciados humorísticos semiespontáneos, extraídos de una muestra de 14 entrevistas del programa The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. También se seleccionaron enunciados no humorísticos con fines comparativos y de control (Bryant, 2010). Los archivos de audio se importaron a Praat para obtener los valores de F0 e intensidad de cada enunciado y analizar posteriormente su desviación estándar de la mediana. No se ha detectado contraste prosódico en estos valores entre los enunciados humorísticos y no humorísticos de la muestra.This article presents the results of a prosodic analysis of non-scripted humorous utterances. Humorous utterances have been extracted from a sample of 14 interviews in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Non-humorous utterances were also selected in order to compare humorous and non-humorous utterances, as well as to conduct a control study on contrast between non-humorous utterances (Bryant, 2010). The sound files were imported to Praat, where mean pitch and mean intensity values were obtained for every utterance to later analyse standard deviation. No prosodic contrast has been found between humorous and non-humorous utterances in the sample with regards to intensity and pitch (F0)

Humour support and emotive stance in comments on Korean TV Drama

Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively e based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama

Context Cues For Classification Of Competitive And Collaborative Overlaps

Being able to respond appropriately to users’ overlaps should be seen as one of the core competencies of incremental dialogue systems. At the same time identifying whether an interlocutor wants to support or grab the turn is a task which comes naturally to humans, but has not yet been implemented in such systems. Motivated by this we first investigate whether prosodic characteristics of speech in the vicinity of overlaps are significantly different from prosodic characteristics in the vicinity of non-overlapping speech. We then test the suitability of different context sizes, both preceding and following but excluding features of the overlap, for the automatic classification of collaborative and competitive overlaps. We also test whether the fusion of preceding and succeeding contexts improves the classification. Preliminary results indicate that the optimal context for classification of overlap lies at 0.2 seconds preceding the overlap and up to 0.3 seconds following it. We demonstrate that we are able to classify collaborative and competitive overlap with a median accuracy of 63%

Utilizing External Knowledge to Enhance Semantics in Emotion Detection

Enabling machines to emotion recognition in conversation is challenging, mainly because the information in human dialogue innately conveys emotions by long-term experience, abundant knowledge, context, and the intricate patterns between the affective states. We address the task of emotion recognition in conversations using external knowledge to enhance semantics. We propose KES model, a new framework that incorporates different elements of external knowledge and conversational semantic role labeling, where build upon them to learn interactions between interlocutors participating in a conversation. We design a self-attention layer specialized for enhanced semantic text features with external commonsense knowledge. Then, two different networks composed of LSTM are responsible for tracking individual internal state and context external state. In addition, the proposed model has experimented on three datasets in emotion detection in conversation. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on most of the tested datasets

Children's humour and the grotesque pleasures in school mealtime socialisation

In this paper, we argue for two propositions: children are socialised and guided to become competent members of school mealtime community, and children have the capacity to modify and challenge existing practices. We draw on Bakhtin's concepts of the carnivalesque laughter and grotesque realism to illustrate how children use humour to test the boundaries of what is permitted. Children's mealtime interactions foster the development of social skills to subvert and negotiate adult authority and manage unfolding interactions between children and adults. We present findings from a child‐centred perspective in a primary school in the United Kingdom

Humour production in face-to-face interaction: a multimodal and cognitive study

El humor es una de las formas de comunicación más complejas que existen (Veale, Brône & Feyaerts, 2015). Entre las teorías lingüísticas sobre el humor, algunas tienen un enfoque semántico-pragmático, tales como la Semantic Script Theory of Humour (Raskin, 1984) o la General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo, 2001). Otras se inscriben en la Teoría de la Relevancia (Yus, 2016) y las hay también con una perspectiva más cognitiva (Giora, 1991, 2015; Coulson & Okley, 2005; Veale, Feyaerts & Brône, 2006). Por otra parte, se han realizado varios estudios sobre los marcadores multimodales de la ironía o el sarcasmo, cuyos resultados son dispares (Attardo, Eisterhold, Hay, and Poggi, 2003; Attardo, Pickering, and Baker, 2011; Attardo, Wagner, and Urios-Aparisi, 2011). Sin embargo, el humor no irónico ha sido objeto de menor estudio. Además, la mayor parte de los análisis se circunscriben al humor ensayado, con pocos estudios sobre el humor producido de forma espontánea (Bryant, 2010, Feyaerts, 2013; Tabacaru, 2014, etc.) y menos aún que conjuguen la perspectiva multimodal con la cognitiva. En esta tesis se analizan 14 entrevistas extraídas de The Late Show with Stephen Colbert con vistas a explicar la comunicación espontánea del humor desde el punto de vista multimodal y cognitivo. Los enunciados se han identificado como humorísticos cuando el público reaccionaba riendo. El análisis multimodal se ha realizado en ELAN, con cinco niveles de anotaciones: transcripción, tipo de humor (Feyaerts et al., 2010), mecanismo conceptual subyacente (Croft & Cruse, 2004), gestos y prosodia. El estudio prosódico se ha llevado a cabo con Praat, a fin de determinar si había un mayor contraste prosódico en enunciados humorísticos. Los resultados muestran que los mecanismos multimodales y cognitivos no difieren entre enunciados humorísticos y no humorísticos.Departamento de Filología InglesaDoctorado en Estudios Ingleses Avanzados: Lenguas y Culturas en Contact

Testing, stretching, and aligning:Using ‘ironic personae’ to make sense of complicated issues

Irony and humor play an important role in both organizing and organizations, because they both help to collide and contrast ideas as well as mitigate and moderate criticism. Our empirical observations of a senior management team suggest participants frequently use verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor through ‘ironic personae’ – a cast of characters, real or imaginary – as a vehicle for pragmatically making sense of complicated topics. We show how ironic personae perform three functions: (i) testing new positions on topics in a non-committal way; (ii) stretching the frame of comparison of a group; and (iii) aligning shared understanding and commitment. Thus, our analysis sheds light on an underexplored and undertheorised pragmatic vehicle for the expression of humorous verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor