Inhalation Noises as Endings of Laughs in Conversational Speech

In this study we investigate the role of inhalation noises at the end of laughter events in two conversational corpora that provide relevant annotations. A re-annotation of the categories for laughter, silence and inbreath noises enabled us to see that inhalation noises terminate laughter events in the majority of all inspected laughs with a duration comparable to inbreath noises initiating speech phases. This type of corpus analysis helps to understand the mechanisms of audible respiratory activities in speaking vs. laughing in conversations.</p

An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation

Ludusan B, Wagner P. An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2020. ISCA; 2020: 621-625.With laughter research seeing a development in recent years, there is also an increased need in materials having laughter annotations. We examine in this study how one can leverage existing spontaneous speech resources to this goal. We first analyze the process of manual laughter annotation in corpora, by establishing two important parameters of the process: the amount of time required and its inter-rater reliability. Next, we propose a novel semi-automatic tool for laughter annotation, based on a signal-based representation of speech rhythm. We test both annotation approaches on the same recordings, containing German dyadic spontaneous interactions, and employing a larger pool of annotators than previously done. We then compare and discuss the obtained results based on the two aforementioned parameters, highlighting the benefits and costs associated to each approach

Proceedings

Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication. Editors: Patrizia Paggio, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Costanza Navarretta. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 15 (2011), vi+87 pp. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/22532

An XML Coding Scheme for Multimodal Corpus Annotation

International audienceMultimodality has become one of today's most crucial challenges both for linguistics and computer science, entailing theoretical issues as well as practical ones (verbal interaction description, human-machine dialogues, virtual reality etc...). Understanding interaction processes is one of the main targets of these sciences, and requires to take into account the whole set of modalities and the way they interact.From a linguistic standpoint, language and speech analysis are based on studies of distinct research fields, such as phonetics, phonemics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics or gesture studies. Each of them have been investigated in the past either separately or in relation with another field that was considered as closely connected (e.g. syntax and semantics, prosody and syntax, etc.). The perspective adopted by modern linguistics is a considerably broader one: even though each domain reveals a certain degree of autonomy, it cannot be accounted for independently from its interactions with the other domains. Accordingly, the study of the interaction between the fields appears to be as important as the study of each distinct field. This is a pre-requisite for an elaboration of a valid theory of language. However, as important as the needs in this area might be, high level multimodal resources and adequate methods in order to construct them are scarce and unequally developed. Ongoing projects mainly focus on one modality as a main target, with an alternate modality as an optional complement. Moreover, coding standards in this field remain very partial and do not cover all the needs in terms of multimodal annotation. One of the first issues we have to face is the definition of a coding scheme providing adequate responses to the needs of the various levels encompassed, from phonetics to pragmatics or syntax. While working in the general context of international coding standards, we plan to create a specific coding standard designed to supply proper responses to the specific needs of multimodal annotation, as available solutions in the area do not seem to be totally satisfactory. <BR /

An XML Coding Scheme for Multimodal Corpus Annotation

International audienceMultimodality has become one of today's most crucial challenges both for linguistics and computer science, entailing theoretical issues as well as practical ones (verbal interaction description, human-machine dialogues, virtual reality etc...). Understanding interaction processes is one of the main targets of these sciences, and requires to take into account the whole set of modalities and the way they interact.From a linguistic standpoint, language and speech analysis are based on studies of distinct research fields, such as phonetics, phonemics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics or gesture studies. Each of them have been investigated in the past either separately or in relation with another field that was considered as closely connected (e.g. syntax and semantics, prosody and syntax, etc.). The perspective adopted by modern linguistics is a considerably broader one: even though each domain reveals a certain degree of autonomy, it cannot be accounted for independently from its interactions with the other domains. Accordingly, the study of the interaction between the fields appears to be as important as the study of each distinct field. This is a pre-requisite for an elaboration of a valid theory of language. However, as important as the needs in this area might be, high level multimodal resources and adequate methods in order to construct them are scarce and unequally developed. Ongoing projects mainly focus on one modality as a main target, with an alternate modality as an optional complement. Moreover, coding standards in this field remain very partial and do not cover all the needs in terms of multimodal annotation. One of the first issues we have to face is the definition of a coding scheme providing adequate responses to the needs of the various levels encompassed, from phonetics to pragmatics or syntax. While working in the general context of international coding standards, we plan to create a specific coding standard designed to supply proper responses to the specific needs of multimodal annotation, as available solutions in the area do not seem to be totally satisfactory. <BR /