We report on our explorations of laughter in multiparty spoken interaction. Laughter is universally observed in human interaction. It is multimodal in nature: a stereotyped exhalation from the mouth in conjunction with rhythmic head and body movement. Predominantly occurring in company rather than solo; it is believed to aid social bonding. Spoken interaction is widely studied through corpus analysis; often concentrating on ‘taskbased’ interactions such as information gap activities and real or staged business meetings. Task-based interactions rely heavily on verbal information exchange while the immediate task in natural conversation is social bonding. We investigate laughter in situ in task-based and social interaction; using corpora of non-scripted (spontaneous) multiparty interaction: the task-oriented AMI meetings corpus; and the conversational TableTalk; and D-ANS corpora. We outline extension of previous work on laughter and topic change; describe the collection of natural social spoken interaction in the DANS corpus including audio-visual and biosignals; and describe an annotation experiment on multimodal aspects of laughter. We discuss the results and signal current and future research directions.
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