Dialogue act classification is a laughing matter

Abstract:

In this paper we explore the role of laughter in attributing communicative intents to utterances, i.e.\ detecting the dialogue act performed by them. We conduct a corpus study in adult phone conversations showing how different dialogue acts are characterised by specific laughter patterns, both from the speaker and from the partner. Furthermore, we show that laughs can positively impact the performance of Transformer-based models in a dialogue act recognition task. Our results highlight the importance of laughter for meaning construction and disambiguation in interaction.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Dialogue modelling
• Laughter

Year:

2021

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue