Interdisciplinary Workshop on

Laughter and other Non-Verbal Vocalisations in Speech

Dublin
October 26-27, 2012

 
   

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Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbrücken (2007) and Berlin (2009), we have the pleasure to organise a forthcoming workshop in Dublin in October 2012.

The studies of non-verbal vocal interaction is proving to be important in many research areas such as phonetics and discourse analysis, and also in more technology-oriented fields such as social signal processing and human behaviour understanding. Previous research has shown that laughter and other nonverbal vocalisations (e.g., breath sounds, yawning, sighing) have important functions in social interaction, for example, giving feedback, signaling engagement, and regulating turn-taking. However, much of the phonetic characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations, and the relationship between social functions and non-verbal vocalisations is still unknown.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together scientists from diverse research areas and to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary discussions in order to gain a better understanding of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations. The workshop will consist of invited talks, oral presentations of ongoing research and discussion papers.

The keynote speakers are Marc Mehu (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences) and Jens Edlund (KTH Stockholm).

Research contributions concerning laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations from the fields of phonetics, linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis, and human-machine interaction will be presented. In particular, topics related to the following aspects are of interest:

  • Multimodality: visual aspects of non-verbal vocalisations, incl. smiles
  • Entrainment and alignment: `timing together' of non-verbal vocalisations
  • Emotion/affect and social behaviour: decoding and encoding of emotion/socio-related states in non-verbal vocalisations
  • Computational models: automatic processing of non-verbal vocalisations

The workshop is supported by SSPnet, TCD Long Room Hub, TCD Speech Communication Lab, SFI FastNet project at Trinity College Dublin as well as by Saarland University (Computational Linguistics and Phonetics) and University of Twente (Human Media Interaction).

Important dates

  • Abstract submission deadline: 31 August 2012
  • Notification of acceptance/rejection: 7 September 2012
  • Registration deadline by email, extended to: 19 October 2012
  • Workshop date: 26-27 October 2012

Organizers

  • Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin
  • Jürgen Trouvain, Saarland University
  • Khiet Truong, University of Twente