Towards an annotation scheme for causes of laughter in dialogue

Abstract

This paper presents a first attempt to develop an annotation scheme for laughter in dialogue operationalising the previously reported idea of laughter being caused by incongruity, and based on violations of Grice’s maxims. This exploratory scheme is intended to form the basis of a spoken dialogue system that can laugh during dialogue in a human like manner and can understand why users laugh. We present the scheme and discuss preliminary results.