LAUGHTER WORKSHOP 2018

Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbruecken (2007), Berlin (2009), Dublin (2012) and Enschede (2015), we have the pleasure to announce a forthcoming workshop in Paris, France in September 2018.

Non-verbal vocalisations in human-human and human-machine interactions play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviors and in controlling the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that have been studied previously from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the phonetic or visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations (production/encoding) and their relations to their intentions and perceived meanings (perception/decoding) in interaction.

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 and oral presentations of ongoing research and discussion papers.

We invite contributions concerning laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations from the fields of phonetics, linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis, social signal processing, and human-machine/robot interaction. In particular, topics related to the following aspects are very much welcomed:

* Multimodal interaction: visual aspects of non-verbal vocalisations, e.g., smiles, relation between non-verbal vocalisations and visual behaviors
* Social and affective behavior: decoding and encoding of emotion/socio-related states in non-verbal vocalisations
* Conversation: (pragmatic) role of non-verbal vocalisations in dialog
* Computation: automatic analysis and generation of non-verbal vocalisations

Submission procedure
 
Researchers are invited to submit an extended abstract of their work, including work in progress. Please send your extended abstract of max. 4 pages, 11pt font (including references) in PDF format to laughterworkshop2018@isir.upmc.fr. Each submission should follow the ACL style ? the author kits (LaTeX and Word) can be downloaded from the workshop web site. In the email, please include the name of the authors, their affiliations and the email address of the corresponding author, and a title of the abstract. Abstracts will undergo a review process performed by at least 2 reviewers. The submissions will be made available online.

Registration
 
Attendees are asked to register by sending an email to laughterworkshop2018 at isir dot upmc dot fr.

Important dates

 * Abstract submission deadline:  26 May 2018
* Notification acceptance/rejection:  29 June 2018
* Registration deadline by email: 14 September 2018
* Workshop dates: 27-28 September 2018

Venue
 
ISIR, Sorbonne University

http://www.isir.upmc.fr/

Website

 Please check the website 

http://pages.isir.upmc.fr/~pelachaud/site/LaughterWorkshop18.html

for updated information about the workshop

Organizers
 

Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS ? ISIR, Sorbonne University

Jonathan Ginzburg, University Paris Diderot

Jürgen Trouvain, Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University
Nick Campbell, School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, Trinity College Dublin
Khiet Truong, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente/Radboud University
Dirk Heylen, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente

Contact information

 Catherine Pelachaud

CNRS - ISIR, Sorbonne University

catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr