Building a Multimodal Laughter Database for Emotion Recognition

Merlin Teodosia Suarez, Jocelynn Cu, Madelene Sta. Maria

Abstract
Laughter is a significant paralinguistic cue that is largely ignored in multimodal affect analysis. In this work, we investigate how a multimodal laughter corpus can be constructed and annotated both with discrete and dimensional labels of emotions for acted and spontaneous laughter. Professional actors enacted emotions to produce acted clips, while spontaneous laughter was collected from volunteers. Experts annotated acted laughter clips, while volunteers who possess an acceptable empathic quotient score annotated spontaneous laughter clips. The data was pre-processed to remove noise from the environment, and then manually segmented starting from the onset of the expression until its offset. Our findings indicate that laughter carries distinct emotions, and that emotion in laughter is best recognized using audio information rather than facial information. This may be explained by emotion regulation, i.e. laughter is used to suppress or regulate certain emotions. Furthermore, contextual information plays a crucial role in understanding the kind of laughter and emotion in the enactment.
Anthology ID:
L12-1459
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2347–2350
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/779_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Merlin Teodosia Suarez, Jocelynn Cu, and Madelene Sta. Maria. 2012. Building a Multimodal Laughter Database for Emotion Recognition. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2347–2350, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a Multimodal Laughter Database for Emotion Recognition (Suarez et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/779_Paper.pdf
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