Understanding Laughter in Dialog

Abstract This work explores laughter within a corpus of three-party, task-based dialogs with native and non-native speakers English, each consisting two players facilitator, in relation to whether the is perceived as serving discourse functions or rather genuinely mirthful according small number annotators’ (2) inspection substantical multimodal dialog (18 interactions approximately 10 min each). We test hypothesis that those different types have occurrence patterns relate ways topical structure conversations, showing stronger tendency occur at topic termination points. All events (569) are assigned one three values, discourse, ambiguous, studied respect their distribution across sections. The analysis among type section type, also other variables such facilitators’ feedback speakers’ conversational role gender. Discourse more frequent points than beginnings, comparison laughter. highly associated especially ends. Finally, there few distinctive effects gender, an interaction speaker type. results strengthen function laughter, indicating systematicity it predictable points, and, on contrary, less systematic which shows no particular pattern boundaries.