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LAUGHTER IN CONVERSATION: ENHANCING THE NATURALNESS OF DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

Objective

With the wide-scale adoption of speech-based applications, the research community has started focusing on ways to improve naturalness and expressiveness of human-machine interactions. Among the directions pursued, the study of paralinguistic phenomena in conversation plays an important role. This project proposes to investigate conversational laughter, both from a fundamental research perspective as well as from an application viewpoint. The addressed research question concerns the context in which social laughter occurs, in particular the use of acoustic-prosodic cues in marking it. The findings of this investigation will directly feed into a spoken dialogue system, with the aim of increasing its perceived naturalness. In a first step, phrase- and turn-level analyses will be performed to identify the range of cues used by speakers to mark the use of laughter in conversation. Next, state-of-the-art signal processing methods combined with prosodic information will be used to automatically detect and segment laughter. This will allow the analysis of a larger number of conversational corpora which would, in turn, improve the generalizability of the results. Finally, a laughter-enhanced dialogue system will be implemented and its naturalness will be tested through perception experiments. It is expected that the laughter-enhanced system will be perceived more natural and that documented gender differences found in the production of laughter will be found also in its perception.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2017

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET BIELEFELD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 159 460,80
Address
UNIVERSITAETSSTRASSE 25
33615 BIELEFELD
Germany

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Region
Nordrhein-Westfalen Detmold Bielefeld, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 159 460,80
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