Niklas Müller

Lukas Christ, Shahin Amiriparian, Alexander Kathan et al.

Humor is a substantial element of human social behavior, affect, and cognition. Its automatic understanding can facilitate a more naturalistic human-AI interaction. Current methods of humor detection have been exclusively based on staged data, making them inadequate for "real-world" applications. We contribute to addressing this deficiency by introducing the novel Passau-Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, comprising about 11 hours of recordings. The Passau-SFCH dataset is annotated for the presence of humor and its dimensions (sentiment and direction) as proposed in Martin's Humor Style Questionnaire. We conduct a series of experiments employing pretrained Transformers, convolutional neural networks, and expert-designed features. The performance of each modality (text, audio, video) for spontaneous humor recognition is analyzed and their complementarity is investigated. Our findings suggest that for the automatic analysis of humor and its sentiment, facial expressions are most promising, while humor direction can be best modeled via text-based features. Further, we experiment with different multimodal approaches to humor recognition, including decision-level fusion and MulT, a multimodal Transformer approach. In this context, we propose a novel multimodal architecture that yields the best overall results. Finally, we make our code publicly available at https://www.github.com/lc0197/passau-sfch. The Passau-SFCH dataset is available upon request.

Lukas Christ, Shahin Amiriparian, Alice Baird et al.

The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2022 is dedicated to multimodal sentiment and emotion recognition. For this year's challenge, we feature three datasets: (i) the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset that contains audio-visual recordings of German football coaches, labelled for the presence of humour; (ii) the Hume-Reaction dataset in which reactions of individuals to emotional stimuli have been annotated with respect to seven emotional expression intensities, and (iii) the Ulm-Trier Social Stress Test (Ulm-TSST) dataset comprising of audio-visual data labelled with continuous emotion values (arousal and valence) of people in stressful dispositions. Using the introduced datasets, MuSe 2022 2022 addresses three contemporary affective computing problems: in the Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor), spontaneous humour has to be recognised; in the Emotional Reactions Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Reaction), seven fine-grained `in-the-wild' emotions have to be predicted; and in the Emotional Stress Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Stress), a continuous prediction of stressed emotion values is featured. The challenge is designed to attract different research communities, encouraging a fusion of their disciplines. Mainly, MuSe 2022 targets the communities of audio-visual emotion recognition, health informatics, and symbolic sentiment analysis. This baseline paper describes the datasets as well as the feature sets extracted from them. A recurrent neural network with LSTM cells is used to set competitive baseline results on the test partitions for each sub-challenge. We report an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of .8480 for MuSe-Humor; .2801 mean (from 7-classes) Pearson's Correlations Coefficient for MuSe-Reaction, as well as .4931 Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) and .4761 for valence and arousal in MuSe-Stress, respectively.

Shahin Amiriparian, Lukas Christ, Alexander Kathan et al.

The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2024 addresses two contemporary multimodal affect and sentiment analysis problems: In the Social Perception Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Perception), participants will predict 16 different social attributes of individuals such as assertiveness, dominance, likability, and sincerity based on the provided audio-visual data. The Cross-Cultural Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor) dataset expands upon the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, focusing on the detection of spontaneous humor in a cross-lingual and cross-cultural setting. The main objective of MuSe 2024 is to unite a broad audience from various research domains, including multimodal sentiment analysis, audio-visual affective computing, continuous signal processing, and natural language processing. By fostering collaboration and exchange among experts in these fields, the MuSe 2024 endeavors to advance the understanding and application of sentiment analysis and affective computing across multiple modalities. This baseline paper provides details on each sub-challenge and its corresponding dataset, extracted features from each data modality, and discusses challenge baselines. For our baseline system, we make use of a range of Transformers and expert-designed features and train Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models on them, resulting in a competitive baseline system. On the unseen test datasets of the respective sub-challenges, it achieves a mean Pearson's Correlation Coefficient ($ρ$) of 0.3573 for MuSe-Perception and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) value of 0.8682 for MuSe-Humor.