On Laughter and Speech-Laugh, Based on Observations of Child-Robot Interaction
This work addresses understanding social cues in human-robot interaction for applications in robotics and child development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation and classification methods.
The study analyzed unprompted laughter and speech-laugh in child-robot interactions, reporting on their syntactic positions, communicative functions, and automatic classification performance with acoustic features.
In this article, we study laughter found in child-robot interaction where it had not been prompted intentionally. Different types of laughter and speech-laugh are annotated and processed. In a descriptive part, we report on the position of laughter and speech-laugh in syntax and dialogue structure, and on communicative functions. In a second part, we report on automatic classification performance and on acoustic characteristics, based on extensive feature selection procedures.