Smiling and Laughter are crucial communicative means in our interaction and can affect importantly the meaning of our utterances, the unfolding of the dialogue, and the relationship between interactants. Previous research provided us with important insights into the role of smiling and laughter in interaction, how they “work” and how to process them. Nevertheless, there are still many open questions and under-explored areas of investigation, which given the multidimensional nature of smiling and laughter need a multidisciplinary approach to be addressed. The main aim of our workshop is therefore to highlight these still unresolved questions encouraging sharing in terms of insights, methods, and resources across domains and fields, in order to further boost the interdisciplinary collaborations which are already intrinsically at the core of the community. As a multidisciplinary workshop, we invite contributors of different backgrounds to share their work revolving around smiling and laughter with the main goal to push further the boundaries reached by previous work, to improve the fluidity of resources exchanges and inter-disciplinary collaborations in order to deepen our understanding of these communicative displays and build applications able to recognise, process, and produce them when desirable.

Topics

Topics of interest include:

  • Dataset and other resources:

    • Corpora and datasets
    • Annotation protocols
    • Smiling and Laughter in dialogue management

  • Machine learning applications on smiling and laughter:

    • Unimodal or multimodal synthesis
    • Unimodal or multimodal detection/recognition
    • General machine learning applications for smiling and laughter

  • Smiling and Laughter dynamics in interactions:

    • Smiling and laughter in dyadic/group interactions
    • Smiling and laughter to manage conversations, topics and relationships
    • Smiling and laughter in learning environments
    • Smiling and laughter in clinical populations/settings

  • Smiling, Laughter and meaning:

    • Smiling, laughter and multimodal meaning construction
    • Smiling, laughter and interaction with other modalities
    • Smiling and laughter relationship: scalar continuum or not?

  • Smiling and Laughter in human-agent/robot interactions:

    • Smiling and laughter for context-dependent interactions
    • Smiling and laughter in real-world human-agent interactions setups
    • Interpretation and understanding of smiling and laughter by agents/robot
    • Smiling and laughter for general human-agent/robot interactions applications

  • Smiling and laughter development

    • Smiling and laughter in the establishing of first interactions
    • Smiling, laughter and cognitive development
    • Smiling and laughter to grasp and build social and pragmatic skills

  • Smiling, laughter and language development

    • Smiling and laughter processing and production in experimental settings
    • Behavioural investigations on what it takes to process/produce a smile/laugh and what are their effects on subjects
    • Neuro-correlates of smiling and laughter perception and production

  • Any other related topic!