Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations Workshop 2024
16-17 July 2024, Belfast, United Kingdom
Call for Papers
Non-verbal vocalisations in human-human and human-machine interactions play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviours and in managing the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, clicks, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that are being increasingly studied from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the phonetic or visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations (production/encoding), their relations to the social actions they are part of, their perceived meanings (perception/decoding), and their ordering in interaction. Furthermore, with the increased interest for more naturalness in human-machine interaction, current times also invite exploring how these phenomena can be integrated in speech applications.
The workshop would be in its 7th edition, with previous editions held in Saarbrücken (2007), Berlin (2009), Dublin (2012), Enschede (2015), Paris (2018), and Bielefeld (2020). The goal of this series of workshops is to bring together scientists from diverse research areas and to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary discussions in order to gain a better understanding of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations.
Research themes include, but are not restricted to, these aspects of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations:
- Articulation, acoustics, and perception
- Interaction and pragmatics
- Affective and evaluative meanings
- Social perception and organisation
- Disfluency
- Technology applications
Researchers are invited to submit extended abstracts (2 pages of content and maximum one additional page for references and figures) describing original work, including work in progress.
There will be two keynote presentations on the topics treated by the workshop, delivered by Prof. Carolyn McGettigan (University College London, UK) and Prof. Margaret Zellers (Kiel University, Germany).
The workshop will be collocated with the 2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion and will take place on July 16-17, at Queen’s University Belfast.
We look forward to seeing you in Belfast!
Bogdan Ludusan and Marina Cantarutti
Update: The workshop will be supported by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), offering one travel grant for early career scientists. Authors of accepted papers who are eligible for this award should apply for it through the ISCA platform.
Proocedings
The proceedings have been published in the ISCA Archive.
Programme
The workshop will take place over two days: 16 (Tuesday) and 17 (Wednesday) July 2024.
The programme can be found here.
Keynote talks
Carolyn McGettigan (University College London) - Laughter as a tool for investigating human vocal communication (abstract)
Margaret Zellers (Kiel University) - Forms and functions of discourse clicks across languages (abstract)
Location
The workshop will take place at Queen's University Belfast, collocated with the 2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion.
The room of the workshop will be the Council Chamber, in the Lanyon Building of the University (University Road, Belfast, GB BT7 1NN).
Registration
The registration will be managed by the 2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion.
Registration fee:
Workshop only: 125 £
Workshop, if attending also ISRE2024: 75 £
See the conference website for details on how to register.
Important Dates
Submission opens: 01 February 2024
Submission deadline: 1̶5̶ ̶M̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶4̶ 21 March 2024
Acceptance notification: 1̶5̶ ̶A̶p̶r̶i̶l̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶4̶ 18 April 2024
Final paper submission: 15 May 2024
Workshop registration deadline: 01 June 2024
Workshop: 16-17 July 2024
Scientific Committee
Simon Betz, Bielefeld University, Germany
Marina Cantarutti, University of York, United Kingdom
Mark Dingemanse, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Jessica Di Napoli, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Kevin El Haddad, University of Mons, Belgium
Jonathan Ginzburg, Paris Cité University, France
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Emily Hofstetter, Linköping University, Sweden
Leelo Keevallik, Linköping University, Sweden
Loulou Kosmala, Paris Nanterre University, France
Bogdan Ludusan, Bielefeld University, Germany
Vladislav Maraev, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Chiara Mazzocconi, LPL – CNRS / Aix-Marseille University, France
Carolyn McGettigan, University College London, United Kingdom
Richard Ogden, University of York, United Kingdom
Disa Sauter, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Loredana Schettino, Federico II University, Italy
Søren Sandager Sørensen, University of Agder, Norway
Jürgen Trouvain, Saarland University, Germany
Khiet Truong, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Petra Wagner, Bielefeld University, Germany
Margaret Zellers, Kiel University, Germany
Organising Committee
Bogdan Ludusan, Bielefeld University, Germany
Marina Cantarutti, University of York, United Kingdom
For further information or questions regarding the workshop you can contact the organizers at the following email address: LaughterWorkshop2024@gmail.com
Submission Procedure
All submissions should use the Interspeech 2023 template, but limited to 2 pages of content (and maximum one additional page for references and figures) and should be submitted in pdf format through the CMT platform: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/LW2024/Submission/Index.
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Accepted papers will be made available online, through the ISCA Archive.