@conference{Maraev.Noble.Mazzocconi.Howes_SemDial_Laughter_2021,
author = "Vladislav Maraev and William Noble and Chiara Mazzocconi and Christine Howes",
abstract = "In this paper we explore the role of laughter in attributing
  communicative intents to utterances, i.e.\ detecting the dialogue act
  performed by them. We conduct a corpus study in adult
  phone conversations showing how different dialogue acts are
  characterised by specific laughter patterns, both from the speaker
  and from the partner. Furthermore, we show that laughs can
  positively impact the performance of Transformer-based models in a
  dialogue act recognition task.  Our results highlight the importance
  of laughter for meaning construction and disambiguation in
  interaction.",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue",
journal = "Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue",
publisher = "SEMDIAL",
title = "{D}ialogue act classification is a laughing matter",
url = "http://www.christinehowes.com/papers/Maraev.etal_SemDial_Laughter_2021.pdf",
year = "2021",
}