The “HUMIC–DIAL” special session has been approved.

A special session has been approved. Its title is Designing Humour in Human-Computer Interaction with focus on dialogue technology.

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Organisers

  • Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), Singapore
  • Andreea I. Niculescu
  • Mr. Kheng Hui Yeo

Program committee members

  • Björn Schuller, Imperial College London, UK
  • David Suendermann, Educational Testing Service (ETS), USA
  • Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Microsoft Research, USA
  • Elnaz Nouri, ObEN, USA
  • Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
  • Jason Williams, Apple, USA
  • Jiang Ridong, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
  • Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Kotaro Funakoshi, Honda Research Institute, Japan
  • Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, France
  • Luis Fernando D’Haro, Technical University of Madrid, Spain
  • Luisa Coheur, Lisbon University, Portugal
  • Matthew Henderson,PolyAI, Singapore
  • Michael McTear, University of Ulster, UK
  • Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute, Japan
  • Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
  • Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University, UK
  • Ramón López-Cózar, University of Granada, Spain
  • Sakriani Sakti, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  • Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  • Seokhwan Kim, Adobe, USA
  • Sophie Rosset, LIMSI-CNRS, France
  • Stefan Ultes, Cambridge University, UK
  • Suraj Nair, Technische Universität München, Germany
  • Teruhisa Misu, Honda Research Institute, USA
  • Tomoki Toda, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  • Yasuharu Den, Chiba University, Japan
  • Shiv Vitaladevuni, Amazon, USA

Objectives and topics of interest

Humour can be used in human interaction to produce a positive affect [1] on the relationship between the people communicating. However, this is not always reliable, as it depends heavily on shared cultural norms and experiences to work [2]. Studying experiences and challenges in the use of humour between humans can inform those modelling interaction between humans and computers, enabling them to design conversational experiences which are more appealing to users and raise effectiveness of such systems [3]. In this special session, we invite participants to share their experiences working toward incorporating humour into their interactive systems. We would also like to explore ways in which the addition of humour into human-computer dialogue can change it, for better or for worse, and maybe work towards an evaluation schema for humour in human-computer dialogue.

Topics of interest:

  • Computational humour approaches & applications in spoken and written dialogues
  • Humorous virtual agents & social robots & chatbots
  • Linguistics and non-linguistics challenges in designing conversational humour
  • Evaluation approaches for humorous dialogue interactions
  • Cultural and social norms for appropriate humorous dialogues
  1. Niculescu, A.I. van Dijk, B., Nijholt, A., Li, H. and See, S.L. Making social robots more attractive: the effects of voice pitch, humour and empathy. International journal of social robotics, 5(2), pp.171-191 (2013).
  2. Niculescu, A.I., Wadhwa, B. and Nijholt, A.. 2018. Designing Humour in Interaction: A Design Experience. In N. Streitz and S. Konomi (eds.) Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions. DAPI 2018. LNCS, vol. 10921, Springer, Cham, Switzerland.
  3. Nijholt A. Conversational agents and the construction of humorous acts. In: Conversational informatics: an engineering approach. Wiley, Chichester, pp 21–47. (2007).