Multimodal humor dataset: Predicting laughter tracks for sitcoms

Badri N. Patro, Mayank Lunayach, Deepankar Srivastava, Sarvesh Sarvesh, Hunar Singh, Vinay P. Namboodiri

Research output: Chapter or section in a book/report/conference proceedingChapter in a published conference proceeding

19 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

A great number of situational comedies (sitcoms) are being regularly made and the task of adding laughter tracks to these is a critical task. Providing an ability to be able to predict whether something will be humorous to the audience is also crucial. In this project, we aim to automate this task. Towards doing so, we annotate an existing sitcom ('Big Bang Theory') and use the laughter cues present to obtain a manual annotation for this show. We provide detailed analysis for the dataset design and further evaluate various state of the art baselines for solving this task. We observe that existing LSTM and BERT based networks on the text alone do not perform as well as joint text and video or only video-based networks. Moreover, it is challenging to ascertain that the words attended to while predicting laughter are indeed humorous. Our dataset and analysis provided through this paper is a valuable resource towards solving this interesting semantic and practical task. As an additional contribution, we have developed a novel model for solving this task that is a multi-modal self-attention based model that outperforms currently prevalent models for solving this task. The project page for our paper is https://delta-lab-iitk.github.io/Multimodal-Humor-Dataset/.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2021
Place of PublicationU. S. A.
PublisherIEEE
Pages576-585
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9780738142661
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Jun 2021
Event2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2021 - Virtual, Online, USA United States
Duration: 5 Jan 20219 Jan 2021

Publication series

Name2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2021
PublisherIEEE
ISSN (Print)2472-6737
ISSN (Electronic)2642-9381

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2021
Country/TerritoryUSA United States
CityVirtual, Online
Period5/01/219/01/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Multimodal humor dataset: Predicting laughter tracks for sitcoms'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this