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Proceedings of the 4th Interdisciplinary Workshop on Laughter and Other Non-verbal Vocalisations in Speech, 14-15 April 2015
Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbruecken (2007), Berlin (2009), and Dublin (2012), we have the pleasure to welcome you to the 4th Interdisciplinary Workshop on Laughter and Other Non-verbal Vocalisations in Speech in Enschede, the Netherlands on the 14th–15th of April 2015. Non-verbal vocalisations in human-human and human-machine interactions play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviors and in controlling the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that have been studied previously from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the interplay between phonetic and visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations, the relations to the intentions (encoding) and perceived meanings (decoding), and how non-verbal vocalisations can be automatically recognized and generated in human-machine interaction. The goal of this workshop 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. The workshop consists of invited talks and oral presentations of ongoing research and discussion papers. We are very excited that Prof.dr. Anton Nijholt (University of Twente), Prof.dr. Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS, Telecom ParisTech), Dr. Disa Sauter (University of Amsterdam), and Dr. J¨urgen Trouvain (Saarland University), four experts known for their excellent research, have accepted our invitations to speak about their research in relation to laughter. In addition, we have accepted 8 oral and 3 poster submissions. The invited keynote speakers and participants of the workshop have backgrounds in psychology, computer science, human-machine interaction, phonetics, and linguistics which we expect will give rise to lively cross-disciplinary discussions