Laughter is a non-verbal social signal which is omnipresent in our everyday interactions. Nevertheless, current spoken dialogue systems are not equipped to understand and express the contextual variety of meanings associated with it. In this OFAI guest lecture, Prof. Liana Ermakova of the University of Western Brittany will discuss her recent studies aimed at achieving this goal. In the first part of her talk, she will focus on the role of laughter in meaning construction and attribution of communicative intents, showing how different dialogue acts are characterised by specific laughter patterns. In the second part, she will look at the particular instances of laughs in task-oriented dialogue and propose a formal account for dealing with them in a dialogue management component of spoken dialogue systems.
Members of the public are cordially invited to attend Prof. Ermakova's talk, "JOKER: Towards Automation of Wordplay Translation", via Zoom on Tuesday, 15 February at 18:30 CET:
URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85178563906?pwd=Ui9iR0RIM0wxd1BXWktGV1FUcTJCQT09
Meeting ID: 851 7856 3906
Passcode: 101127
Liana Ermakova has been an associate professor at the University of Western Brittany (Brest, France) since 2017. After obtaining her PhD in computer science in 2016 in Toulouse, she was a post-doc at the interdisciplinary research laboratory LISIS in Paris. Her primary area of research is information retrieval, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Dr Ermakova has worked on evaluation metrics, information distortion analysis, multi-document summarisation, text simplification (project SimpleText), scientometrics. She leads the project JOKER: Interculturality and Localization of Humor and Puns, which aims to build a parallel corpus of wordplay (2021–2022). She has participated in the organisation of various conferences, workshops and evaluation campaigns, including CLEF tracks, and is a member of the competition division of the French Association for Artificial Intelligence. She teaches Pre- and post-editing, Computer aided translation, website localization, NLP to the Master in Translation students and AI to the students of the École nationale d'ingénieurs de Brest.
