We analyze humorous spoken conversa- tions from a classic comedy television show, FRIENDS, by examining acoustic- prosodic and linguistic features and their utility in automatic humor recognition. Using a simple annotation scheme, we au- tomatically label speaker turns in our cor- pus that are followed by laughs as hu- morous and the rest as non-humorous. Our humor-prosody analysis reveals sig- nificant differences in prosodic character- istics (such as pitch, tempo, energy etc.) of humorous and non-humorous speech, even when accounted for the gender and speaker differences. Humor recognition was carried out using standard supervised learning classifiers, and shows promising results significantly above the baseline.

Click Here to View the Paper In XML Format