Looking for Laughs: Gaze Interaction with Laughter Pragmatics and Coordination

ABSTRACT Laughter and gaze have an important role in managing and coordi-nating social interactions. In the current work, using a multimodal corpus of dyadic taste-testing interactions, we explore whether laughs performing different pragmatic functions are accompanied by different gaze patterns towards the interlocutor, both from the point of view of the laughing participant and from her partner. We also investigate the role of gaze in laughter coordination between interactants. Our results show that laughs performing different pragmatic functions are related to different gaze patterns, both for the laugher and her partner, and that gaze is an important cue exploited by interactants when reciprocating laughter or laughing simultaneously. We discuss our data in relation to the literature about laughter and gaze functions in interaction, linking them to dialogic context. Our results stress the importance of laughter and gaze for modeling of multimodal meaning construction and coordination in interaction, and are therefore relevant for researchers designing human-like embodied conversational agents.