The researchers hoped to use their system to improve natural conversations between robots and people.
No one appears to be able to agree on the answer to the question, “What’s so funny?” So picture attempting to train a robot to laugh. But by creating an AI that gets its signals from a shared laughing system, a team of researchers at “Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn’t easy, because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” Inoue said. “We had to carefully categorize exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to.”