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<Paper uid="W06-1625">
  <Title>Humor: Prosody Analysis and Automatic Recognition for F * R * I * E * N * D * S *</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="208" end_page="208" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 FRIENDS Corpus
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> (Scherer, 2003) discuss a number of pros and cons of using real versus acted data, in the context of emotional speech analysis. His main argument is that while real data offers natural expressions of emotions, it is not only hard to collect (due to ethical issues) but also very challenging to annotate and analyze, as there are very few instances of strong expressions and the rest are often very subtle. Acted data (also referred to as portrayed or simulated), on the other hand, offers ample of prototypical examples, although these are criticized for not being natural at times. To achieve some balance between naturalness and strength/number of humorous expressions, we decided to use dialogs from a comedy television show FRIENDS, which provides classical examples of casual, humorous conversations between friends who often discuss very real-life issues, such as job, career, relationships etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We collected a total of 75 dialogs (scenes) from six episodes of FRIENDS, four from Season I (Monica Gets a New Roommate, The One with Two Parts: Part 1 and 2, All the Poker) and two from Season II (Ross Finds Out, The Prom Video), all available on The Best of Friends Volume I DVD. This gave us approximately 2 hrs of audio.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Text transcripts of these episodes were obtained from: http://www.friendscafe.org/scripts.shtml, and were used to extract lexical features (used later in classification).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Figure 1 shows an excerpt from one of the dialogs in our corpus.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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