---- README for the Phonetic Annotation of the AVLaughterCycle Database ----

As explained in the paper submitted for ACII'11, the laughs that had been previously segmented [1] have been phonetically annotated in Praat [2], by one annotator.
Only the laughs that were initially not labeled as containing speech are in this release. 

The release contains three folders:
1) Examples of the labels that were added to the phonetic alphabet, since the extended phonetic alphabet does not cover these laughter sounds:
hum, grunt, groan, vocal fry, snore, cackle and nareal fricatives.

2) The audio files of 1001 segmented laughs (.wav files)
The filename format is the following: [SubjectID]_[StartTime in milliseconds]_[Endtime in milliseconds].wav

3) Annotations files for these 1001 laughs (.TextGrid files).
The filename format is the same: [SubjectID]_[StartTime in milliseconds]_[Endtime in milliseconds].TextGrid
Annotations have been made using the phonetic symbols provided by Praat.
The first annotation track contains the phonetic labels: phonetic symbols defined by Praat and some added annotations: silence, hum, grunt, groan, vocal_fry, snore and nareal fricatives (which are actually labeled as "ne?" in exhalation phases and "ni" in inhalation phases). Cackles are actually labeled as \ic\O^ since it seemed us the way of producing a cackle is close to this symbol. 
The second annotation track specifies the perceived airflow direction: "e" for exhalation and "i" for inhalation. 
Only one of the initial 1001 laughs has been identified as containing speech (file 6_647700_650800). The speech part has been annotated by a "speech" tag on the Respiration (airflow) track.


[1] Urbain, J., Bevacqua, E., Dutoit, T., Moinet, A., Niewiadomski, R., Pelachaud, C.,
Picart, B., Tilmanne, J., Wagner, J.: The AVLaughterCycle database. In: Proceed-
ings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC’10). Valletta, Malta (May 2010)


[2] Boersma, P., Weenink, D.: Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 5.2.11)
[computer program]. www.praat.org (Retrieved on January 20, 2011)