Vladislav Maraev

Vladislav Maraev is a computational linguist with a background in network engineering and cognitive science. He builds computational models that reproduce human behaviour, therefore trying to understand how our cognition works. He received his PhD from the University of Gothenburg on the topic of laughter in interaction between humans and with dialogue systems. His research questions are ‘Why do we laugh?’ as in ‘What makes us laugh?’, ‘What do we do with laughter?’ and ‘How is it placed with respect to speech and other behaviours?’. He aims at building artificial intelligence systems which provide important social functions, including education and companionship.

The project

Title: SocLaVA : Social Laughter for Virtual Agents

"Laughter is not only a reaction to a joke, but plays a crucial role in managing miscommunication in dialogue. We hypothesise that theoretical models of laughter in human dialogue extends to virtual entities. We aim to confirm this using experimental methods which involve virtual agents incorporating both fine-grained laughter behaviours and theoretical models of laughter in the context of dialogue. In SocLaVA, we will develop and evaluate virtual agents which produce laughter behaviours that are appropriate in the context of interaction."

Hosting institution: Sorbonne Université - The Institute Of Intelligent Systems And Robotics​ (ISIR)

Selective Bibliography

• Maraev, V., Mazzocconi, C., Howes, C., & Pelachaud, C. (2023). Towards investigating gaze and laughter coordination in socially interactive agents. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (pp. 473-475).
• Fresno, A. C., Larsson, S., Maraev, V., (2022). ‘Dialogue strategies for... cómo se dice en- trenamiento de vocabulario?’ In: Proceedings of the 26th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers. Dublin, Ireland: SEMDIAL
• Maraev, V., Bernardy, J.-P., Ginzburg, J., (2020). ‘Dialogue management with linear logic: the role of metavariables in questions and clarifications’. In: Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) 61.3., pp. 43–67
• Maraev, V., Bernardy, J.-P., Howes, C., (2021). ‘Non-humorous Use of Laughter in Spoken Dialogue Systems’. In: Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents (LaCATODA 2021), pp. 33–44
• Maraev, V., Breitholtz, E., Howes, C., Larsson, S., Cooper, R., (2021). ‘Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour’. In: Frontiers in Psychology 12., p. 1443