Humor is a substantial element of human social behavior, affect, and cognition. Its automatic understanding can facilitate a more naturalistic human-AI interaction. Current methods of humor detection have been exclusively based on staged data, making them inadequate for ‘real-world’ applications. We contribute to addressing this deficiency by introducing the novel Passau-Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, comprising about 11 hours of recordings. The Passau-SFCH dataset is annotated for the presence of humor and its dimensions (sentiment and direction) as proposed in Martin's Humor Style Questionnaire. We conduct a series of experiments employing pretrained Transformers, convolutional neural networks, and expert-designed features. The performance of each modality (text, audio, video) for spontaneous humor recognition is analyzed and their complementarity is investigated. Our findings suggest that for the automatic analysis of humor and its sentiment, facial expressions are most promising, while humor direction can be best modeled via text-based features. Further, we experiment with different multimodal approaches to humor recognition, including decision-level fusion and MulT, a multimodal Transformer approach. In this context, we propose a novel multimodal architecture that yields the best overall results.

Advances in passive acoustic monitoring and machine learning have led to the procurement of vast datasets for computational bioacoustic research. Nevertheless, data scarcity is still an issue for rare and underrepresented species. This study investigates how meta-information can improve zero-shot audio classification, utilising bird species as an example case study due to the availability of rich and diverse meta-data. We investigate three different sources of metadata: textual bird sound descriptions encoded via (S)Bert, functional traits (Avonet), and bird life-history (BLH) characteristics. As audio features, we extract audio spectrogram transformer (AST) embeddings and project them to the dimension of the auxiliary information by adopting a single linear layer. Then, we employ the dot product as compatibility function and a standard zero-shot learning ranking hinge loss to determine the correct class. The best results are achieved by concatenating the Avonet and BLH features attaining a mean unweighted F1-score of .233 over five different test sets with 8 to 10 classes.

The 4th Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) focuses on Multimodal Prediction of Mimicked Emotions, Cross-Cultural Humour, and Personalised Recognition of Affects. The workshop takes place in conjunction with ACM Multimedia'23. We provide three datasets as part of the challenge: (i) The Hume-Vidmimic dataset which offers 30+ hours of expressive behaviour data from 557 participants. It involves mimicking and rating emotions: Approval, Disappointment, and Uncertainty. This multimodal resource is valuable for studying human emotional expressions. (ii) The 2023 edition of the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset comprises German football press conference recordings within the training set, while videos of English football press conferences are included in the unseen test set. This unique configuration offers a cross-cultural evaluation environment for humour recognition. (iii) The Ulm-Trier Social Stress Test (Ulm-TSST) dataset contains recordings of subjects under stress. It involves arousal and valence signals, with some test labels provided to aid personalisation. Based on these datasets, we formulate three multimodal affective computing challenges: (1) Mimicked Emotions Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Mimic) for categorical emotion prediction, (2) Cross-Cultural Humour Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humour) for cross-cultural humour detection, and (3) Personalisation Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Personalisation) for personalised dimensional emotion recognition. In this summary, we outline the challenge's motivation, participation guidelines, conditions, and results.

The 3rd Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) focuses on multimodal affective computing. The workshop is held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia'22. Three datasets are provided as part of the challenge: (i) the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset which contains humour-tagged audio-visual data of German football coaches, (ii) the Hume-Reaction dataset, which contains annotations on how people respond to emotional stimuli in terms of seven different emotional expression intensities, and (iii) the Ulm-Trier Social Stress Test (Ulm-TSST) dataset, which consists of audio-visual recordings labelled with continuous emotion values of individuals in stressful circumstances. Based on these datasets three affective computing challenges are defined: 1) Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor), for spontaneous humour recognition, 2) Emotional Reactions Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Reaction), for prediction of seven fine-grained in-the-wild' emotions, and 3) Emotional Stress Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Stress), for continuous prediction of stressed emotion values. In this summary, we describe the motivation behind the challenge, participation and its conditions, as well as the outcomes. The complete MuSe'22 workshop proceedings are available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3551876

Abstract Temporal property graphs are graphs whose structure and properties change over time. Temporal graph datasets tend to be large due to stored historical information, asking for scalable analysis capabilities. We give a complete overview of Gradoop, a graph dataflow system for scalable, distributed analytics of temporal property graphs which has been continuously developed since 2005. Its graph model TPGM allows bitemporal modeling not only of vertices and edges but also of graph collections. A declarative analytical language called GrALa allows analysts to flexibly define analytical graph workflows by composing different operators that support temporal graph analysis. Built on a distributed dataflow system, large temporal graphs can be processed on a shared-nothing cluster. We present the system architecture of Gradoop, its data model TPGM with composable temporal graph operators, like snapshot, difference, pattern matching, graph grouping and several implementation details. We evaluate the performance and scalability of selected operators and a composed workflow for synthetic and real-world temporal graphs with up to 283 M vertices and 1.8 B edges, and a graph lifetime of about 8 years with up to 20 M new edges per year. We also reflect on lessons learned from the Gradoop effort.