Abstract

Cheese! is a conversational corpus. It consists of 11 French face-to-face conversations lasting around 15 minutes each. Cheese! is a duplication of an American corpus (ref) in order to conduct a cross-cultural comparison of participants’ smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous sequences in American English and French conversations. In this article, the methodology used to collect and enrich the corpus is presented: experimental protocol, technical choices, transcription, semi-automatic annotations, manual annotations of smiling and humor. An exploratory study investigating the links between smile and humor is then proposed. Based on the analysis of two interactions, two questions are asked: (1) Does smile frame humor? (2) Does smile has an impact on its success or failure? If the experimental design of Cheese! has been elaborated to study specifically smiles and humor in conversations, the high quality of the dataset obtained, and the methodology used are also replicable and can be applied to analyze many other conversational activities and other multimodal modalities.