SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

When Does a Laugh Begin? Structured Annotator Disagreement in Temporal Laughter Localization

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 6, 2026 · UTC

Annotators routinely disagree on laughter boundaries and subtle chuckles, yet temporal laughter localization typically evaluates against a single reference annotation. We show that this disagreement is structured rather than random noise. Re-annotating the SMILE-Temporal benchmark (672 videos, 1,683 events) with 3-5 annotators per video (alpha = 0.757), we find systematic patterns: disagreement is 1.73 times larger at offsets than onsets, far more common for chuckles than full laughs (77% vs. 20%), and predictable from event attributes (AUC = 0.831). Evaluating against a single annotator break

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global