Sociocognitive Language Processing – Emphasising the Soft Factors Bj¨ orn W. Schuller and Michael F. McTear Abstract Sociocognitive Language Processing (SCLP) is the idea of coping with everyday language, including slang and multi-lingual phrases and cultural aspects, and in particular with irony / sarcasm / humour, and paralinguistic information such as the physical and mental state and traits of the dialogue partner (e. g., affect, age groups, personality dimensions), and social aspects. By that, multimodal aspects such as facial expression, gestures or bodily behaviour should ideally be included in the analysis where possible. At the same time, SCLP can render future dialogue systems more ‘chatty’ by not only feeling natural but being truly emotionally and socially competent, ideally leading to a more symmetrical dialogue. For that, the computer should itself have a ‘need for humour’, an ‘increase of familiarity’, etc., i. e., enabling computers to experience or at least better understand emotions and personality such that they have ‘a feel’ for these concepts. Beyond these ideas, the broader idea of SCLP includes verbal behaviour analysis, a closer coupling between language understanding and generation incorporating social and affective informa- tion, and new language resources to meet these ends. By that, SCLP unites expertise from psychology, social sciences, and (natural) language processing. Here, we give a short introduction. Bj¨ orn W. Schuller University of Passau, Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems, Passau, Germany & Imperial College London, Department of Computing, London, U. K. e-mail: schuller@IEEE.org Michael F. McTear University of Ulster, Computer Science Research Institute, Ulster, U. K. e-mail: mf.mctear@ulster.ac.uk 1