Towards an Ontology for Describing Emotions 1 st World Summit of the Knowledge Society WSKS08 Juan Miguel López 1, Rosa Gil 1, Roberto García 1, Idoia Cearreta 2, Nestor Garay 2 1 Universitat de Lleida, Spain 2 University of the Basque Country, Spain September 25, 2008 Athens, Greece

Table of Contents Introduction Describing Emotion Ontologies for Emotion Conclusions Future Work Conceptual Model Emotions Ontology Use Case

Introduction Human beings are eminently emotional Affective computing: detect and response to user's emotions Great variety of theoretical models of emotions Emotions are not universal (cultural, language and individual particularities) Context influence Focus (reduce complexity): –Emergent Emotion: states where the persons whole system is caught up in the way they react to a particular person or situation –Just emotion detection and expression systems, not internals of emotion processing in humans

Introduction Objectives: –Generic approach to define context-aware emergent emotions taking different theoretical models into account –Guide for flexible design of multimodal affective applications with independence of the starting model and the final way of implementation

Describing Emotion Most common cognitive models of emotions: –Categorical (Ekman, 1984) –Dimensional (Lang, 1979) –Appraisal (Scherer, 1999) Emotion expression systems: –Verbal –Behavioural (e.g. facial or postural) –Psycho-physiological (e.g heart rate) Emotional processing levels: –Emotional context (location, time, activity, devices and person) –Emotion itself –Associated multimodal behaviours

Ontologies for Emotion Semantic lexicon in the field of feelings and emotions (Mathieu, 2005) Emotional annotation with WordNetAffect (Strapparava and Valittutti, 2004) Ontology of affective states for context aware applications (Benta et al., 2007) User context model (Cearreta et al., 2007)

Table of Contents Introduction Describing Emotion Ontologies for Emotion Conclusions Future Work Conceptual Model Emotions Ontology Use Case

Conceptual Model Independent from psychological theories –No interpretation of emotions –No emotion triggering mechanism model Multimodality: –Incorporates Langs three expression systems –Input through senses (humans) and sensors (computers) Model context: individual, social and environmental Focus on Emergent Emotion, base of human affectiveness

Conceptual Model physical worldmental world

Emotions Ontology Formalisation of the conceptual model Flexible and extensible (accommodate different theories) Web-wide sharable: Web Ontology Language (OWL) Enrich by reusing upper ontologies DOLCE, Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (Gangemi et al., 2002) –Context representation: Description & Situation –Other generic concepts

Emotions Ontology

DOLCE provides generic terms for modelling context Enormous range of situations that might be associated with emotions FrameNet: formalisation of a enormous linguistic base, based on Frames: Lexical UnitFrameLU Status Lexical Entry Report Annotation Report score.nCardinal_numbersCreatedLE score.nBehind_the_scenesFinished_InitialLEAnno score.vGettingCreated score.vDamagingCreatedLE scores.nQuantityFinished_InitialLEAnno

Emotions Ontology Scenario "Torres scored a winning goal in the last minute" Description score - Recipient "Torres" - Result "winning" - Theme "goal" - Time "in the last minute" describes triggers Emergent Emotion

Use Case Emotion-aware Tangible User Interface Interface: –Sensors: microphone, camera and buttons –Expression: display and speaker Situations Descriptions: –playing a song –displaying a picture

Use Case Emergent Emotion: sadness, happiness, anger, calm, worry, relaxed, boredom and surprise Training: recognize user emotional response to some situations Then, make user experience more pleasant –If detected sadness play songs and/or display images associated to a happy user response

Table of Contents Introduction Describing Emotion Ontologies for Emotion Conclusions Future Work Conceptual Model Emotions Ontology Use Case

Conclusions Generic model for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account –Cognitive interpretation of emotions –Independence from emotion theories Formalised as a Web Ontology Reuse DOLCE and FrameNet

Future Work Extending the ontology beyond emergent emotion –Affective states and emotions in social networks Extend emotion-aware application based on Tangible User Interfaces Make computers more accessible, personalised and adapted to user needs

Thank you for your attention Roberto García