Towards an Ontology for Describing Emotions

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Towards an Ontology for Describing Emotions

• 1st World Summit of the Knowledge Society
• WSKS08
• Juan Miguel López1, Rosa Gil1, Roberto García1,
  Idoia Cearreta2, Nestor Garay2
• 1 Universitat de Lleida, Spain
• 2 University of the Basque Country, Spain

September 25, 2008 Athens, Greece
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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Describing Emotion
• Ontologies for Emotion

• Conceptual Model
• Emotions Ontology
• Use Case

• Conclusions
• Future Work

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Describing Emotion
• Ontologies for Emotion

• Conceptual Model
• Emotions Ontology
• Use Case

• Conclusions
• Future Work

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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

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Conceptual Model
physical world
mental world
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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

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Emotions Ontology
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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

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Emotions Ontology
Scenario
"Torres scored a winning goal in the last minute"
describes
triggers
Emergent Emotion
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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

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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 sadnessplay songs and/or display
  images associated to a happy user response

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Describing Emotion
• Ontologies for Emotion

• Conceptual Model
• Emotions Ontology
• Use Case

• Conclusions
• Future Work

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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

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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

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Thank you for your attention

• Roberto García
• rgarcia_at_diei.udl.es