Dr. Marcin Skowron
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
“No peanuts! Affective Cues for the Virtual Bartender”
Emotionally driven online behavior is traceable in a wide range of
human communication processes on the Internet. Here the sum of
individual emotions of a large number of users, with their
interconnectivity and complex dynamics influence formation, evolution
and breaking-up of online communities. Our research concentrates on
the basic communication process between two conversants. Such
interactions constitute a fundament for the modeling of more complex,
multi-agents communication processes. Using artificial conversational
entities - dialog systems, we investigate the role of emotions in
online, real-time, natural language based communication.
In this talk, we present methods for the detection of affective states
in text and the usage of such affective cues in a dialog system - the
Affect Bartender. We discuss also a concept of affective profile
(i.e., positive, negative, neutral) of conversants and its influence
on the communication processes. The dialog systems are evaluated in
two experimental environments: a virtual reality and an online,
text-based interaction settings. The experimental results show that
user ratings for the conversational agent match those
obtained in a Wizard of Oz setting. The results also demonstrate that
the affective profile to a large extent determines the assessment of
users’ emotional connection and enjoyment from the interaction while
it does not significantly influence the perception of core
capabilities of the dialog systems.
This research was undertaken as part of the EU-Project “Collective
Emotions in Cyberspace (CyberEmotions)”, Project Coordinator:
Prof.Dr. Janusz Holyst, Warsaw, University of Technology, of which
OFAI is a partner.