General Purpose Textual Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection Tools

Textual sentiment analysis and emotion detection consists in retrieving the sentiment or emotion carried by a text or document. This task can be useful in many domains: opinion mining, prediction, feedbacks, etc. However, building a general purpose tool for doing sentiment analysis and emotion detection raises a number of issues, theoretical issues like the dependence to the domain or to the language but also pratical issues like the emotion representation for interoperability. In this paper we present our sentiment/emotion analysis tools, the way we propose to circumvent the di culties and the applications they are used for.Comment: Workshop on Emotion and Computing (2013

Big data analytics:Computational intelligence techniques and application areas

Big Data has significant impact in developing functional smart cities and supporting modern societies. In this paper, we investigate the importance of Big Data in modern life and economy, and discuss challenges arising from Big Data utilization. Different computational intelligence techniques have been considered as tools for Big Data analytics. We also explore the powerful combination of Big Data and Computational Intelligence (CI) and identify a number of areas, where novel applications in real world smart city problems can be developed by utilizing these powerful tools and techniques. We present a case study for intelligent transportation in the context of a smart city, and a novel data modelling methodology based on a biologically inspired universal generative modelling approach called Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal State Machine (HSTSM). We further discuss various implications of policy, protection, valuation and commercialization related to Big Data, its applications and deployment

Facial emotion recognition using min-max similarity classifier

Recognition of human emotions from the imaging templates is useful in a wide variety of human-computer interaction and intelligent systems applications. However, the automatic recognition of facial expressions using image template matching techniques suffer from the natural variability with facial features and recording conditions. In spite of the progress achieved in facial emotion recognition in recent years, the effective and computationally simple feature selection and classification technique for emotion recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient and straightforward facial emotion recognition algorithm to reduce the problem of inter-class pixel mismatch during classification. The proposed method includes the application of pixel normalization to remove intensity offsets followed-up with a Min-Max metric in a nearest neighbor classifier that is capable of suppressing feature outliers. The results indicate an improvement of recognition performance from 92.85% to 98.57% for the proposed Min-Max classification method when tested on JAFFE database. The proposed emotion recognition technique outperforms the existing template matching methods

Deep fusion of multi-channel neurophysiological signal for emotion recognition and monitoring

How to fuse multi-channel neurophysiological signals for emotion recognition is emerging as a hot research topic in community of Computational Psychophysiology. Nevertheless, prior feature engineering based approaches require extracting various domain knowledge related features at a high time cost. Moreover, traditional fusion method cannot fully utilise correlation information between different channels and frequency components. In this paper, we design a hybrid deep learning model, in which the 'Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)' is utilised for extracting task-related features, as well as mining inter-channel and inter-frequency correlation, besides, the 'Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)' is concatenated for integrating contextual information from the frame cube sequence. Experiments are carried out in a trial-level emotion recognition task, on the DEAP benchmarking dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the classical methods, with regard to both of the emotional dimensions of Valence and Arousal

High-Level Concepts for Affective Understanding of Images

This paper aims to bridge the affective gap between image content and the emotional response of the viewer it elicits by using High-Level Concepts (HLCs). In contrast to previous work that relied solely on low-level features or used convolutional neural network (CNN) as a black-box, we use HLCs generated by pretrained CNNs in an explicit way to investigate the relations/associations between these HLCs and a (small) set of Ekman's emotional classes. As a proof-of-concept, we first propose a linear admixture model for modeling these relations, and the resulting computational framework allows us to determine the associations between each emotion class and certain HLCs (objects and places). This linear model is further extended to a nonlinear model using support vector regression (SVR) that aims to predict the viewer's emotional response using both low-level image features and HLCs extracted from images. These class-specific regressors are then assembled into a regressor ensemble that provide a flexible and effective predictor for predicting viewer's emotional responses from images. Experimental results have demonstrated that our results are comparable to existing methods, with a clear view of the association between HLCs and emotional classes that is ostensibly missing in most existing work

Ubiquitous emotion-aware computing

Emotions are a crucial element for personal and ubiquitous computing. What to sense and how to sense it, however, remain a challenge. This study explores the rare combination of speech, electrocardiogram, and a revised Self-Assessment Mannequin to assess people’s emotions. 40 people watched 30 International Affective Picture System pictures in either an office or a living-room environment. Additionally, their personality traits neuroticism and extroversion and demographic information (i.e., gender, nationality, and level of education) were recorded. The resulting data were analyzed using both basic emotion categories and the valence--arousal model, which enabled a comparison between both representations. The combination of heart rate variability and three speech measures (i.e., variability of the fundamental frequency of pitch (F0), intensity, and energy) explained 90% (p < .001) of the participants’ experienced valence--arousal, with 88% for valence and 99% for arousal (ps < .001). The six basic emotions could also be discriminated (p < .001), although the explained variance was much lower: 18–20%. Environment (or context), the personality trait neuroticism, and gender proved to be useful when a nuanced assessment of people’s emotions was needed. Taken together, this study provides a significant leap toward robust, generic, and ubiquitous emotion-aware computing