Automated Semantic Understanding of Human Emotions in Writing and Speech

Affective Human Computer Interaction (A-HCI) will be critical for the success of new technologies that will prevalent in the 21st century. If cell phones and the internet are any indication, there will be continued rapid development of automated assistive systems that help humans to live better, more productive lives. These will not be just passive systems such as cell phones, but active assistive systems like robot aides in use in hospitals, homes, entertainment room, office, and other work environments. Such systems will need to be able to properly deduce human emotional state before they determine how to best interact with people. This dissertation explores and extends the body of knowledge related to Affective HCI. New semantic methodologies are developed and studied for reliable and accurate detection of human emotional states and magnitudes in written and spoken speech; and for mapping emotional states and magnitudes to 3-D facial expression outputs. The automatic detection of affect in language is based on natural language processing and machine learning approaches. Two affect corpora were developed to perform this analysis. Emotion classification is performed at the sentence level using a step-wise approach which incorporates sentiment flow and sentiment composition features. For emotion magnitude estimation, a regression model was developed to predict evolving emotional magnitude of actors. Emotional magnitudes at any point during a story or conversation are determined by 1) previous emotional state magnitude; 2) new text and speech inputs that might act upon that state; and 3) information about the context the actors are in. Acoustic features are also used to capture additional information from the speech signal. Evaluation of the automatic understanding of affect is performed by testing the model on a testing subset of the newly extended corpus. To visualize actor emotions as perceived by the system, a methodology was also developed to map predicted emotion class magnitudes to 3-D facial parameters using vertex-level mesh morphing. The developed sentence level emotion state detection approach achieved classification accuracies as high as 71% for the neutral vs. emotion classification task in a test corpus of children’s stories. After class re-sampling, the results of the step-wise classification methodology on a test sub-set of a medical drama corpus achieved accuracies in the 56% to 84% range for each emotion class and polarity. For emotion magnitude prediction, the developed recurrent (prior-state feedback) regression model using both text-based and acoustic based features achieved correlation coefficients in the range of 0.69 to 0.80. This prediction function was modeled using a non-linear approach based on Support Vector Regression (SVR) and performed better than other approaches based on Linear Regression or Artificial Neural Networks

PRESENCE: A human-inspired architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction

Recent years have seen steady improvements in the quality and performance of speech-based human-machine interaction driven by a significant convergence in the methods and techniques employed. However, the quantity of training data required to improve state-of-the-art systems seems to be growing exponentially and performance appears to be asymptotic to a level that may be inadequate for many real-world applications. This suggests that there may be a fundamental flaw in the underlying architecture of contemporary systems, as well as a failure to capitalize on the combinatorial properties of human spoken language. This paper addresses these issues and presents a novel architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction inspired by recent findings in the neurobiology of living systems. Called PRESENCE-"PREdictive SENsorimotor Control and Emulation" - this new architecture blurs the distinction between the core components of a traditional spoken language dialogue system and instead focuses on a recursive hierarchical feedback control structure. Cooperative and communicative behavior emerges as a by-product of an architecture that is founded on a model of interaction in which the system has in mind the needs and intentions of a user and a user has in mind the needs and intentions of the system

Linguistic Threat Assessment: Understanding Targeted Violence through Computational Linguistics

Language alluding to possible violence is widespread online, and security professionals are increasingly faced with the issue of understanding and mitigating this phenomenon. The volume of extremist and violent online data presents a workload that is unmanageable for traditional, manual threat assessment. Computational linguistics may be of particular relevance to understanding threats of grievance-fuelled targeted violence on a large scale. This thesis seeks to advance knowledge on the possibilities and pitfalls of threat assessment through automated linguistic analysis. Based on in-depth interviews with expert threat assessment practitioners, three areas of language are identified which can be leveraged for automation of threat assessment, namely, linguistic content, style, and trajectories. Implementations of each area are demonstrated in three subsequent quantitative chapters. First, linguistic content is utilised to develop the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary aimed at measuring concepts related to grievance-fuelled violence in text. Thereafter, linguistic content is supplemented with measures of linguistic style in order to examine the feasibility of author profiling (determining gender, age, and personality) in abusive texts. Lastly, linguistic trajectories are measured over time in order to assess the effect of an external event on an extremist movement. Collectively, the chapters in this thesis demonstrate that linguistic automation of threat assessment is indeed possible. The concluding chapter describes the limitations of the proposed approaches and illustrates where future potential lies to improve automated linguistic threat assessment. Ideally, developers of computational implementations for threat assessment strive for explainability and transparency. Furthermore, it is argued that computational linguistics holds particular promise for large-scale measurement of grievance-fuelled language, but is perhaps less suited to prediction of actual violent behaviour. Lastly, researchers and practitioners involved in threat assessment are urged to collaboratively and critically evaluate novel computational tools which may emerge in the future

A Review on MAS-Based Sentiment and Stress Analysis User-Guiding and Risk-Prevention Systems in Social Network Analysis

[EN] In the current world we live immersed in online applications, being one of the most present of them Social Network Sites (SNSs), and different issues arise from this interaction. Therefore, there is a need for research that addresses the potential issues born from the increasing user interaction when navigating. For this reason, in this survey we explore works in the line of prevention of risks that can arise from social interaction in online environments, focusing on works using Multi-Agent System (MAS) technologies. For being able to assess what techniques are available for prevention, works in the detection of sentiment polarity and stress levels of users in SNSs will be reviewed. We review with special attention works using MAS technologies for user recommendation and guiding. Through the analysis of previous approaches on detection of the user state and risk prevention in SNSs we elaborate potential future lines of work that might lead to future applications where users can navigate and interact between each other in a more safe way.This work was funded by the project TIN2017-89156-R of the Spanish government.Aguado-Sarrió, G.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; García-Fornes, A.; Espinosa Minguet, AR. (2020). A Review on MAS-Based Sentiment and Stress Analysis User-Guiding and Risk-Prevention Systems in Social Network Analysis. Applied Sciences. 10(19):1-29. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10196746S1291019Vanderhoven, E., Schellens, T., Vanderlinde, R., & Valcke, M. (2015). Developing educational materials about risks on social network sites: a design based research approach. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(3), 459-480. doi:10.1007/s11423-015-9415-4Teens and ICT: Risks and Opportunities. Belgium: TIRO http://www.belspo.be/belspo/fedra/proj.asp?l=en&COD=TA/00/08Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspective of European Children: Full Findings and Policy Implications From the EU Kids Online Survey of 9–16 Year Olds and Their Parents in 25 Countries http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/33731/Vanderhoven, E., Schellens, T., & Valcke, M. (2014). Educating teens about the risks on social network sites. An intervention study in Secondary Education. Comunicar, 22(43), 123-132. doi:10.3916/c43-2014-12Christofides, E., Muise, A., & Desmarais, S. (2012). Risky Disclosures on Facebook. Journal of Adolescent Research, 27(6), 714-731. doi:10.1177/0743558411432635George, J. M., & Dane, E. (2016). Affect, emotion, and decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 136, 47-55. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.06.004Thelwall, M. (2017). TensiStrength: Stress and relaxation magnitude detection for social media texts. Information Processing & Management, 53(1), 106-121. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2016.06.009Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., & Kappas, A. (2010). Sentiment strength detection in short informal text. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(12), 2544-2558. doi:10.1002/asi.21416Shoumy, N. J., Ang, L.-M., Seng, K. P., Rahaman, D. M. M., & Zia, T. (2020). Multimodal big data affective analytics: A comprehensive survey using text, audio, visual and physiological signals. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 149, 102447. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2019.102447Zhang, C., Zeng, D., Li, J., Wang, F.-Y., & Zuo, W. (2009). Sentiment analysis of Chinese documents: From sentence to document level. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12), 2474-2487. doi:10.1002/asi.21206Lu, B., Ott, M., Cardie, C., & Tsou, B. K. (2011). Multi-aspect Sentiment Analysis with Topic Models. 2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops. doi:10.1109/icdmw.2011.125Nasukawa, T., & Yi, J. (2003). Sentiment analysis. Proceedings of the international conference on Knowledge capture - K-CAP ’03. doi:10.1145/945645.945658Borth, D., Ji, R., Chen, T., Breuel, T., & Chang, S.-F. (2013). Large-scale visual sentiment ontology and detectors using adjective noun pairs. Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia - MM ’13. doi:10.1145/2502081.2502282Deb, S., & Dandapat, S. (2019). Emotion Classification Using Segmentation of Vowel-Like and Non-Vowel-Like Regions. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 10(3), 360-373. doi:10.1109/taffc.2017.2730187Deng, J., Zhang, Z., Marchi, E., & Schuller, B. (2013). Sparse Autoencoder-Based Feature Transfer Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition. 2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. doi:10.1109/acii.2013.90Nicolaou, M. A., Gunes, H., & Pantic, M. (2011). Continuous Prediction of Spontaneous Affect from Multiple Cues and Modalities in Valence-Arousal Space. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2(2), 92-105. doi:10.1109/t-affc.2011.9Hossain, M. S., Muhammad, G., Alhamid, M. F., Song, B., & Al-Mutib, K. (2016). Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition Using Big Data Towards 5G. Mobile Networks and Applications, 21(5), 753-763. doi:10.1007/s11036-016-0685-9Zhou, F., Jianxin Jiao, R., & Linsey, J. S. (2015). Latent Customer Needs Elicitation by Use Case Analogical Reasoning From Sentiment Analysis of Online Product Reviews. Journal of Mechanical Design, 137(7). doi:10.1115/1.4030159Ceci, F., Goncalves, A. L., & Weber, R. (2016). A model for sentiment analysis based on ontology and cases. IEEE Latin America Transactions, 14(11), 4560-4566. doi:10.1109/tla.2016.7795829Vizer, L. M., Zhou, L., & Sears, A. (2009). Automated stress detection using keystroke and linguistic features: An exploratory study. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67(10), 870-886. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.07.005Feldman, R. (2013). Techniques and applications for sentiment analysis. Communications of the ACM, 56(4), 82-89. doi:10.1145/2436256.2436274Schouten, K., & Frasincar, F. (2016). Survey on Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 28(3), 813-830. doi:10.1109/tkde.2015.2485209Ji, R., Cao, D., Zhou, Y., & Chen, F. (2016). Survey of visual sentiment prediction for social media analysis. Frontiers of Computer Science, 10(4), 602-611. doi:10.1007/s11704-016-5453-2Li, L., Cao, D., Li, S., & Ji, R. (2015). Sentiment analysis of Chinese micro-blog based on multi-modal correlation model. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). doi:10.1109/icip.2015.7351718Lee, P.-M., Tsui, W.-H., & Hsiao, T.-C. (2015). The Influence of Emotion on Keyboard Typing: An Experimental Study Using Auditory Stimuli. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0129056. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129056Matsiola, M., Dimoulas, C., Kalliris, G., & Veglis, A. A. (2018). Augmenting User Interaction Experience Through Embedded Multimodal Media Agents in Social Networks. Information Retrieval and Management, 1972-1993. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-5191-1.ch088Rosaci, D. (2007). CILIOS: Connectionist inductive learning and inter-ontology similarities for recommending information agents. Information Systems, 32(6), 793-825. doi:10.1016/j.is.2006.06.003Buccafurri, F., Comi, A., Lax, G., & Rosaci, D. (2016). Experimenting with Certified Reputation in a Competitive Multi-Agent Scenario. 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The European Physical Journal B, 77(4), 533-545. doi:10.1140/epjb/e2010-00292-

The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use

This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary which can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fuelled violence threat assessment. We describe the development the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2,318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evidence for a difference between populations in several dictionary categories. Further classification tasks showed promising performance, but future improvements are still needed. Finally, we provide instructions and suggestions for the use of the Grievance Dictionary by security professionals and (violence) researchers.Comment: pre-prin

Prédiction de la détérioration du comportement à l’aide de l’apprentissage automatique

Les plateformes de médias sociaux rassemblent des individus pour interagir de manière amicale et civilisée tout en ayant des convictions et des croyances diversifiées. Certaines personnes adoptent des comportements répréhensibles qui nuisent à la sérénité et affectent négativement l’équanimité des autres utilisateurs. Certains cas de mauvaise conduite peuvent initialement avoir de petits effets statistiques, mais leur accumulation persistante pourrait entraîner des conséquences majeures et dévastatrices. L’accumulation persistante des mauvais comportements peut être un prédicteur valide des facteurs de risque de détérioration du comportement. Le problème de la détérioration du comportement n’a pas été largement étudié dans le contexte des médias sociaux. La détection précoce de la détérioration du comportement peut être d’une importance cruciale pour éviter que le mauvais comportement des individus ne s’aggrave. Cette thèse aborde le problème de la détérioration du comportement dans le contexte des médias sociaux. Nous proposons de nouvelles méthodes basées sur l’apprentissage automatique qui (1) explorent les séquences comportementales et leurs motifs temporels pour faciliter la compréhension des comportements manifestés par les individus et (2) prédisent la détérioration du comportement à partir de combinaisons consécutives de motifs séquentiels correspondant à des comportements inappropriés. Nous menons des expériences approfondies à l’aide d’ensembles de données du monde réel et démontrons la capacité de nos modèles à prédire la détérioration du comportement avec un haut degré de précision, c’est-à-dire des scores F-1 supérieurs à 0,8. En outre, nous examinons la trajectoire de détérioration du comportement afin de découvrir les états émotionnels que les individus présentent progressivement et d’évaluer si ces états émotionnels conduisent à la détérioration du comportement au fil du temps. Nos résultats suggèrent que la colère pourrait être un état émotionnel potentiel qui pourrait contribuer substantiellement à la détérioration du comportement

A Proposal for Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Aural Transformers and Action Units on RAVDESS Dataset

The work leading to these results was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the projects GOMINOLA (PID2020-118112RB-C21 and PID2020-118112RB-C22, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), CAVIAR (TEC2017-84593-C2-1-R, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER "Una manera de hacer Europa"), and AMIC-PoC (PDC2021-120846-C42, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by "the European Union "NextGenerationEU/PRTR"). This research also received funding from the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 823907 (http://menhir-project.eu, accessed on 17 November 2021). Furthermore, R.K.'s research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPI grant PRE2018-083225).Emotion recognition is attracting the attention of the research community due to its multiple applications in different fields, such as medicine or autonomous driving. In this paper, we proposed an automatic emotion recognizer system that consisted of a speech emotion recognizer (SER) and a facial emotion recognizer (FER). For the SER, we evaluated a pre-trained xlsr-Wav2Vec2.0 transformer using two transfer-learning techniques: embedding extraction and fine-tuning. The best accuracy results were achieved when we fine-tuned the whole model by appending a multilayer perceptron on top of it, confirming that the training was more robust when it did not start from scratch and the previous knowledge of the network was similar to the task to adapt. Regarding the facial emotion recognizer, we extracted the Action Units of the videos and compared the performance between employing static models against sequential models. Results showed that sequential models beat static models by a narrow difference. Error analysis reported that the visual systems could improve with a detector of high-emotional load frames, which opened a new line of research to discover new ways to learn from videos. Finally, combining these two modalities with a late fusion strategy, we achieved 86.70% accuracy on the RAVDESS dataset on a subject-wise 5-CV evaluation, classifying eight emotions. Results demonstrated that these modalities carried relevant information to detect users’ emotional state and their combination allowed to improve the final system performance.Spanish Government PID2020-118112RB-C21 PID2020-118112RB-C22 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 TEC2017-84593-C2-1-R MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER PDC2021-120846-C42European Union "NextGenerationEU/PRTR")European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation program 823907German Research Foundation (DFG) PRE2018-08322

Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations

Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical children/adolescents, but not on an allegedly metacognitive implicit one. In Experiment 2, neurotypical adults completed these tasks in a single-task condition, or a dual-task condition that required concurrent completion of a secondary task that tapped mindreading. Metacognitive accuracy was significantly diminished by the dual-mindreading-task on the explicit task, but not the implicit task. In Experiment 3, we included additional dual-tasks to rule out the possibility that any secondary task (regardless of whether it required mindreading) would diminish metacognitive accuracy. Finally, in both experiments 1 and 2, metacognitive accuracy on the explicit task, but not the implicit task, was associated significantly with performance on a measure of mindreading ability. These results suggest that explicit metacognitive tasks (used frequently to measure metacognition in humans) share metarepresentational processing resources with mindreading, whereas implicit tasks (which are claimed by some comparative psychologists to measure metacognition in non-human animals) do not