An Affect-Rich Neural Conversational Model with Biased Attention and Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss

Affect conveys important implicit information in human communication. Having the capability to correctly express affect during human-machine conversations is one of the major milestones in artificial intelligence. In recent years, extensive research on open-domain neural conversational models has been conducted. However, embedding affect into such models is still under explored. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end affect-rich open-domain neural conversational model that produces responses not only appropriate in syntax and semantics, but also with rich affect. Our model extends the Seq2Seq model and adopts VAD (Valence, Arousal and Dominance) affective notations to embed each word with affects. In addition, our model considers the effect of negators and intensifiers via a novel affective attention mechanism, which biases attention towards affect-rich words in input sentences. Lastly, we train our model with an affect-incorporated objective function to encourage the generation of affect-rich words in the output responses. Evaluations based on both perplexity and human evaluations show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline model of comparable size in producing natural and affect-rich responses.Comment: AAAI-1

EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the neuronal activities in different brain regions via electrodes. Many existing studies on EEG-based emotion recognition do not fully exploit the topology of EEG channels. In this paper, we propose a regularized graph neural network (RGNN) for EEG-based emotion recognition. RGNN considers the biological topology among different brain regions to capture both local and global relations among different EEG channels. Specifically, we model the inter-channel relations in EEG signals via an adjacency matrix in a graph neural network where the connection and sparseness of the adjacency matrix are inspired by neuroscience theories of human brain organization. In addition, we propose two regularizers, namely node-wise domain adversarial training (NodeDAT) and emotion-aware distribution learning (EmotionDL), to better handle cross-subject EEG variations and noisy labels, respectively. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, SEED and SEED-IV, demonstrate the superior performance of our model than state-of-the-art models in most experimental settings. Moreover, ablation studies show that the proposed adjacency matrix and two regularizers contribute consistent and significant gain to the performance of our RGNN model. Finally, investigations on the neuronal activities reveal important brain regions and inter-channel relations for EEG-based emotion recognition

Investigating the use of pretrained convolutional neural network on cross-subject and cross-dataset EEG emotion recognition

The electroencephalogram (EEG) has great attraction in emotion recognition studies due to its resistance to deceptive actions of humans. This is one of the most significant advantages of brain signals in comparison to visual or speech signals in the emotion recognition context. A major challenge in EEG-based emotion recognition is that EEG recordings exhibit varying distributions for different people as well as for the same person at different time instances. This nonstationary nature of EEG limits the accuracy of it when subject independency is the priority. The aim of this study is to increase the subject-independent recognition accuracy by exploiting pretrained state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. Unlike similar studies that extract spectral band power features from the EEG readings, raw EEG data is used in our study after applying windowing, pre-adjustments and normalization. Removing manual feature extraction from the training system overcomes the risk of eliminating hidden features in the raw data and helps leverage the deep neural network’s power in uncovering unknown features. To improve the classification accuracy further, a median filter is used to eliminate the false detections along a prediction interval of emotions. This method yields a mean cross-subject accuracy of 86.56% and 78.34% on the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Emotion EEG Dataset (SEED) for two and three emotion classes, respectively. It also yields a mean cross-subject accuracy of 72.81% on the Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological Signals (DEAP) and 81.8% on the Loughborough University Multimodal Emotion Dataset (LUMED) for two emotion classes. Furthermore, the recognition model that has been trained using the SEED dataset was tested with the DEAP dataset, which yields a mean prediction accuracy of 58.1% across all subjects and emotion classes. Results show that in terms of classification accuracy, the proposed approach is superior to, or on par with, the reference subject-independent EEG emotion recognition studies identified in literature and has limited complexity due to the elimination of the need for feature extraction.<br

EEG-based emotion recognition via fast and robust feature smoothing

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