[humaine news] W3C to work on web standard for Emotion Markup

[Marc Schroeder]

The World Wide Web's Multimodal Interaction working group has been 
officially recharted to work on developing a W3C Recommendation for an 
Emotion Markup Language.

The aims are described in the Multimodal Interaction group's charter:

     EmotionML will provide representations of emotions and related 
states for technological applications. The possible use cases include:

         * Opinion mining / sentiment analysis in Web 2.0, to 
automatically track customer's attitude regarding a product across blogs 
(e.g., Sentimine, Jodange)
         * Affective monitoring, such as "lie detection" using a 
polygraph, fear detection for surveillance purposes or using wearable 
sensors to test customer satisfaction
         * Character design and control for games and virtual worlds 
(e.g., Emotion AI Engine, MystiTool for Second Life)
         * Social robots, such as guide robots engaging with visitors 
(e.g., Fujitsu "enon", BlueBotics RoboX)
         * Expressive speech synthesis, generating synthetic speech with 
different emotions, such as happy or sad, friendly or apologetic (e.g., 
Loquendo TTS, IBM Research TTS)
         * Emotion recognition (e.g., for spotting angry customers in 
speech dialog systems)
         * Support for people with disabilities, such as educational 
programs for people with autism

     Some of those applications already exist on the market, while 
others only as research prototypes. However, development is very fast in 
this area.

     Notation for emotions is needed to be standardized, because 
emotions are conceptually clear in the scientific literature but 
engineers tend to get it wrong when they try to create actual 
applications. W3C can help avoid fragmentation of emotion-related 
technology by providing a scientifically well-founded format that can be 
generally used.

     Naturalistic, interactive multimodal applications need to account 
for emotions and related human factors. EmotionML will serve as a 
"plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual 
annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states 
from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.

     The specification of EmotionML can build on previous work of the 
Emotion Incubator Group and the Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group. 
These groups have identified use cases and requirements, and have 
drafted elements of a specification for a core set of requirements. The 
work of those groups have shown that there is a high degree of consensus 
already on how to represent emotions, so the Multimodal Interaction 
Working Group thinks a standardization looks feasible.

     The following design goals motivate the specification:

        1. Plug-in language. It should be possible to use EmotionML 
markup in different contexts where emotions and related states need to 
be represented.
        2. Scientific validity. Representations should reflect the state 
of knowledge in the affective sciences to the extent that these are 
practically suitable and relevant, and provide support for 
state-of-the-art emotion models.
        3. Controlled extensibility. As there are no agreed vocabularies 
for representing emotions, it must be possible to use custom emotion 
vocabularies. Independently of the vocabularies used, the structure of 
EmotionML documents should stay the same. It should be possible to 
validate documents independently of the choice of vocabularies, 
including the verification that vocabularies are correctly used.

     The EmotionML task in the Multimodal Interaction Working Group will 
continue the work of the Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group in the 
Recommendation Track, and aims to produce a W3C Recommendation. Due to 
the previous work, we expect to have a First Public Working Draft within 
the first three months of this charter, and to make further rapid 
progress after that.

Experts in the area of emotion-related technology are welcome to join 
the effort. For informal inquiries, get in touch with Marc Schröder. In 
order to formally join the group, see here: http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/#join

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de

Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Email: schroed at dfki.de
Phone: +49-681-302-5303
Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 
Saarbrücken, Germany
--
Official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313