Re: draft RE my action item (was Re: Agenda for phone meeting 31 January 2008)

Bill,

I agree with Ian that the current exercise, from my point of view, was 
about getting a "feel" of the "syntax" associated with various 
representations, not about immediately designing a "meaningful" 
structure within any given framework. The various ad hoc choices in the 
other examples illustrate that, and raise interesting questions worth 
discussion.

On the other hand, you are asking very interesting and relevant 
questions, so let me briefly reply.

Bill Jarrold schrieb:
> How in the world will we deal with all these differences of opinion?
> With changes in the field as affective science evolves....The key to
> me seems to be to (a) allow people to continue to debate what is the
> correct taxoomony and yet (b) still let people who need to use some
> term set at least make some headway and leverage *something* without
> having to wait for the people in (a) to reach conssensus.  

Exactly. So even though there is no chance to have a unified emotion 
theory any time soon, there is *some* consensus among *some* people, and 
we should provide a flexible mechanism for encoding that, without 
deciding for a camp ourselves. And if engineers decide they need to 
build bridges between camps that theorists would never endorse as valid, 
but for which there is an application need, we should let them. 
Actually, maybe, just maybe, the experience of what works and what 
doesn't in practice can inform theory...!

> Okay, I have provisionally assumed that allowing for multiple
> taxonomies (or even more complex -- multiple theories) is a requirement.

Yes. BUT in order to avoid complete chaos, there should be clearly 
defined ways of saying that one is "using Ekman's six basic emotions" or 
"the concept of mood dimensions as in Gebhard 2007" or "the distinction 
of types of affective states as in Scherer 2000" etc. So the idea is, 
let them use what they want *if* they make their choices explicit.

In EARL, we did this using a separate namespace for each configuration 
of annotations [1] -- not very modular (you could not simply refer in 
the document itself to the various label sets you were using, but needed 
to create a new Schema for every specific combination), but OK it was a 
start.

[1] http://emotion-research.net/earl/schemadesign#SchemaDialects

> TECHNICAL QUESTION: Any sense as to what kinds of tools
> might actually do that markup? Something pre-existing? protege?
> Something custom created?)

This is another really good question. We should talk about it. For 
machine recognition and generation, of course both the generation and 
the interpretation of the markup will be done by software components; 
but for manual labelling of data, what would one use? I know that for 
annotating videos, colleagues in Paris and Belfast are using Anvil [2], 
but that labelling tool has its own data formats, so getting an Emotion 
Markup from Anvil may need effort.

[2] http://www.anvil-software.de/

> Given the potential ugliness of namespaces perhaps we just need to
> have everything be in one namespace but use different owl files.

One important aspect is extensibility: we will not be able to preview 
all the sets of emotion categories, for example, that our users will 
want to use in their annotations. Often, these are quite 
application-specific, so users will want to "plug in" their own label set.

> At first blush, my approach is to have a representation of that object
> that we wish to makup.  Let me consider a specific real world case
> that I hope is a decent exemplar of Alexander's use case?
> Specifically I consider the point in Macbeth where Lady M says "Out
> damn spot!"  How might I go aobut ontologizing this.
> 
> I will first do this diagramatically to give as easily grokable
> description.  Then, hopefully, if time, will spell out the owl --
> which I lament is not very human readable.
> 
> Now, some diagramatic notation conventions:
> 
> Slots or relations are have a name that begins with a lowercase
> character (e.g. annotationTextIs)
> 
> Individuals (as opposed to classes) have a name that begins with a *
> followed by an uppercase character, e.g. *Alexander.
> 
> Primitive Data types (e.g. strings, time instants, numbers, booleans)
> are put in quotations.
> 
> *"Out damn spot!"
>  ^
>  |
>  annotationTextIs
>  |
> *Annotation24601
>  |
>  |--- annotationAuthor: *Alexander
>  |
>  |--- annotationTime: "2008-01-23T13:36"
>  |
>  |-- annotatedEmotion: *FearInstance35
>     |
>     |--instanceOf: *DC-2006-Fear
>     |
>     |--valence: "-0.8"
>     |
>     |--
> <sstopping here>

So if I understand you correctly, this is a stub of a graphical 
representation of an OWL document containing a concrete emotion 
annotation. "annotatedEmotion" is where the Emotion Markup really 
starts, right? The line from *"Out damn spot!" to *Annotation24601 is an 
answer to our requirement 'Links to the "rest of the world": Links to 
media'.

I am not very firm in ontological theory, so I am uncertain about the 
status of *FearInstance35: is this the specific emotion annotated in 
this case, never to be used again, or is it an "instance" in the sense 
that it is one particular kind of combination of a categorical label and 
other annotations?

Also, the way that you structure it, *FearInstance35 being an 
"instanceOf" *DC-2006-Fear, doesn't that imply you are giving more 
fundamental reality to the categorical representation compared to the 
"valence" dimension (which is not, in the example, derived from any 
particular theory)?

So much for now, best regards,
Marc

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE
Chair W3C Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group 
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion
Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de
Project Leader DFG project PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque

Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Email: schroed@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

Received on Wednesday, 30 January 2008 15:23:53 UTC