Re: [EMOXG] Deliverable report published as first draft: Emotion Markup Language: Requirements with Priorities

Hi Marc,

Thanks for putting this together.  Looks great.  I have just a few  
comments.  Although there have been other discussion of your draft in  
recent days, that discussion seems unrelated to my comments so,  
rather than replying to them, I am replying directly to your message.

On Apr 29, 2008, at 2:33 AM, Marc Schroeder wrote:

>
> Dear all,
>
> the last few weeks have shown little visible activity in this  
> group, but Felix Burkhardt and I have been working on the  
> requirements document that is intended to reflect the outcomes of  
> our discussions during the last few months, regarding mandatory vs.  
> optional requirements for an emotion markup language.
>
> So here it is, as a first draft, for you to comment upon:
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-requirements-20080429/
>
> I kindly request that any comments to this document should be sent  
> to this list. I suggest that we allow for
>
> 	two weeks, i.e. until 13 May 2008
>
> time for commenting on this draft. Comments expressed during this  
> time can be discussed and, if agreement can be reached, will be  
> taken on board. If no objections from group members are raised, the  
> report will be considered final by the above date.

My comments have to do with requirement for expressing amounts.   
These comments apply to Core 6 and Core 8.

Core 6 says "The emotion markup must provide an emotion attribute to  
represent the intensity of an emotion.  The intensity is a dimension  
with values in [0,1]"

Core 8 says "The emotion markup shuld provide emotion attributes to  
represent the various kinds of regulation.  The value of these  
attributes should be in [0,1]."

I consider a value range of [0,1] to be a unitless value range.

This is good.  But I think we want to give annotators more options  
for these values than just [0,1].

One reason that merely [0,1] may not be enough is this: Is it really  
true that there is a maximum amount of a particular emotion?  A  
maximal amount of experiencable joy?  How depressing ! (-:  Having a  
fixed max or min seems to be taking a theoretical stand that might be  
quite valid for some theories but not all theories.

Okay, so, the basic idea is that we should allow additional means to  
express intensity. In particular we should allow [a] qualitative  
values [b] qualitative values relative to a particular class [c] a  
partial ordering of values [d] unit based values.

Do we need [a] AND [b] AND [c] AND [d]?  I don't know.  Lets consider  
each one as a separate amendment.  Maybe we'll want just [a] but not  
[b], [c], or [d].  Let's discuss which if any of these additions we  
want.

I will now describe each of [a], [b], [c] and [d] and try to provide  
an evocative use case (expressed in English)

[a] Qualitative Values

In a mushy area sometimes all we can assert are values like high,  
medium or low.  E.g.  "Fred felt a lot of anger."  How much is a  
lot?  .7, .8, .9?  The value can be quite arbitrary.  Thus we want a  
set of qualitative values such as "high", "medium", "low", "very  
high", "very low" etc......[Sure, a given researcher should be able  
map high to .9 or 0.77 if he decides to later on down the road in his/ 
her markup activity.  So, there would also need to be vocab to  
optionally map such vocab to actual numbers.]

[b] qualitative values relative to a particular class

This is basically [a] except you can relativize the qualitative value
to a particular class.  E.g.

"Fred felt a low amount of anger for a New Yorker"

"Joe felt a low amount of love for a California Hippie During the
Summer of Love"

"Subject24601 expressed a medium amount of surprise for Sample Set 35
As Rated by Graduate Student Joe"

We would do this kind of thing (i.e. [a] or [b]) all the time with a  
knowledge rep /
ontology system such as Cyc or the Knowledge Machine (and the
Component Library associated with it) [references happily furnished if
you ask].  For example the express the concept that "Fred is short for
a basketball player and tall for a pigmy." (We'll really we'd say that
the value of the height property for Fred was Low with respect to the
class Basketball Player but High for the class Pigmy".  It stands to  
reason that if this kind of scheme has been developed for these  
projects for quantities like height we should also do it for emotion.

[Of course, the user of Cyc or KM can specify stuff like "Short for a  
Basketball Player is 5 feet 9 inches." as well]

[c] a partial ordering of values

The idea here is we want to handle cases where we do not wish to nail
down any particular value for an emotion intensity but do wish to say
that one value is greater or less than another.

E.g. "The level of Fred's happiness today is higher than it was
yesterday."

[d] unit based values.

I don't know of any scheme for quantifying emotion intensity on some
sort of scale.  However, we should allow (and encourage) researchers
who have devised such a scale to use use it.  This scheme would allow
the annotator to associate a value with a particular set of units of  
his/her
chosing."

E.g. "Using his new instrument, Joe the Scientist measured Fred's
happiness as 75 felicitons."

  "Using her new instrument, Sally the Scientist measured  
Fred'shappiness
as 3.2 kilofelicitons."

  "Using her new instrument, Jing the Scientist measured Fran's pride  
as -1.98 shameitrons."

Well, the examples might sound a little silly, but hopefully they  
illustrate the need for what
I am making the case for.  We can make the examples more sober and  
scientifically plausible in
due course as necessary.

Hope this helps,

Bill

>
>
> This document gives us a pretty concrete starting point for  
> thinking about syntax now. I believe we should come to a conclusion  
> about which format to use (XML vs. RDF vs. OWL) in May, and start  
> drafting a syntax specification from June onwards.
>
> Does this sound reasonable? Let's get back to work! :-)
>
> Best regards,
> Marc
>
>
> -- 
> Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
> Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
> Chair W3C Emotion ML Incubator 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, 7 May 2008 05:00:31 UTC