Re: A paper on progress from EMOXG at Emotion&Computing workshop

Hi Catherine,

OK, I take your point about that.  But in that case, how can we make a
principled argument for including action tendencies while excluding all
other motor output such as facial expression, vocal signals, gesture, etc?

After all, action tendencies are equally complex, probably more complex than
all other motor output combined.  Conversely, the other forms of motor
output are just the categories you have mentioned - facial expressions,
vocal quality, gesture and body quality - and no more.

So, in my view, we either exclude all motor output or make some kind of
provision to include all forms of motor output.

Note that for robots, unlike humans, the expression of emotions need not
involve motor output - it could involve flashing lights, for example.

Let's say we are observing a robot flash red lights.  We think that this
means that it is sad, but we are not sure.  If we have scope in EML for
encoding this signal, alongside the inferred emotion, then if we discover
later that red lights mean anger, we can easily correct the encoding.
Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for an animal wagging its tail.

Best wishes,

Dylan

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Catherine Pelachaud <
pelachaud@iut.univ-paris8.fr> wrote:

>
> Hi Dylan,
>
> The problem of including facial expression into the language is the
> exponentiality of things to include: vocal description, emotional gesture,
> body quality... The quantity of information to characterize bodily
> expressions of emotions can be very vast. Including them will explode the
> language!
> Best,
>
> Catherine
>
> Dylan Evans a écrit :
>
>  Hi Catherine,
>>
>> The precise details of how to encode, say, a smile or a frown could be
>> left to a standard like MPEG-4 or FACS.  But this would only handle
>> human-like facial expressions.  It wouldn't handle robot-specific
>> expressions such as moving ears, flashing lights, etc.  So we could
>> have some high-level feature in which people could specify the kind of
>> expression associated with a given emotion (eg. smile/flash blue
>> lights).  If this was a humanlike facial expression, the details could
>> then be handled by MPEG-4 or FACS (which would take "smile" as input
>> and transform that into specific facial action units etc.).  That's
>> assuming we are interested in the generation of facial expressions in
>> artificial agents.  But we might want to include a facial expression
>> feature in EML so that people or computers who are tagging video data
>> can say what made them infer a particular emotion category without
>> having to go into the details of FACS.
>>
>> I'm just thinking out loud, but it only struck me today that it
>> appears rather inconsistent to include a category for behaviour
>> tendency but not for facial expression.  Almost all the proposed core
>> features deal with what we might call internal aspects of emotion -
>> type of emotion, emotion intensity, appraisal etc.  If we wanted EML
>> to handle just these internal aspects, and let other standards like
>> FACS etc handle external aspects, then it is strange to include an
>> external aspect like action tendency in the current requirements list.
>>  On the other hand, if we include action tendency in the list, it is
>> strange to exclude other external aspects such as facial expression.
>>
>> Does anyone else feel perplexed by this, or am I on the wrong track?
>>
>> Dylan
>>
>> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Catherine Pelachaud
>> <pelachaud@iut.univ-paris8.fr> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Expression does now seem odd but again it is very implementational, what
>>>> did we decide on this, my memory is vague?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> From what I can recall, it has been decided that any visual and acoustic
>>> expression of emotion be specified outside of EMOXG. there exist already
>>> some standards, such as MPEG-4, H-anim, or widely used annotation scheme,
>>> FACS. In the ECA community there are quite a lot of work to develop a
>>> 'standard' representation language for behaviors (and another one for
>>> communicative functions).
>>>
>>> best,
>>> Catherine
>>>
>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>>
>>>> Ian
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed May 28 2:48 PM , "Dylan Evans" <evansd66@googlemail.com> sent:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I'd be happy to contribute a short discussion of core 5: action
>>>> tendencies, unless Bill or Ian wants to do this (it was either Bill or
>>>> Ian who suggested that this be part of the core, I think). There are
>>>> some interesting difficulties with this requirement. One of them
>>>> concerns the level at which behaviour should be specified; another is
>>>> the dependency of action tendencies on the effectors available to the
>>>> system, which have huge variation. Another is the distinction between
>>>> action tendencies and expression. For example, is the movement of
>>>> wizkid's undefinedheadundefined an action tendency or an expression? See
>>>>
>>>> http://www.wizkid.info/en/page12.xml
>>>>
>>>> Come to think of it, we don't have a category for expressions at all
>>>> in the core requirements. That seems really odd to me now, given that
>>>> we have a category for action tendencies. Some robots express
>>>> emotions by means of different coloured lights, while others do so by
>>>> means of moving their ears, for example, so it would be good to enable
>>>> robotic designers the means to register these possibilities in the
>>>> EML.
>>>>
>>>> Dylan
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 8:59 AM, Marc Schroeder wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> this email goes to all those who have participated in the preparation
>>>>> and
>>>>> discussion of the prioritised requirements document [1].
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined I think it would be nice to write a short paper on the
>>>> progress
>>>> we have made
>>>> undefined in the EMOXG, for the workshop undefinedEmotion and
>>>> Computingundefined [2] at the KI2008
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> conference. That is a small workshop aimed at promoting discussion, so
>>>>> bringing in our "2 cents" seems worthwhile.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined Deadline is 6 June; target length is 4-8 pages in Springer
>>>> LNCS
>>>> format, i.e.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> not much space. Tentative title:
>>>>>
>>>>> "What is most important for an Emotion Markup Language?"
>>>>>
>>>>> The idea would be to report on the result of our priority discussions.
>>>>> A
>>>>> main section could describe the mandatory requirements in some detail
>>>>> and
>>>>> the optional ones in less detail; a shorter discussion section could
>>>>> point
>>>>> out some of the issues that were raised on the mailing list (scales,
>>>>> intention for state-of-the-art or beyond).
>>>>>
>>>>> Who would be willing to help write the paper? Please also suggest which
>>>>> section you could contribute to. Active participation would be a
>>>>> precondition for being listed as an author, and we should try to find
>>>>> an
>>>>> order of authorship that fairly represents the amount of participation
>>>>> (in
>>>>> the previous discussion and in paper writing).
>>>>>
>>>>> Best wishes,
>>>>> Marc
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-requirements
>>>> undefined [2] http://www.emotion-and-computing.de/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
>>>> undefined Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE
>>>> http://www.semaine-project.eu
>>>> undefined Chair W3C Emotion ML Incubator
>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion
>>>> undefined Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
>>>> undefined Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de
>>>> undefined Project Leader DFG project PAVOQUE
>>>> http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque
>>>>      undefined Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed<http://www.dfki.de/%7Eschroed>
>>>> undefined Email: schroed@dfki.de
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Phone: +49-681-302-5303
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3,
>>>> D-66123
>>>> undefined Saarbrücken, Germany
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> undefined Official DFKI coordinates:
>>>> undefined Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
>>>> undefined Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
>>>> undefined Geschaeftsfuehrung:
>>>> undefined Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
>>>> undefined Dr. Walter Olthoff
>>>> undefined Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
>>>> undefined Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> --------------------------------------------
>>>> Dr. Dylan Evans
>>>> Senior Research Scientist
>>>> Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C)
>>>> University College Cork,
>>>> Cork, Ireland.
>>>>
>>>> Tel: +353-(0)21-4255408
>>>> Fax: +353-(0)21-4255424
>>>> Email: d.evans@4c.ucc.ie
>>>> Web: http://4c.ucc.ie
>>>> http://www.dylan.org.uk
>>>> --------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> -------
>>>> Sent from Orgoo.com <http://www.orgoo.com/Home?referrer=1> - Your
>>>> communications cockpit!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>


-- 
--------------------------------------------
Dr. Dylan Evans
Senior Research Scientist
Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C)
University College Cork,
Cork, Ireland.

Tel: +353-(0)21-4255408
Fax: +353-(0)21-4255424
Email: d.evans@4c.ucc.ie
Web: http://4c.ucc.ie
http://www.dylan.org.uk
--------------------------------------------