The emotion reasoning platform discussed in this paper has developed over the course of several years and currently includes, besides the underlying emotion engine (described briefly below), a speech recognition package which is able to discriminate at least some broad categories of emotion content; a music indexing and playback mechanism allowing virtually instant access to hundreds of hours of midi format music used to aid in the expression of emotion; a schematic representation of approximately 70 emotion faces; and a text-to-speech module for expressing dynamically constructed text, including a minimal amount of emotion inflection (through runtime control of speed, pitch and volume).
In the spirit of one of this year's conference themes, we view this project as being in the ``platform and concept hacking'' stage, wherein we explore what plausible expectations we may make with respect to a shallow model of emotion and personality representation on the computer. Findings are strictly preliminary, and yet enough work has been done to raise what we feel to be some interesting questions.
What we refer to as ``emotions'' in this paper arise naturally in many human social situations as a byproduct of goal-driven and principled (or unprincipled) behavior, simple preferences, and relationships with other agents. This applies to many situations that one would not ordinary refer to as emotional: a social agent becoming annoyed with someone who is wasting her time (a mild case of that person violating the agent's principle of social efficiency thus blocking of one of the agent's goals through the reduction of a valued resource, time), enjoying a piece of music because it is appealing (liking it, through a simple, unjustifiable, preference), and so forth. We limit our consideration of emotion states, and intensities, to states and intensities similar to what Frijda et al. [Frijda et al. 1992] were describing when they referred to the overall felt intensity of an emotion as comprising ``whatever would go into the generation of a response to a global question such as this: `How intense was your emotional reaction to situation S?''' Physical manifestations, neural processes, and much about duration are not included in the model.
Lastly, we suggest that the representation of human emotion and personality in a social context, using AI techniques, is long overdue as a major area of study (c.f. [Norman1980]). It is our belief that for each of the issues raised below, enough background work has been done that partial solutions are within the grasp of the AI community.