This volume maps the watershed areas between two 'holy grails' of computer science: the identification and interpretation of affect – including sentiment and mood. The expression of sentiment and mood involves the use of metaphors, especially in emotive situations. Affect computing is rooted in hermeneutics, philosophy, political science and sociology, and is now a key area of research in computer science. The 24/7 news sites and blogs facilitate the expression and shaping of opinion locally and globally. Sentiment analysis, based on text and data mining, is being used in the looking at news and blogs for purposes as diverse as: brand management, film reviews, financial market analysis and prediction, homeland security. There are systems that learn how sentiments are articulated. This work draws on, and informs, research in fields as varied as artificial intelligence, especially reasoning and machine learning, corpus-based information extraction, linguistics, and psychology.

Sentiment analysis research has been started long back and recently it is one of the demanding research topics. Research activities on Sentiment Analysis in natural language texts and other media are gaining ground with full swing. But, till date, no concise set of factors has been yet defined that really affects how writers’ sentiment i.e., broadly human sentiment is expressed, perceived, recognized, processed, and interpreted in natural languages. The existing reported solutions or the available systems are still far from perfect or fail to meet the satisfaction level of the end users. The reasons may be that there are dozens of conceptual rules that govern sentiment and even there are possibly unlimited clues that can convey these concepts from realization to practical implementation. Therefore, the main aim of this book is to provide a feasible research platform to our ambitious researchers towards developing the practical solutions that will be indeed beneficial for our society, business and future researches as well.

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more—that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human emotions, requirements for emotionally intelligent computers, applications of affective computing, and moral and social questions raised by the technology. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers. Although this material is more technical than that in Part 1, the author has kept it less technical than typical scientific publications in order to make it accessible to newcomers. Topics in Part 2 include signal-based representations of emotions, human affect recognition as a pattern recognition and learning problem, recent and ongoing efforts to build models of emotion for synthesizing emotions in computers, and the new application area of affective wearable computers.

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2007. The 57 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 33 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective facial expression and recognition, affective body expression and recognition, affective speech processing, affective text and dialogue processing, recognising affect using physiological measures, computational models of emotion and theoretical foundations, affective databases, annotations, tools and languages, affective sound and music processing, affective interactions: systems and applications, as well as evaluating affective systems.

In this book common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques is exploited on two common sense knowledge bases to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data.

This volume presents a knowledge-based approach to concept-level sentiment analysis at the crossroads between affective computing, information extraction, and common-sense computing, which exploits both computer and social sciences to better interpret and process information on the Web. Concept-level sentiment analysis goes beyond a mere word-level analysis of text in order to enable a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data, in potentially any domain. Readers will discover the following key novelties, that make this approach so unique and avant-garde, being reviewed and discussed: • Sentic Computing's multi-disciplinary approach to sentiment analysis-evidenced by the concomitant use of AI, linguistics and psychology for knowledge representation and inference • Sentic Computing's shift from syntax to semantics-enabled by the adoption of the bag-of-concepts model instead of simply counting word co-occurrence frequencies in text • Sentic Computing's shift from statistics to linguistics-implemented by allowing sentiments to flow from concept to concept based on the dependency relation between clauses This volume is the first in the Series Socio-Affective Computing edited by Dr Amir Hussain and Dr Erik Cambria and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socially intelligent, affective and multimodal human-machine interaction and systems.

The aim of Sentiment Analysis is to define automatic tools able to extract subjective information from texts in natural language, such as opinions and sentiments, in order to create structured and actionable knowledge to be used by either a decision support system or a decision maker. Sentiment analysis has gained even more value with the advent and growth of social networking. Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks begins with an overview of the latest research trends in the field. It then discusses the sociological and psychological processes underling social network interactions. The book explores both semantic and machine learning models and methods that address context-dependent and dynamic text in online social networks, showing how social network streams pose numerous challenges due to their large-scale, short, noisy, context- dependent and dynamic nature. Further, this volume: - Takes an interdisciplinary approach from a number of computing domains, including natural language processing, machine learning, big data, and statistical methodologies - Provides insights into opinion spamming, reasoning, and social network analysis - Shows how to apply sentiment analysis tools for a particular application and domain, and how to get the best results for understanding the consequences - Serves as a one-stop reference for the state-of-the-art in social media analytics - Takes an interdisciplinary approach from a number of computing domains, including natural language processing, big data, and statistical methodologies - Provides insights into opinion spamming, reasoning, and social network mining - Shows how to apply opinion mining tools for a particular application and domain, and how to get the best results for understanding the consequences - Serves as a one-stop reference for the state-of-the-art in social media analytics

The natural interaction ability between human and machine mainly involves human-machine dialogue ability, multi-modal sentiment analysis ability, human-machine cooperation ability, and so on. To enable intelligent computers to have multi-modal sentiment analysis ability, it is necessary to equip them with a strong multi-modal sentiment analysis ability during the process of human-computer interaction. This is one of the key technologies for efficient and intelligent human-computer interaction. This book focuses on the research and practical applications of multi-modal sentiment analysis for human-computer natural interaction, particularly in the areas of multi-modal information feature representation, feature fusion, and sentiment classification. Multi-modal sentiment analysis for natural interaction is a comprehensive research field that involves the integration of natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, pattern recognition, algorithm, robot intelligent system, human-computer interaction, etc. Currently, research on multi-modal sentiment analysis in natural interaction is developing rapidly. This book can be used as a professional textbook in the fields of natural interaction, intelligent question answering (customer service), natural language processing, human-computer interaction, etc. It can also serve as an important reference book for the development of systems and products in intelligent robots, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and related fields.

The objective of this monograph is to improve the performance of the sentiment analysis model by incorporating the semantic, syntactic and common-sense knowledge. This book proposes a novel semantic concept extraction approach that uses dependency relations between words to extract the features from the text. Proposed approach combines the semantic and common-sense knowledge for the better understanding of the text. In addition, the book aims to extract prominent features from the unstructured text by eliminating the noisy, irrelevant and redundant features. Readers will also discover a proposed method for efficient dimensionality reduction to alleviate the data sparseness problem being faced by machine learning model. Authors pay attention to the four main findings of the book : -Performance of the sentiment analysis can be improved by reducing the redundancy among the features. Experimental results show that minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) feature selection technique improves the performance of the sentiment analysis by eliminating the redundant features. - Boolean Multinomial Naive Bayes (BMNB) machine learning algorithm with mRMR feature selection technique performs better than Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for sentiment analysis. - The problem of data sparseness is alleviated by semantic clustering of features, which in turn improves the performance of the sentiment analysis. - Semantic relations among the words in the text have useful cues for sentiment analysis. Common-sense knowledge in form of ConceptNet ontology acquires knowledge, which provides a better understanding of the text that improves the performance of the sentiment analysis.