W3C to work on web standard for Emotion Markup

The aims are described in the Multimodal Interaction group's charter:

EmotionML will provide representations of emotions and related states for technological applications. The possible use cases include:

• Opinion mining / sentiment analysis in Web 2.0, to automatically track customer's attitude regarding a product across blogs (e.g., Sentimine, Jodange)
• Affective monitoring, such as "lie detection" using a polygraph, fear detection for surveillance purposes or using wearable sensors to test customer satisfaction
• Character design and control for games and virtual worlds (e.g., Emotion AI Engine, MystiTool for Second Life)
• Social robots, such as guide robots engaging with visitors (e.g., Fujitsu "enon", BlueBotics RoboX)
• Expressive speech synthesis, generating synthetic speech with different emotions, such as happy or sad, friendly or apologetic (e.g., Loquendo TTS, IBM Research TTS)
• Emotion recognition (e.g., for spotting angry customers in speech dialog systems)
• Support for people with disabilities, such as educational programs for people with autism

Some of those applications already exist on the market, while others only as research prototypes. However, development is very fast in this area.

Notation for emotions is needed to be standardized, because emotions are conceptually clear in the scientific literature but engineers tend to get it wrong when they try to create actual applications. W3C can help avoid fragmentation of emotion-related technology by providing a scientifically well-founded format that can be generally used.

Naturalistic, interactive multimodal applications need to account for emotions and related human factors. EmotionML will serve as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.

The specification of EmotionML can build on previous work of the Emotion Incubator Group and the Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group. These groups have identified use cases and requirements, and have drafted elements of a specification for a core set of requirements. The work of those groups have shown that there is a high degree of consensus already on how to represent emotions, so the Multimodal Interaction Working Group thinks a standardization looks feasible.

The following design goals motivate the specification:

1. Plug-in language. It should be possible to use EmotionML markup in different contexts where emotions and related states need to be represented.
2. Scientific validity. Representations should reflect the state of knowledge in the affective sciences to the extent that these are practically suitable and relevant, and provide support for state-of-the-art emotion models.
3. Controlled extensibility. As there are no agreed vocabularies for representing emotions, it must be possible to use custom emotion vocabularies. Independently of the vocabularies used, the structure of EmotionML documents should stay the same. It should be possible to validate documents independently of the choice of vocabularies, including the verification that vocabularies are correctly used.

The EmotionML task in the Multimodal Interaction Working Group will continue the work of the Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group in the Recommendation Track, and aims to produce a W3C Recommendation. Due to the previous work, we expect to have a First Public Working Draft within the first three months of this charter, and to make further rapid progress after that.

Experts in the area of emotion-related technology are welcome to join the effort. For informal inquiries, get in touch with Marc Schröder. In order to formally join the group, see here: http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/#join