Emotion: Corpora for Research on Emotion and Affect

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              Third call for Papers

        International Workshop on EMOTION:
     CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT

                 23 May 2006

        Half day workshop: afternoon session

****Submission Deadline: postponed to 24th February *******

             In Association with

 5th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE
          RESOURCES AND EVALUATION

        LREC2006 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/

                Main Conference
               24-25-26 May 2006

       Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center
               Genoa - Italy
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Summary of the call for participation
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Papers are invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and
affect.  They may cover one or more of the following topics. What kind of
theory of emotion is needed to guide the area? What are appropriate
sources? Which modalities should be considered, in which combinations?
What are the realistic constraints on recording quality? How can the
emotional content of episodes be described within a corpus? Which
emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how? How should
access to corpora be provided? What level of standardisation is
appropriate? How can quality be assessed? Ethical issues in database
development and access.The organisers of this workshop proposal are
members of the Humaine NoE, and have a main role in its databases WP.
They will be able to reach researchers in databases of emotions both
through the resulting contacts and through the HUMAINE portal.

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MOTIVATIONS
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This decade has seen an upsurge of interest in systems that register emotion
 (in a broad sense) and react appropriately to it. Emotion corpora are
 fundamental both to developing sound conceptual analyses and to training
these 'emotion-oriented systems' at all levels - to recognise user emotion,
to express appropriate emotions, to anticipate how a user in one state might
 respond to a possible kind of reaction from the machine, etc. Corpora have
only begun to grow with the area, and much work is needed before they provide
 a sound foundation.

The HUMAINE network of excellence (http://emotion-research.net/) has brought
together several groups working on the development of databases, and the
workshop aims to broaden the interaction that has developed in that context.

Papers are expected to address some of the following areas of concern.

Many models of emotion are common enough to affect the way teams go about
 collecting and describing emotion-related data. Some which are familiar
 and intuitively appealing are known to be problematic, either because
they are theoretically dated or because they do not transfer to practical
 contexts. To evaluate the resources that are already available, and to
construct valid new corpora, research teams need some sense of the models
that are relevant to the area.

What are appropriate sources?

In the area of emotion, some of the hardest problems involve acquiring
basic data. Four main types of source are commonly used. Their potential
contributions and limitations need to be understood.

Acted:

Many widely used emotion databases consist of acted representations
 of emotion (which may or may not be generated by actors). The method is
extremely convenient, but it is known that systems trained on acted material
 may not transfer to natural emotion. It has to be established what kind
 of acted material is useful for what purposes.

Application-driven:

A growing range of databases are derived from specific
 applications (eg call centres). These are ideal for some purposes, but
access is often restricted for commercial reasons, and it is highly
desirable to have more generic material that could underpin work on a
wide range of applications.

General naturalistic:

Data that is representative of everyday life is an
attractive ideal, but very difficult to collect. Making
special-purpose recordings of everyday life is a massive
task, with the risk that recording changes behaviour.  Several
 teams have used material from broadcasts, radio & TV (talk shows,
 current affairs). That raises issues of access, signal quality,
 and genuineness.

Induction:

 A natural ideal is to induce emotion of appropriate kinds under
 appropriate circumstances. Satisfying induction is an elusive ideal,
but new techniques are gradually emerging.

Which modalities should be considered, in which combinations?

Emotion is reflected in multiple channels - linguistic content,
paralinguistic expression, facial expression, eye movement, gesture,
gross body movement, manner of action, visceral changes
(heart rate, etc), brain states (eeg activity, etc). The obvious ideal
is to cover all simultaneously, but that is impractical - and it is
not clear how often all the channels are actually active. The community
needs to clarify the relative usefulness of the channels, and of
strategies for sampling combinations.

What are the realistic constraints on recording quality?

Naturalism tends to be at odds with ease of signal processing.
Understanding of the relevant tradeoffs needs to be reached. That
includes awareness of different applications (high quality may not be
crucial for defining the expressive behaviours a virtual agent should
 show) and of timescale for solving particular signal processing issues
 (eg recovering features from images of heads in arbitrary poses).

How can the emotional content of episodes be described within a corpus?

Several broad approaches exist to transcribing the emotional content of
an excerpt - using everyday emotion words; using dimensional descriptions
rooted in psychological theory (intensity, evaluation, activation, power);
using concepts from appraisal theory (perceived goal-conduciveness of a
development, potential for coping, etc). These are being developed in
specific ways driven by goals such as elegance, inter-rater reliability,
faithfulness to the subtlety of everyday emotion, relevance to agent
decisions, etc.  There seems to be a real prospect of achieving an
agreed synthesis of the main schemes.

Which emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how?

Corresponding to each emotion-related channel is one or more sets of
signs relevant to conveying emotion. For instance, paralinguistic signs
exist at the level of basic contours - F0, intensity, formant-related
properties, and so on; at the level of linguistic features of prosody
(such as 'tones and breaks' in TOBI); and at more global levels
(tune shapes, repetitions, etc). Even for speech, inventories of
relevant signs need to be developed, and for channels such as idle
body movements, few descriptive systems have been proposed.
Few teams have the expertise to annotate many types of sign competently,
 and so it is important to establish ways of allowing teams that do have
 the expertise to make their annotations available as part of a database.
 Mainly for lower level features, automatic transcription methods exist,
and their role needs to be clarified. In particular, tests of their
reliability are needed, and that depends on data that can serve as a
reference.

How should access to corpora be provided?

Practically, it is clearly important to find ways of establishing a
sustainable and easily expandable multi-modal database for any sorts
of emotion-related data; to develop tools for easily importing and
exporting data; to develop analysis tools and application programmers
interfaces to work on the stored data and meta-data; and to provide
ready access to existing data from previous projects. Approaches to
those goals need to be defined.

What level of standardisation is appropriate?

Standardisation is clearly desirable in the long term, but with so many
 basic issues unresolved, it is not clear where real consensus can be
 achieved and where it is better to encourage competition among
different options.

How can quality be assessed?

It is clear that some existing corpora should not be used for serious
research. The problem is to develop quality assurance procedures that
can direct potential users toward those which can.

Ethical issues in database development and access

Corpora that show people behaving emotionally are very likely to raise
ethical issues - not simply about signed release forms, but about the
impact of appearing in a public forum talking (for instance) about topics
 that distress or excite them. Adequate guidelines need to be developed.

All of the questions above will be studied during the workshop and will
contribute to the study of practical, methodological and technical issues
central to developing emotional corpora(such as the methodologies to be
used for emotional database creation, the coding schemes to be defined,
 the technical settings to be used for the collection, the selection of
appropriate coders).

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IMPORTANT DATES
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1rt call for paper                                 16 December
2nd call for paper                                 8 January
Deadline for 1000 words abstract submission        24 February
Notification of acceptance                         10 March
Final version of accepted paper                    10 April
Workshop half-day                                  23 May

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SUBMISSIONS
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The workshop will consist of paper and poster presentations.

Final submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English,
and follow the submission guidelines at
http://www.chi2006.org/docs/chi2006pubsformat.doc

The preferred format is MS word.
The .doc file should be submitted via email
to lrec-emotion@limsi.fr
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As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to
lrec-emotion@limsi.fr
a brief email indicating their intention to participate,
including their contact information and the topic they
intend to address in their submissions.

Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC
Local Organising Committee.

Submitted papers will be blind reviewed.

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TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE
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The workshop will consist of an afternoon session,
There will be time for collective discussions.
For this half-day Workshop, the registration fee will
be specified on http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/

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THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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Laurence Devillers / Jean-Claude Martin
Spoken Language Processing group/ Architectures and Models for Interaction,
LIMSI-CNRS,
BP 133, 91403 Orsay Cedex, France
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 62 /  (+33) 1 69 85 81 04 (phone)
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 / (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 (fax)
devil@limsi.fr / martin@limsi.fr
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/devil/
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/

Roddy Cowie / School of Psychology
Ellen Douglas-Cowie / Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Queen's University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
+44 2890 974354 / +44 2890 975348  (phone)
+44 2890 664144 / +44 2890 ******  (fax)
http://www.psych.qub.ac.uk/staff/teaching/cowie/index.aspx
http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/staff/douglas-cowie/
r.cowie@qub.ac.uk / e.douglas-Cowie@qub.ac.uk

Anton Batliner - Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Informatik 5)
Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg - Martensstrasse 3
91058 Erlangen - F.R. of Germany
Tel.: +49 9131 85 27823 - Fax.: +49 9131 303811
batliner@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
http://www5.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Personen/batliner/

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Roddy Cowie, QUB, UK
Ellen Douglas-Cowie, QUB, UK
Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, FR
Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, FR
Anton Batliner, Univ. Erlangen, D
Nick Campbell, ATR, J
Elisabeth André, Univ. Augsburg, D
Stephanos Kollias, ICCS, G
Marc Schröder, DFKI Saarbrücken, D
Catherine Pelachaud, Univ. Paris VIII, FR
Elisabeth Shriberg, SRI and ICSI, USA
Izhak Shafran, Univ. Johns Hopkins, CSLP, USA
Ioana Vasilescu, ENST, FR
Fiorella de Rosis, Univ. Bari, I
Isabella Poggi, Univ. Roma Tre, I
Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, Univ. Aizu, J
Susanne Kaiser, UNIGE, S
Valérie Maffiolo, FranceTelecom, FR
Véronique Aubergé, CNRS-STIC, FR
Shrikanth Narayanan, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USA
John Hansen,Univ. of Texas at Dallas, USA
Christine Lisetti, EURECOM, FR
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