Tutorial on 'Affective Natural Language Generation', in the scope of User Modeling 2007

Natural language generation (NLG) is the task of automatically producing appropriate human language based on non-linguistic inputs. Affective NLG is where NLG meets affective computing, to produce language that achieves emotional or other non-rational effects on the reader. In fact, all text produced by a computer has non-rational effects on its readers, though these are usually unintentional, because of limitations in our existing models of linguistic communication.

So really affective NLG is about how we can become more aware of those effects that language has and intentionally manipulate them. The goal of this tutorial is to convey the potential of affective NLG, describe some of the initial work done in this area and outline some of the challenges it makes to user modelling.

Individual users differ in how they respond emotionally to a given piece of natural language, and so one of the challenges for user modelling is to be able to capture this variation in order to support choices by computer systems between linguistic alternatives in their utterances.

The tutorial is relevant to workers in HCI and other areas who are concerned with personalised adaptive interfaces which generate language of some kind (whatever the complexity of their generation models). It will be introductory and will presuppose only limited previous knowledge of NLG or affective computing.

It will therefore be suitable to people from a range of disciplines, including Artificial Intelligence, HCI and Education. The Tutorial will not present just the union of work in affective computing and NLG: it will be the result of a coordinated synthesis developed by the two organisers. It will combine a state of the art description with a vision of the possible trends of this fast evolving domain. Description of methods will be integrated with critical reflection on the main results obtained, of their limits and of the open problems, so as to solicit active contributions from the participants. A short questionnaire will be administered to those who register for the Tutorial, to understand their interests and backgrounds, so that the lecturers can adapt their content accordingly. This will enable the organisers to remain within the limited time available and yet go deeper into the topics which are of interest for the participants.