Emotions ontology for collaborative modelling and learning of emotional responses

Abstract

Emotions-aware applications are getting a lot of attention as a way to improve the user experience, and also thanks to increasingly affordable Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). Thus, projects collecting emotion-related data are proliferating, like social networks sentiment analysis or tracking students" engagement to reduce Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) drop out rates. All them require a common way to represent emotions so it can be more easily integrated, shared and reused by applications improving user experience. Due to the complexity of this data, our proposal is to use rich semantic models based on ontology. EmotionsOnto is a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology has been applied in the context of EmoCS, a project that collaboratively collects emotion common sense and models it using the EmotionsOnto and other ontologies. Currently, emotion input is provided manually by users. However, experiments are being conduced to automatically measure users"s emotional states using Brain Computer Interfaces.