John A Barnden (University of Birmingham)
Affective Communication and Metaphor in an E-Drama ProjectFriday 11 May 2007 (week 4)
In a project in collaboration with industry we have been developing algorithms for detection of emotion and other types of affect in textual, improvised e-drama. In this type of virtual drama or role-play, human users (actors) type in short "speeches" for their assigned characters to utter, the characters are displayed as avatars on the computer screens, and the speeches appear in text-bubbles above the avatars' heads. The improvisations are usually within a loose pre-specified scenario, such as a school-bullying scenario or a scenario derived from a historical event, but the actors entirely invent their own speeches. The affect detection, applied to the speeches of the human-controlled characters, is used for controlling the responses of an automated actor controlling an extra on-screen character, for influencing the gestures of the various characters, and for sending advice messages to the human director who monitors the drama. The talk will concentrate on one specialized but salient aspect of affect detection, namely detection in cases where affect is conveyed via metaphor. The talk will map out the metaphor-related issues in our genre and will describe some limited, affect-orientated metaphor processing that we have implemented. The talk will also relate the practical metaphor issues to theoretical developments on metaphor produced by our separate research programme on metaphor generally.
The e-drama project is supported by a grant from the ESRC, EPSRC and DTI under the LINK "PACCIT" programme (People at the Centre of Communication and IT).