EmotionML: A new W3C markup language for expression emotions

<emotion>

<category name="This must be a joke"/> <intensity value="1.0"/>

</emotion>

This is much more useful and less frivolous than you'd probably think at first glance. Think about it, emotion underlies almost every other medium that we use to communicate, emotions are the most primitive indicators of how a person feels and each and every other medium that we've used to express ourselves in has a way of 'pushing' those emotional buttons somehow.

To know which emotional buttons are attached to which part of a piece of writing, a movie, a piece of music and so on can help a lot in both selecting things to fit or counter a mood and it can help in analysing content in an automated way (even if the annotation has to be done by hand).

From the article:

"There are various emotion category sets, the shortest one being Paul Ekman’s, containing six basic emotions having facial expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprised."

Tags are fine ofcourse, but how does one go about mapping these to something useful to a user? Images? ASCII emoticons?

Lemme take a stab at it:

anger >:(

digust D8

fear 8-[

happiness :D

sadness :'(

surprised 8O

Looks like a joke, but seems to be real. From the draft:

    Use cases for EmotionML can be grouped into three broad types:

    Manual annotation of material involving emotionality,
    such as annotation of videos, of speech recordings,
    of faces, of texts, etc;

    Automatic recognition of emotions from sensors,
    including physiological sensors, speech recordings,
    facial expressions, etc., as well as from multi-modal
     combinations of sensors;

    Generation of emotion-related system responses, which
    may involve reasoning about the emotional implications
    of events, emotional prosody in synthetic speech, facial
    expressions and gestures of embodied agents or robots,
    the choice of music and colors of lighting in a room, etc.

Is it just me or using XML to describe emotions is just stupid....

Even if I pretended this was something to be taken serious, I doubt there is a device that can register emotions or that a psychologist would write this trash instead of forming plain old English sentences.

The abstract offers what I think is a good reasoning for this.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-emotionml-20100729/

I got yer W3C emotion markup language right here:

:P

This does make sense for use on robots which display some sort of "face" on a screen, or for some chatbots.