Emotional expressions

A computer character, capable of realistic emotional expressions may soon be incorporated into working applications.

The research team in the Information Society Technologies (IST) project ERMIS created a prototype able to analyse and respond to user input.

In the analysis phase, the team extracted some 400 features of common speech, then selected around 20-25 as the most important in expressing emotion. These terms were then fed into a neural network architecture that combined all the different speech, paralinguistic and facial communications features. For facial expression, some 19 were selected as the most relevant and were input accordingly.

The results of this analysis were incorporated into a prototype system with several on-screen characters, each of which were capable of reacting to and reproducing the emotional content in speech and facial expressions. By interacting with their human subjects, these computer characters would attempt to make the user angry, happy, sad or even bored. Sometimes with great success, explained Stefanos Kollias of the National Technical University of Athens.