Abstract
We discuss an aspect of an affect-detection system used in edrama by intelligent conversational agents, namely affective interpretation of limited sorts of metaphorical utterance. Our system currently only deals with cases, which we found to be quite common in edrama, in which a person is compared to, or stated to be, something non-human such as an animal, object, artefact or supernatural being. Our approach permits a limited degree of variability and extension of these metaphors. We discuss how these metaphorical utterances are recognized, how they are analysed and their affective content determined and in particular how the electronic lexical database, WordNet, and the natural language glosses of the WordNet sysnsets can be used. We also discuss how this relatively shallow approach relates in important ways to the deeper ATT-Meta theory of metaphor interpretation and to approaches to affect and emotion in metaphor theory. We finish by illustrating the approach with a number of ‘worked examples’.
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Notes
- 1.
User-testing [25] shows that users have enjoyed using the system.
- 2.
The same algorithms are also used for influencing the characters’ gesturing when a 3D animation mode produced by one of our industrial partners is used.
- 3.
Although we did not pursue this in our work, exploring meronym and holonym links in WordNet might be of use in interpreting limited types of metonymy.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by EPSRC grant EP/C538943/1 and grant RES-328-25-0009 from the ESRC under the ESRC/EPSRC/DTI ‘PACCIT’ programme. We wish to thank our colleagues Catherine Smith and Sheila Glasbey.
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Wallington, A., Agerri, R., Barnden, J., Lee, M., Rumbell, T. (2011). Affect Transfer by Metaphor for an Intelligent Conversational Agent. In: Ahmad, K. (eds) Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 45. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1757-2_5
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