Artificial empathy : using vector space modeling and mixed scope alignment to infer emotional states of characters in stories

Emotions greatly influence human cognition. Therefore, if we are to develop artificially intelligent programs that work closely with humans, we must ensure that they are capable of empathy. In an effort to realize the goal of emotionally aware programs, I created a multi-corpus informed vector space model to determine the emotions evoked by individual terms. I then combined that information with the semantic parse trees produced by the Genesis Story Understanding System to ascertain the emotions evoked by a single sentence. Additionally, I used the story aligner within Genesis to determine the emotions evoked by stories described over multiple sentences. My program can infer characters' emotional states based on their descriptions, the situations they are involved in, and the actions they perform. For instance, it infers that Alice is joyful from the sentence "Alice wins an award" and that James is probably experiencing sadness from the sentence "James is lonely." Additionally, the program can identify that Austin is likely surprised if "Austin has to take a test" and "Austin doesn't know about the test."

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Alexander, Ryan Cherian

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick Henry Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106032

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/106032