User study of AffectIM, an emotionally intelligent instant messaging system

Abstract

Our research addresses the tasks of recognition, interpretation and visualization of affect communicated through text messaging. In order to facilitate sensitive and expressive interaction in computer-mediated communication, we previously introduced a novel syntactical rule-based approach to affect recognition from text. The evaluation of the developed Affect Analysis Model showed promising results regarding its capability to accurately recognize affective information in text from an existing corpus of informal online conversations. To enrich the user's experience in online communication, make it enjoyable, exciting and fun, we implemented a web-based IM application, AffectIM, and endowed it with emotional intelligence by integrating the developed Affect Analysis Model. This paper describes the findings of a twenty-person study conducted with our AffectIM system. The results of the study indicated that automatic emotion recognition function can bring a high level of affective intelligence to the IM application. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.