Representing emotions and related states in technological systems

Abstract

In many cases when technological systems are to operate on emotions and related states, they need to represent these states. Existing representations are limited to application-specific solutions that fall short of representing the full range of concepts that have been identified as relevant in the scientific literature. The present chapter presents a broad conceptual view on the possibility to create a generic representation of emotions that can be used in many contexts and for many purposes. Potential use cases and resulting requirements are identified and compared to the scientific literature on emotions. Options for the practical realisation of an Emotion Markup Language are discussed in the light of the requirement to extend the language to different emotion concepts and vocabularies, and ontologies are investigated as a means to provide limited “mapping” mechanisms between different emotion representations.