A Machine Learning Tool to Determine State of Mind and Emotion

TL;DR

This paper presents a machine learning tool that automatically assesses individuals' emotional states and preferences through questionnaires, aiming to mimic psychological expertise without prior psychological knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces a novel computational approach to interpret emotional and preference data, using machine learning models trained on questionnaire responses.

Findings

Successful classification of emotional states using ANN and SVM

Effective analysis of addiction levels from questionnaire data

Potential applications in psychological and medical diagnostics

Abstract

This paper investigates the possibility of creating a machine learning tool that automatically determines the state of mind and emotion of an individual through a questionnaire, without the aid of a human expert. The state of mind and emotion is defined in this work as pertaining to preference, feelings, or opinion that is not based on logic or reason. It is the case when a person gives out an answer to start by saying, "I feel...". The tool is designed to mimic the expertise of a psychologist and is built without any formal knowledge of psychology. The idea is to build the expertise by purely computational methods through thousands of questions collected from users. It is aimed towards possibly diagnosing substance addiction, alcoholism, sexual attraction, HIV status, degree of commitment, activity inclination, etc. First, the paper presents the related literature and classifies them according to data gathering methods. Another classification is created according to preference, emotion, grouping, and rules to achieve a deeper interpretation and better understanding of the state of mind and emotion. Second, the proposed tool is developed using an online addiction questionnaire with 10 questions and 292 respondents. In addition, an initial investigation on the dimension of addiction is presented through the built machine learning model. Machine learning methods, namely, artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM), are used to determine a true or false or degree of state of a respondent.