HICEM: A High-Coverage Emotion Model for Artificial Emotional Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper introduces HICEM, a comprehensive emotion model using word embeddings and clustering, achieving broad language coverage with only 15 core emotions for improved artificial emotional intelligence.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, language-agnostic emotion model based on unsupervised clustering of word embeddings, enhancing coverage and applicability for AEI systems.

Findings

15 emotion categories provide maximum coverage across six languages

Large-scale datasets validate the model's alignment with human perception

Robust emotion models are crucial for real-world affective computing applications

Abstract

As social robots and other intelligent machines enter the home, artificial emotional intelligence (AEI) is taking center stage to address users' desire for deeper, more meaningful human-machine interaction. To accomplish such efficacious interaction, the next-generation AEI need comprehensive human emotion models for training. Unlike theory of emotion, which has been the historical focus in psychology, emotion models are a descriptive tools. In practice, the strongest models need robust coverage, which means defining the smallest core set of emotions from which all others can be derived. To achieve the desired coverage, we turn to word embeddings from natural language processing. Using unsupervised clustering techniques, our experiments show that with as few as 15 discrete emotion categories, we can provide maximum coverage across six major languages--Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. In support of our findings, we also examine annotations from two large-scale emotion recognition datasets to assess the validity of existing emotion models compared to human perception at scale. Because robust, comprehensive emotion models are foundational for developing real-world affective computing applications, this work has broad implications in social robotics, human-machine interaction, mental healthcare, and computational psychology.