The Challenge of Defining A Generally Usable Emotion Markup Language
Any attempt to standardize the description of emotions using a finite set of fixed descriptors is doomed to failure, as there is no consensus on the number of relevant emotions, on the names that should be given to them or how else best to describe them. For example, the difference between ":)" and "(:" is small, but using a standardized markup it would make one invalid. Even more basically, the list of emotion-related states that should be distinguished varies depending on the application domain and the aspect of emotions to be focused. Basically, the vocabulary needed depends on the context of use.
On the other hand, the basic structure of concepts is less controversial: it is generally agreed that emotions involve triggers, appraisals, feelings, expressive behavior including physiological changes, and action tendencies; emotions in their entirety can be described in terms of categories or a small number of dimensions; emotions have an intensity, and so on. For details, see the Scientific Descriptions of Emotions in the Final Report of the Emotion Incubator Group.
Given this lack of agreement on descriptors in the field, the only practical way of defining an emotion markup language is the definition of possible structural elements and to allow users to "plug in" vocabularies that they consider appropriate for their work.
An additional challenge lies in the aim to provide a markup language that is generally usable. The requirements that arise from different use cases are rather different. Whereas manual annotation tends to require all the fine-grained distinctions considered in the scientific literature, automatic recognition systems can usually distinguish only a very small number of different states and affective avatars need yet another level of detail for expressing emotions in an appropriate way.
For the reasons outlined here, it is clear that there is an inevitable tension between flexibility and interoperability, which need to be weighed in the formulation of an EmotionML. The guiding principle in the following specification has been to provide a choice only where it is needed, and to propose reasonable default options for every choice.
Read more about this topic: Emotion Markup Language
Famous quotes containing the words challenge, defining, generally, usable, emotion and/or language:
“Do your children view themselves as successes or failures? Are they being encouraged to be inquisitive or passive? Are they afraid to challenge authority and to question assumptions? Do they feel comfortable adapting to change? Are they easily discouraged if they cannot arrive at a solution to a problem? The answers to those questions will give you a better appraisal of their education than any list of courses, grades, or test scores.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.”
—Victoria (1819–1901)
“It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
—Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)