2nd Call for Papers: CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT Workshop (LREC 2008)

[ELDA]

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Second call for Papers (deadline for abstract : 12/02/2008)

Second International Workshop on EMOTION (satellite of LREC):

CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT

             Monday, 26 May 2008

            in Marrakech (Morocco)

             In Association with

6th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION

         LREC2008 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

                 Main Conference
                 28-29-30 May 2008

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This decade has seen an upsurge of interest in systems that register
emotion (in a broad sense) and react appropriately to it. Emotion corpora
are fundamental both to developing sound conceptual analyses and to
training these 'emotion-oriented systems' at all levels - to recognise
user emotion, to express appropriate emotions, to anticipate how a user in
one state might respond to a possible kind of reaction from the machine,
etc. Corpora have only begun to grow with the area, and much work is
needed before they provide a sound foundation.

This workshop follows a first successful workshop on Corpora for research
on Emotion and Affect at LREC 2006. The HUMAINE network of excellence
(http://emotion-research.net/) has brought together several groups working
on the development of emotional databases, the HUMAINE association will
continue this effort and the workshop aims to broaden the interaction that
has developed in that context. The HUMAINE Association portal will provide
a range of services for individuals, such as a web presence, access to
data, and an email news service; special interest groups will be provided
with a working folder, a mailing list, and a discussion forum or a blog.
Conferences, workshops and research projects in the area of
emotion-oriented computing can be given a web presence on the portal.

Papers are invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and
affect.  They may raise one or more of the following questions. What kind
of theory of emotion is needed to guide the area? What are appropriate
sources? Which modalities should be considered, in which combinations?
What are the realistic constraints on recording quality? How can the
emotional content of episodes be described within a corpus? Which
emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how? How should
access to corpora be provided? What level of standardisation is
appropriate? How can quality be assessed? Ethical issues in database
development and access.

Description of the specific technical issues of the workshop:
Many models of emotion are common enough to affect the way teams go about
collecting and describing emotion-related data. Some which are familiar
and intuitively appealing are known to be problematic, either because they
are theoretically dated or because they do not transfer to practical
contexts. To evaluate the resources that are already available, and to
construct valid new corpora, research teams need some sense of the models
that are relevant to the area.

•	What are appropriate sources?
In the area of emotion, some of the hardest problems involve acquiring
basic data. Four main types of source are commonly used. Their potential
contributions and limitations need to be understood.

•	Acted:
Many widely used emotion databases consist of acted representations of
emotion (which may or may not be generated by actors). The method is
extremely convenient, but it is known that systems trained on acted
material may not transfer to natural emotion. It has to be established
what kind of acted material is useful for what purposes.

•	Application-driven:
A growing range of databases are derived from specific applications (eg
call centres). These are ideal for some purposes, but access is often
restricted for commercial reasons, and it is highly desirable to have more
generic material that could underpin work on a wide range of applications.

•	General naturalistic:
Data that is representative of everyday life is an attractive ideal, but
very difficult to collect. Making special-purpose recordings of everyday
life is a massive task, with the risk that recording changes behaviour. 
Several teams have used material from broadcasts, radio & TV (talk shows,
current affairs). That raises issues of access, signal quality, and
genuineness.

•	Induction:
A natural ideal is to induce emotion of appropriate kinds under
appropriate circumstances. Satisfying induction is an elusive ideal, but
new techniques are gradually emerging.

•	Which modalities should be considered, in which combinations?
Emotion is reflected in multiple channels - linguistic content,
paralinguistic expression, facial expression, eye movement, gesture, gross
body movement, manner of action, visceral changes (heart rate, etc), brain
states (eeg activity, etc). The obvious ideal is to cover all
simultaneously, but that is impractical - and it is not clear how often
all the channels are actually active. The community needs to clarify the
relative usefulness of the channels, and of strategies for sampling
combinations.

•	What are the realistic constraints on recording quality?
Naturalism tends to be at odds with ease of signal processing.
Understanding of the relevant tradeoffs needs to be reached. That includes
awareness of different applications (high quality may not be crucial for
defining the expressive behaviours a virtual agent should show) and of
timescale for solving particular signal processing issues(eg recovering
features from images of heads in arbitrary poses).

•	How can the emotional content of episodes be described within a corpus?
Several broad approaches exist to transcribing the emotional content of an
excerpt - using everyday emotion words; using dimensional descriptions
rooted in psychological theory (intensity, evaluation, activation, power);
using concepts from appraisal theory (perceived goal-conduciveness of a
development, potential for coping, etc). These are being developed in
specific ways driven by goals such as elegance, inter-rater reliability,
and faithfulness to the subtlety of everyday emotion, relevance to agent
decisions, etc.  There seems to be a real prospect of achieving an agreed
synthesis of the main schemes.

•	Which emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how?
Corresponding to each emotion-related channel is one or more sets of signs
relevant to conveying emotion. For instance, paralinguistic signs exist at
the level of basic features - F0, intensity, formant-related properties,
and so on; at the level of linguistic features of prosody ; and at more
global levels (tune shapes, repetitions, etc). Even for speech,
inventories of relevant signs need to be developed, and for channels such
as idle body movements, few descriptive systems have been proposed. Few
teams have the expertise to annotate many types of sign competently, and
so it is important to establish ways of allowing teams that do have the
expertise to make their annotations available as part of a database.
Mainly for lower level features, automatic transcription methods exist,
and their role needs to be clarified. In particular, tests of their
reliability are needed, and that depends on data that can serve as a
reference.

•	How should access to corpora be provided?
Practically, it is clearly important to find ways of establishing a
sustainable and easily expandable multi-modal database for any sorts of
emotion-related data; to develop tools for easily importing and exporting
data; to develop analysis tools and application programmers’ interfaces to
work on the stored data and meta-data; and to provide ready access to
existing data from previous projects. Approaches to those goals need to be
defined.

•	What level of standardisation is appropriate?
Standardisation is clearly desirable in the long term, but with so many
basic issues unresolved, it is not clear where real consensus can be
achieved and where it is better to encourage competition among different
options.

•	How can quality be assessed?
It is clear that some existing corpora should not be used for serious
research. The problem is to develop quality assurance procedures that can
direct potential users toward those which can.

•	Ethical issues in database development and access
Corpora that show people behaving emotionally are very likely to raise
ethical issues - not simply about signed release forms, but about the
impact of appearing in a public forum talking (for instance) about topics
that distress or excite them. Adequate guidelines need to be developed.

All of the questions above will be studied during the workshop and will
contribute to the study of practical, methodological and technical issues
central to developing emotional corpora (such as the methodologies to be
used for emotional database creation, the coding schemes to be defined, 
the technical settings to be used for the collection, the selection of
appropriate coders).


The organising committee:
Laurence Devillers / Jean-Claude Martin
Spoken Language Processing group/ Architectures and Models for
Interaction, LIMSI-CNRS,
BP 133, 91403 Orsay Cedex, France
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 62 /  (+33) 1 69 85 81 04 (phone)
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 / (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 (fax)
devil at limsi.fr / martin at limsi.fr
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/devil/
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/

Roddy Cowie / School of Psychology
Ellen Douglas-Cowie / Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Queen's
University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
+44 2890 974354 / +44 2890 975348  (phone)
+44 2890 664144 / +44 2890 ******  (fax)
http://www.psych.qub.ac.uk/staff/teaching/cowie/index.aspx
http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/staff/douglas-cowie/
r.cowie at qub.ac.uk / e.douglas-Cowie at qub.ac.uk

Anton Batliner - Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Informatik 5)
Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg - Martensstrasse 3
91058 Erlangen - F.R. of Germany
Tel.: +49 9131 85 27823 - Fax.: +49 9131 303811
batliner at informatik.uni-erlangen.de
http://www5.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Personen/batliner/

Contact: Laurence Devillers lrec-emotion at limsi.fr

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IMPORTANT DATES
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1rt call for paper                                 21 December
2nd call for paper                                 29 January
Deadline for 1500-2000 words abstract submission   12 February
Notification of acceptance                         12 March
Final version of accepted paper                    4 April
Workshop full-day                                  26 May

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SUBMISSIONS
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The workshop will consist of paper and poster presentations.
Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster must consist of about
1500-2000 words.
Final submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English,
and follow the submission guidelines at LREC2008.

The preferred format is MS word or pdf. The file should be submitted via
email
to lrec-emotion at limsi.fr
   -----------------------------

As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to
lrec-emotion at limsi.fr a brief email indicating their intention to
participate, including their contact information and the topic they intend
to address in their
submissions.

Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC Local Organising
Committee.

Submitted papers will be blind reviewed.

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TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE
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The workshop will consist of a full-day session,
There will be time for collective discussions.
For this full-day Workshop, the registration fee will
be specified on http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/