Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

• Program: International Initiatives

• SEEMPAD

• Social Exchanges and Emotions in Mediated Polemics - Analysis and Data

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of Montréal, Heron Lab (Canada)

• Duration: 2014 - 2017

• See also: https://project.inria.fr/seempad/

• Generating, annotating and analyzing a dataset that documents a debate. We aim at synchronizing several dimensions: social links (intensity, alliances, etc.); interactions happening (who talks to whom); textual content of the exchanged messages; social-based semantic relations among the arguments; emotions, polarity, opinions detected from the text; emotions, physical state detected from sensors.

  During the first year, we have defined the protocol for the first experimental setting, which will represent the first stage of the proof-of-concept. The goal of the first experiment is to address a feasibility study of the annotation of a corpus of natural language arguments with emotions. The experiment involved a group of 20 participants, recruited by the Heron Lab. In particular, the first experiment has considered the following steps:

  • Starting from an issue to be discussed provided by the animators, the aim of the experiment is to collect the arguments proposed by the participants.

  • These arguments are then associated with the emotional component detected through apposite devices of the Heron Lab. More precisely, the workload/engagement emotional states and the facial emotions of the participants are extracted during the debate, using an EEG headset and a Face Emotion Recognition tool respectively.

  • In a post-processing phase on the collected data, we have synchronized the arguments put forward at instant t with the emotional indexes we retrieved.

  • The output of this post-processing phase (ongoing) will result in an argumentation graph representing each discussion addressed by the discussion groups. These argumentation graphs connect the arguments to each other by a support or an attack relation, and they will be labeled with the source that has proposed the argument, and the emotional state of the source itself and of the other participants at the time when the argument has been put on the table.