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Contribution to Book
Semantics with Feeling: Emotions for Abstract Embedding, Affect for Concrete Grounding
Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
  • Daniele Moro, Boise State University
  • Gerardo Caracas, Boise State University
  • David McNeill, Boise State University
  • Casey Kennington, Boise State University
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
7-1-2020
Disciplines
Abstract

An important yet underexplored aspect of meaning in both distributional and grounded models of semantics is emotion. In this paper, we explore how emotion can be predicted from descriptions of robot behaviors represented with embeddings. We then compare this approach with a grounded model that maps corresponding robot behaviors represented as internal states to the same emotion labels and discover comparable results. We then take the predictions from the second model and use them as a proxy for concrete affect (as opposed to abstract emotion) and use this derived affect to ground a semantic classifier in a retrieval task and see improvements on the retrieval task when affect is used as a grounded modality. This demonstrates that semantics can benefit from using a proxy of affect derived from human perceptions, given those perceptions are mapped to clear proxies, such the behaviors of an embodied robot.

Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Citation Information
Daniele Moro, Gerardo Caracas, David McNeill and Casey Kennington. "Semantics with Feeling: Emotions for Abstract Embedding, Affect for Concrete Grounding" Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (2020)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/casey-kennington/44/