Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Testing one, two..

Tuesday brought some initial testing of the old code, using the real Robot-Arm. Here is an example drawing made with the old code:

Sadly, it became apparent that the old code contained some errors, preventing the use of more than one colour. The rest of the day was mostly used for creating an initial labBook-presentation and reading/thinking about which emotions should relate to which colours/shapes.

Thinking about Emotion

The emotions wanted to represent in the most basic form of the plotter would have to include the culturally independent emotions defined by Paul Ekman:

anger
disgust
fear
joy
sadness
surprise

Some of these emotions are easy to filter out of a block of text. Sadness, joy and anger can be found with keywords lonely, happy, love, upset, angry, et cetera. It is disgust and surprise that are more difficult to define in keywords.

Of course we need to mention that most emotions are hard to filter out from any conversation that does not specifically regard emotion. Most emotions are interpreted through either facial expressions, body language and voice intonation. The choice to use a console prompt to interact with the robot is indeed a practical one and not an ideal choice- it would be much more elegant to be able to yell and gesture at the robot.

So once we have decided to use this manner of communication, we can focus on what we want to filter on. In our code, keywords defined in or statements, and the following keywords are categorized in the following emotions:

joy

happy, bright, bounc-, glad, blij, zon, ecstat-, thrill, geluk, sun, wonder, fantas-, heart, love, adore, nice, hart, lief, sweet, zoet, roze, pink, cute, leuk

sadness

sad, blue, verdriet-, unhappy, alone, lone-, eenzaam, solit-, whiskey, depress-, grief, hurt, pain, sorry

anger

angry, frustrat-, piss-, mad, bad, horribl-, aggravat, doesn't work, boos, werkt niet, stom, achterlijk

disgust

angry, piss, mad, bad, horribl-, aggravat-, doesn't work, boos, werkt niet, stom, achterlijk

fear

afraid, scar-, fear, anxi-, eng, bang, nervous, nerveus, alarm, suspicious, terrified, tremble, worried, zorg-, startl-, disturb-, fright-, stun-

surprise

surprise, shock, amaze, astonish, astound, verras-, unexpect-, onverwacht-, schok-, opeens, sudden-, bewilder, flabbergast-

We will continue defining emotions we want to portray without going into the details of the visualization just yet. There are some emotions we decided we wanted to add to our program that are not included in the basic human emotions. One is the feeling of puzzlement, the other is the feeling devoid of emotion. The keywords we used for these were

puzzlement

why, who, waar, ?, snap het niet, hoezo, moei, but, wat, how, wonder, what

emotionless

lala, pom, tral-, leuk, lol, grap, neat, fun, nonsens, useless, art, joke

Either cloud is debatable in its existence as an emotion, however in the context of visualization of a conversation with a console, either cloud seems to represent a large part of the banter that goes on. You could however also argue that if we decide to start modelling modes of conversation we should include small talk, gossip, ribaldry, pillow talk, repartee, negotiation, debate, interview, arguments, et cetera. Which is a valid argument, but a pile of work we do not think we can finish on time.