Collective Emotions in Cyberspace
The CyberEmotions consortium began in February 2009 for a period of four years. The project focuses on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up e-communities.
The project involves nine partners in six different countries in Europe, including experts in the psychology of emotions, complexity, web data collection, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Results
The consortium has produced many publications as well as software for dialog systems and representing emotion in 3D virtual worlds. One of our programs, SentiStrength, is sold commercially, is used in several countries and has been translated into a variety of different langauges. Project partners are also always interested in commercial collaboration with those interested in exploiting our technology.
As a sample, here is a still of a virtual reality experiment with people interacting with an intelligent, sentiment-aware bartender. The 3D agents expressed emotions through body movements and facial expressions as they interacted with the humans.
And below is a video demonstration of network visualization software with sentiment filtering and dynamic network evolution. Download HD (55Mb) or SD (40Mb) QuickTime versions.
About CYBEREMOTIONS
CYBEREMOTIONS is a research domain that studies observable and analyzable phenomena related to any means of communication provided by the Internet - such as text, sound, visual, or any combination of these - that are related to emotional processes in individuals or groups. Transcending the classical analysis of human emotions, researchers in this domain also deal with emergent properties of the interplay between individual human emotions, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, and communication processes linked to all spheres of life. Therefore, research in the area of CYBEREMOTIONS is closely linked with human emotional processes in general (biological, behavioral, and experiential), with Internet-mediated communication (partially erasing space and time boundaries, and with creating specific networks of interactions).
A particular emphasis lies on the automatic analysis of online messages using methodologies such as sentiment analysis to provide access to emotional cues in large samples. The precise relationships between individual and collective emotions on the Internet are not yet known and likely require complex systems and network approaches.
The EU funded CYBEREMOTIONS consortium was created to better understand collective emotional phenomena in cyberspace, with the help of knowledge and methods from natural, social, and engineering sciences.
What is the difference between emotions and sentiments?
Emotions refer to bodily and psychological states in individuals. The causes of emotions are often social and the communication of emotion is an important facet of much human communication. Messages, verbal or nonverbal, do not, strictly speaking, contain emotions, but they are influenced, consciously and outside of awareness, by the emotional state of the sender, they may be sent to elicit or modify emotions in others, and they may be interpreted by receivers as emotional or create emotions in receivers. A research domain has developed that is referred to as "sentiment analysis" - to avoid confusion the analysis of emotion in messages refers to sentiments. Sentiment in this sense, refers to emotion-related aspects of messages. The use of sentiments as being synonymous with feelings in everyday and in scientific language is considered outdated.
