Emotions in European parliamentary debates: Passionate speakers or un-emotional gentlemen?

Exemelification of Parliamentary Debates

Parliamentary debates are an interesting domain to apply state-of-the-art information retrieval technology. Parliamentary debates are highly structured transcripts of meetings of politicians in parliament. These debates are an important part of the cultural heritage of countries; they are often free of copy-right; citizens often have a legal right to inspect them; and several countries make gre...

Modelling argumentation in parliamentary debates

In this paper we apply the information state update (ISU) machinery to tracking and understanding the argumentative behaviour of participants in a parliamentary debate in order to predict its outcome. We propose to use the ISU approach to model the arguments of the debaters and the support/attack links between them as part of the formal representations of a participant’s information state. We f...

Televised Debates in Parliamentary Democracies

Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures

depression, and dogs happiness and dejection? People disagree about the nature of emotions in nonhuman animal beings (hereafter animals), especially concerning the question of whether any animals other than humans can feel emotions (Ekman 1998). Pythagoreans long ago believed that animals experience the same range of emotions as humans (Coates 1998), and current research provides compelling evi...

Emotional Thought or Thoughtful Emotions?

The anatomical circuits for emotion are straightforward: prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and the amygdala. However, neurophysiologists have not yet uncovered any robust neurophysiological differences among what we perceive to be as radically different emotions. Nevertheless, they believe that someday, they will be able to discover local anatomical or physiological differences among our dif...