From Descriptive to Numeric Emotions in Agents

Representing emotions in agents is important for designing agents that behave like humans or are intended to interact with humans. OCC model, a descriptive emotion model, has been used widely as a standard for emotion synthesis, however it is also criticized for falling short on suggestions for what to do with the emotional states. PAD emotion scale, a numeric emotion measurement of emotions, supplies a highly useful and convenient assessment of consumer emotional reactions to services, products, or combinations of products and services. It closely connects human’s emotional states with the behaviors. If we can find out the relationship between these two models, we can produce a more complete emotion mechanism by using OCC to generate emotional states and PAD to analyze them. Meanwhile, when we consider emotional negotiation, a numeric measurement of emotions is desirable. We need to find a proper way to embed emotions into a utility function. This paper presents a method to map descriptive OCC emotions to numeric PAD emotions, thereby providing an opportunity to embed both the OCC model and the PAD emotion scale into emotional agents to produce a more complete emotion mechanism. The mechanism includes both generating emotions and predicting the effects of emotions on agents’ reasoning processes and behaviors. More specifically, we use WordNet as a lexical ontology and apply ontology matching techniques to produce a mapping from the 22 basic descriptive emotions generated by the OCC model to the numeric PAD emotion space. The result is consistent with the senses in WordNet and the situations in the OCC