Automatic Affective Feedback in an Email Browser

This paper demonstrates a new approach to recognizing and presenting the affect of text. The approach starts with a corpus of 400,000 responses to questions about everyday life in Open Mind Common Sense. This so-called commonsense knowledge is the basis of a textual affect sensing engine. The engine dynamically analyzes a user’s text and senses broad affective qualities of the story at the sentence level. This paper shows how a commonsense affect model was constructed and incorporated into Chernov face style feedback in an affectively responsive email browser called EmpathyBuddy. This experimental system reacts to sentences as they are typed. It is robust enough that it is being used to send email. The response of the few dozen people that have typed into it is dramatically enthusiastic. This paper debuts a new style of user interface technique for creating intelligent responses. Instead of relying on specialized handcrafted knowledge bases this approach relies on a generic commonsense repository. Instead of relying on linguistic or statistical analysis alone to “understand” the affect of text, it relies on a small society of approaches based on the commonsense repository.