ESSEM 2015 - 2015 2nd International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media: opportunities and challenges for emotion-aware multiagent systems

Emotions play a key role in the interactions that occur in a multi-agent system. Relevant perspectives include, on the one hand, research on architectures and cognitive models, which is concerned with the integration of emotional states into agents and the role of emotions in agent communication; on the other hand, research on techniques for sentiment analysis and opinion mining, devoted to automatic processing of affective information conveyed by spontaneous, multi-faceted user responses about shared contents.
The main goal of the workshop is to attain cross-fertilization between the two perspectives. While the former relies mainly on cognitively inspired agent models, the latter relies on the use of statistical and learning techniques supported by resources such as corpora and linguistic datasets. By proposing ESSEM15 as an AAMAS workshop, we intend to stimulate a tighter integration of agent-based paradigms with techniques for sentiment and opinion mining, which have raised a growing interest in a social web and big data perspective. We think that, since they typically involve interaction and feedback as part of their functioning, social and expressive media ? ranging from online communities, blogs and fan-generated narratives to interactive art installations and digital-based performances ? will provide an effective testbed for:
integrating complementary aspects: emotion generation and detection, affect expression and reception;
studying the role of affect in the generation of social behavior, and communicative behavior in particular
As the paradigmatic situation, we envisage a range of applicative contexts that involve a ‘performance’ of some kind, targeted to some audience/user, and possibly an interactive one. The performance/reception paradigm, be it a live execution of an interactive score, a digitally mediated co-creation session or the contribution of a single user in a social forum, provides a conceptual framework for studying affect generation and detection in an integrated approach.
Reception can take the form of immediate feedback, possibly regulated by a protocol, or of asynchronous response (such as tags and comments) conveyed through a plurality of media, against a background shaped by reputation and trust, intended as a relevant part of the audience value systems.
Performance/reception becomes the common ground where the two communities meet in a set of tasks that range from managing the expressive aspects of performance (e.g. embodiment) and its interactive aspects (e.g. emergent behaviour) to analysing and measuring the reception by the audience/users, with linguistic levels ranging from text, music, image, acting, etc. to multimodality.
ESSEM 2015 follows the 1st edition of the workshop, held in Turin in 2013. With about 40 registered attendees and a full-day program, the 2013 edition was an encouraging start for the ESSEM series.