Analysis of affect expressed through the evolving language of online communication

In this paper, we focus on affect recognition from text in order to facilitate sensitive and expressive communication in computer-mediated environments. Our model for analyzing affect conveyed by text is tailored to handle the style and specifics of informal online conversations. The motivation behind our approach is to improve social interactivity and emotional expressiveness of real-time messaging.In order to estimate affect in text, our model processes symbolic cues, such as emoticons, detects and transforms abbreviations, and employs natural language processing techniques for word/phrase/sentence-level analysis, e.g. by considering relations among words in a sentence. As a result of the analysis, text can be categorized into emotional states and communicative functions. A designed graphical representation of a user (avatar) displays emotions and social behaviour driven by text and performs natural idle movements. The proposed system shows promising results on affect recognition in real examples of online conversation.