The 2nd International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM 20151) is taking place on May 5, 2015, in Istanbul as a workshop of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2015). 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 a ective 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 ESSEM 2015 as an AAMAS workshop, we intend to stimulate a tighter integration of agentbased paradigms with techniques for sentiment and opinion mining, which have raised a growing interest in a social web and big data perspective. 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 { will provide an e ective testbed for: { integrating complementary aspects: emotion generation and detection, a ect expression and reception; { studying the role of a ect 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. The performance/reception paradigm, be it a digitally mediated co-creation session or the contribution of a user in a social forum, provides a conceptual framework for studying a ect generation and detection in an integrated approach. Reception can take the form of immediate feedback, possibly regulated by a protocol, or of asynchronous response (e.g. tags and comments) conveyed through a plurality of
media, against a background shaped by reputation and trust as a relevant part of the audience value systems.
Given the leading thread described above, we have proposed a special focus for ESSEM 2015: opportunities and challenges for emotion-aware multi agent systems. The nal program includes four full papers (out of the eight submissions that were reviewed in the full paper category) and six short papers, which all in all cover di erent topics of the call for papers and represent an interesting variety of point of views on the ESSEM themes. The members of the program committee did an exceptional job, managing to complete the review process in record time, by providing authors with three reviews per full/short paper, we would like to thank them for their accurate work. We thank our invited speakers Ana Paiva (INESC-ID, Portugal) and Gulsen Eryigit (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey) for accepting to deliver the ESSEM keynote talks for this edition, crucial contributions towards a successful cross-fertilization of ideas between the agent and NLP communities about emotion and sentiment themes. We also thank Catherine Pelachaud (panel chair, CNRS, TELECOM ParisTech, France), Chloe Clavel (Telecom-ParisTech, France), Emiliano Lorini (IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France), Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University, USA), Gualtiero Volpe (University of Genova, Italy) which accepted to animate our nal discussion panel. We would like to express our gratitude for the o cial endorsement we received from the CELI Torino, CIRMA and WIQ-EI (Web Information Quality Evaluation Initiative). Furthermore, we are grateful to all authors who submitted their works to ESSEM 2015.
We sincerely hope that ESSEM 2015 could be the occasion for merging the the agent community and the sentiment analysis and opinion mining community, both interested in emotions and sentiments in social and expressive media, although from complementary perspectives. Still many are the open questions for the two research communities. Does the progress in sentiment analysis and opinion mining also bring opportunities for modeling the a ective component of agent behaviour? Are technologies for automatic sentiment analysis mature enough to allow for a tighter integration with emotions in modelling feedback in expressive media? Which a ective frameworks should be considered in a perspective that integrates both the a ective information extracted from user responses and the a ective agent behavior to be generated? Are there any relationships between the analysis of emotion and sentiment in social and expressive media and the captology research eld, e.g. the study of computers as persuasive technologies? Hopefully, some of these questions will have a tentative answer in the context of the ESSEM 2015 workshop.
April 2015
Erik Cambria Rossana Damiano Viviana Patti
Paolo Rosso
Erik Cambria Rossana Damiano Viviana Patti Paolo Rosso
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Italy University of Turin, Italy INESC-ID and ISLA Campus Lisboa, Portugal Teesside University, UK Telecom-ParisTech, France University of Trento, Italy Jadavpur University, India Utrecht University, the Netherlands University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy University of Calabria, Italy Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain North Carolina State University, Releigh, USA Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France University of Genova, Italy University of Trento, Italy University of Groningen, the Netherlands University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy University of Naples Federico II, Italy Technical University of Valencia, Spain Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria University of Turin, Italy Autoritas Consulting, Spain The Open University, UK Technical University of Munich, Germany University of Bari, Italy University of Wolverhampton, UK Johannes Kepler University, Austria Technical University of Valencia, Spain University of Genova, Italy Nuance Communications, Italy
CELI s.r.l Torino WIQ-EI (Web Information Quality Evaluation Initiative)