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EEG Mode: emotional episode generation for social sharing of emotions

Publication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.; Prada, Rui

Social sharing of emotions (SSE) occurs when one communicates their feelings and reactions to a certain event in the course of a social interaction. The phenomenon is part of our social fabric and plays an important role in creating empathetic responses and establishing rapport. Intelligent social agents capable of SSE will have a mechanism to create and build long-term interaction with humans. In this paper, we present the Emotional Episode Generation (EEG) model, a fine-tuned GPT-2 model capable of generating emotional social talk regarding multiple event tuples in a human-like manner. Human evaluation results show that the model successfully translates one or more event-tuples into emotional episodes, reaching quality levels close to human performance. Furthermore, the model clearly expresses one emotion in each episode as well as humans. To train this model we used a public dataset and built upon it using event extraction techniques(1).

2021Conference object

Open Access

ISPO: a serious game to train the interview skills of police officers

Publication . Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Soeiro, Cristina; Guerra, Raquel; Steiner-Stanitznig, Christina; Molinari, Andrea

The training of Police Interview competencies relies on the hiring of actors to play the role of victims, witnesses and suspects. While role-play can be a particularly effective training technique, it requires a significant amount of resources. The Interview Sim-ulation for Police Officers (ISPO) is a serious game developed as a collaboration of Gameware Europe with the Portuguese School of Police Officers. The objective of the game is to train police officers in communication competencies related to the interview of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Through ISPO, players can take the role of a police interviewer and practice the techniques and methodologies learned in theoretical classes. The serious game offers a safe, lightweight and easily repeatable experience. In order to evaluate the training effectiveness of the serious game, a study was con-ducted with 194 participants where general subjective learning effectiveness was mea-sured. Overall, the ISPO game improved the self-perceived competence of its players. Additionally, participants changed their opinion regarding the most valuable attitudes necessary to conduct a successful interview. Finally, the interaction with the game had a stronger effect on inexperienced users. These results lead us to believe that ISPO can be an added value to police officer schools.

2022Journal article

Open Access

Emotionally expressive motion controller for virtual character locomotion animations

Publication . Silva, Diogo; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, Joao

Style and emotional expressiveness are essential aspects of virtual character computer animation. For a virtual character to display different emotions, motion capture data conveying each desired style has to be recorded, even if the baseline motion is the same. Animators then have to refine and conjoin each recording in order to create the final animations making it a timely and costly process. Although there have been efforts made into the automatic generation of motions, the problem persists that, for each new desired emotion, reference data displaying said emotion has to be readily available and a new motion has to be learned from scratch. By combining Machine Learning with Emotion Analysis - in particular Laban Movement Analysis and the Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance Emotional State Model - we have developed a system that is capable of not only identifying the perceived emotion of locomotion animations but that also allows users to alter the character's expressed emotion in real time and without the need of additional data.

2022Journal article

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