[Aleader-dev] Re: direction

[William L. Jarrold]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 09, 2003 at 03:36:34PM -0500, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> > On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
> > > One more note: For easy of discussion I assume "emotion" =
> > > "affective state".]

<...>

> I took a look at LIWC.  It looks like a superficial approach to NLP.
> I guess LIWC would easier than integrating with Erik Mueller's
> ThoughtTreasure or KM.  On the other hand, I tend to prefer the deeper
> approach, even if it takes more effort.
>
> OK, maybe it's not impossible, even with my modest computing resources.
> It sounds like a lot of work though.  I feel like I have already done
> too much work without any pay-off.  I am eager to grab some low-hang
> fruit.  After a few bananas, I'm willing to re-consider all the
> options.

Agreed.  There may be a very large low hanging fruit involving LIWC.
I mentioned one such idea in an email I sent not long ago today.

Maybe even ThoughtTreasure.

>
> > You might also be interested in the CASP and the DANVA.
> > Both of these are instruments that neuropsychologist type people
> > who I work with at UT use.  And these instruments are used to
> > detect impairments with social cue perception.
>
> Yah, I can definitely see applications for Aleader here.  If we
> published the right type of article and tweak the software a bit
> then it should be an easy sell.  I see that DANVA costs $250.
> If we start some kind of mail-order business then I bet we can
> get at least one order per month.  ;-)

Yes.  More likely we'll have to go through an educational distributor.
I'm finding that I have connections to a few.  Whatever, I need to stop
dreaming and start building and doing.

>
> > Inferring emotion from prosody is something much different than
> > the logical cognitive models that my dissertation was about.  But
> > your system is capable of assessing someone's prosodic perception.
> > But your formal system is miles away from modeling prosodic perception.
> > The kind of formal system for that is more like a markov process,
> > a neural network...something that handles non-digital, non-symbolic
> > representations.
>
> Well .. my main interest is in empirically validating the Aleader
> aspraisal model.  Assessing prosodic perception does not really
> interest me.  On the other hand, all my source code is GPL'd so
> anyone is welcome to work on it.

Hmm, I thought you were interested in prosody.  If you aren't, then
I think you'd be happy with representing textual stories and teaching a
computer to infer the affect.

>
> In an eariler email, you mentioned Clark Elliott.  I guess I find his
> research a little bit strange.  According to my philosophical beliefs,
> what is important is to teach people how to recognize the
> meaning of emotion.  Teaching computers how to express emotion
> doesn't seem very interesting.  I think John McCarthy would agree
> with me.

Why do you invoke McCarthy here?

I haven't looked at Clark's stuff in a long while but since he was a
student of Ortony's I'd think he'd be more interested in appraisal than
expression of emotion.

>
> A question about attribution:  I took some of your email and dropped
> it into the Aleader manual, almost verbatim: "A given personality in a
> given film clip may be depicting several different emotions at once."
> Do you care about this?  I don't mind adding your name somewhere.  Let
> me know if I should do something.

How about this...If you could thank me in the acknowledgements....I really
should stop this email back and forth and go to the latest manual and
re-read it and see if I'd be comfortable with co-author....If you are
about to this document to anyone, I might wanna be alerted to as to hop to
and see if I want my name on it.

>
> [And now back to today's back & forth.]
>
> > not good for getting published.  Much ink has been spilled on what
> > is an emotion.  We need to have a good definition.
>
> No doubt.  If we need to discuss the definition of "emotion" then
> let's discuss it.

I say lets adopt the OCC definition or maybe it was defined in
referential structure of affective lexicon and then make up our own term
-- affective state.

>
> > Part of making a good definition is to say what our definition is NOT.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > The following
> > blurb shows how Ortony et al have defined emotion.  This is an excerpt
> > from my master's thesis (well, technically it is from my prospectus) that
> > was commented out from the final version...
> >
> > %The first step in this process is defining emotions as affectively
> > %valenced construals of situations.  However, they define emotion as
> > %distinct subset of affect. (actually this is not from [OCC] but rather
> > %from [Ortony, Clore and Foss 1987a]) The best examples of emotions are
> > %those that a) refer to internal, mental conditions as opposed to
> > %external or physical ones, b) are clear cases of states (I'm not exactly
> > %sure what they mean by this), c) and have affect as opposed to behavior
> > %or cognition as predominant focus.  As these constraints are relaxed,
> > %one gets non-emotions or poorer examples of emotions.  Though the
>
> This is probably wrong, but I am tempted to write "a summary of
> the Aleader appraisal instructions."

Huh?  Why could it be wrong to summarize something?  I think it would be
v helpful to summarize them.

> It is tautological that
> we are including all the emotions which can arise from any
> situation which can provide answers to our appraisal questions.
> Erm ..

I'm loosing you here.

>
> One point which may be helpful is that Aleader emotions
> happen "outside" in the sense that the emotion is a relation
> between two people.  I speculate that Damasio has targetted
> his emotion research from the opposite angle, trying to
> measure the _physiology_ of emotion (& maybe thinking).
> I'm not very familiar with Damasio's work, so I'm just
> guessing here.

Hmm, you are defining emotion differently than OCC.  I'm a little anxious
about defining emotion as a "relation between two people."  You'll have to
say more.  Enemy, blood brother and step-child are also relations between
people but are not emotions...C'mon please, pretty please can we use the
OCC defn of emotion? (-;

>
> > ...As I recall OCC has a nice blurb on how "abandoned" does not refer to
> > an emotion.  Our paper should say that although "abandoned" does not refer
> > to an Ortony like emotion but it does refer to an affective state.
>
> Yah, that's a nice tie-in.  I have taken note.

And hopefully maybe shoved such a note into some Aleader related writing?


>
> > > > I don't see haughty as being a sub-case of admires, unless admires
> > > > includes self-admiration?
> > >
> > > To be precise, the appraisal category is:
> > >
> > >   "I am _expecting_ you to admire me."
> > >   (I=Will, you=Chuckie, spoken in a pushy tone of voice)
> >
> > OCC states that admiration, by definition, involves one person to feel
> > good about something that another has/does.  The emoter is focusing on
> > the praiseworthiness of another's role in some situation.  The emoter
> > finds that the admired person is upholding some kind of standard.  I find
> > this to be a good coherent definition of the emotion (and the affective
> > state) referred to by the word "admiration".
>
> Yes, that is exactly how Aleader defines the general category of
> admiration.  However, Aleader leaves the point-of-view unspecified.
> It sounds like OCC style admiration is always from the admirer's
> point-of-view.  To contrast, Aleader considers the point-of-view
> (the admirer or the admired) as a refinement of admiration.

Huh?  But the experience of the admirer or the admired are completely
different!  So they are completely different emotions being experienced.
No?

Hmm, on the outside chance...maybe this is a cultural difference in the
way Americans vs Indians think about emotions (but I thought maybe you
were American...whatever).

Okay I have got to stop here.  I will respond to the rest of this soon.

Bill

>
> > As you state, the "You think I'm afraid of you big fuck" clip is about
> > Will expecting Chuckie to admire him.  I agree with that statement well
> > enough for current purposes.  However, I will add that the affective
> > state depicted is *related to* admiration but it does not fit the OCC
> > definition of admiration.  Will is *expecting* Chuckie to admire him.
> > Will is *not* focusing on the praiseworthiness of Chuckie's comportment
> > in this situation.
>
> I think you meant: "_Chuckie_ is *not* focusing on the praiseworthiness
> of _Will's_ comportment in the situation." (Will and Chuckie are
> reversed?)
>
> > Expectations fit in via standards based emotions such
> > as admiration and reproach.  E.g. people are expected to hold up the
> > standard of "exhibit good manners" or "don't lie" or "don't kill people."
> > Back to the example at hand, Will is expecting Chuckie to admire him.
> > Will is sitting there like, "come on you fuck, admire me!" and Chuckie is
> > not complying with this expectation.  In fact, I think Will is feeling the
> > opposite of admiration.  He is feeling reproach in this situation.
>
> Are you saying that Will's
>
> 1. comment is a reaction to his prior feeling of reproach
> 2. comment is an expression of reproach
> 3. he feel reproach after making his comment
>
> ?  (Roughly, I'm asking you to clarify "phase" in Aleader terms.)
>
> > Will
> > expects his friends to uphold the standard of admiring those who deserve
> > to be admired.  And Will believes that he is deserving of admiration.
> > Chuckie is "just sitting there".  So, Will perceives Chuckie's role
> > as violating the standard/expectation of "Admire those who deserve to be."
> > According to OCC, if someone focuses thought on a another's
> > blameworthiness with respect to a given standard/expectation and these
> > thoughts are "above threshold" (kind of a handwave for present purposes)
> > THEN reproach is felt.
> >
> > Hmm, let me do a "parity check" here to make sure we are on sort of in
> > sync....
>
> Yah, sounds reasonable.  I bet you'll pick [1] from the list above,
> but maybe not ...
>
> > The original line from the film is "You think I'm afraid of you
> > big fuck." [a] Does "you" refer to Chuckie or Will?  Joshua, you
> > basically stated that subtext of [a] was "I (Will) am _expecting_
> > you(Chuckie) to admire me."  Correct?
>
> Correct.
>
> > Hmm, I used the word "parity check".  Not sure if you have had the right
> > courses/self study to know what I am referring.
>
> Yah, I know a little bit about digital circuit design.  While in
> junior college, I built a simple counter with wires, chips and
> solder.  It was fun.
>
> > What kinds of classes did you take at CMU?
>
> I finished two years of a four year software engineering &
> math program.
>
> I left because the courses increasingly seemed irrelevant to
> what I was really interested in.  Somehow I am not very good
> at doing things which don't interest me.
>
> > Any significant self-study beyond that?
>
> Yah, tons.  That's one of the reasons I got bored at college.
> I was forced to take courses like "How to program in C" while I
> was working with a team to write a multi-user Star Trek game in
> my spare time.  ;-)
>
> Maybe I should have applied for a PhD program or something,
> but it never entered my mind.
>
> > Now that I think of it, what computer languages do you know?
>
> My favorites are C and Perl.  I also know Borne Shell, C++ (ugh),
> Bison, Lex, PCCTS, Lisp/Scheme, Prolog, Pascal, SML, Haskell,
> and a bunch of others which I temporarily forgotten.
>
> The question you should ask is: what computer languages do
> you _not_ know?  Well .. KM, except that I almost know it
> now because I read the manuals.
>
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "funny cases".  I don't think there
> > are another other elements to be added to the above 3 element list.
>
> Good then.  Maybe the list won't expand.
>
> > > Which reminds me ... I have tried to explain this next point
> > > a few times.  Tell me if you understand (or if you already
> > > understood previously):
> >
> > Thanks for asking.  Questions like this seem to be causing me to feel
> > hopeful optimism about our working together.  (-:
>
> In an attempt to increase your comfort level further, I would like
> to point out that I have some experience doing team projects:
>
>   http://search.cpan.org/author/JPRIT/
>
> The "Event" module is the most popular.  While I did most of the
> coding, grep'ing the ChangeLog shows about 25 contributors to the
> project.
>
> > So, to answer your question about your next point.  I sort of understood
> > it but not entirely.  And I understand it slightly better having read
> > the paragraph below.  However, I still have some lack of understanding.
> > See my questions below.
>
> Let's keep going until it's crystal clear.
>
> > This helps.  If you haven't already, put the above paragraph in your
> > writings near the beginning.
>
> Done.
>
> > However, you will need more.  There are three big open issues
> > here.  There is:
> >
> > Issue 1: "What rules govern cognitive appraisal?"  (I.e. for a given agent
> > how can we predict the affective states experienced for a given set of
> > perceptions).
> >
> > Issue 2: "What rules govern affective mindreading a.k.a. cognitive
> > empathy?"
> >
> > Issue 3: "Are there answers to issues 1 and 2 that can be consciously or
> > deliberately used by people for the purposes of personal growth."
>
> I'm not sure whether I understand the issue questions.  I'll
> give it a try though:
>
> Issue 1: I've tried to spell-out the rules in the Aleader manual
> in the Classification chapter.  Doing a KR model of the appraisal
> process would probably help to make the written instruction more
> precise.
>
> Issue 2: For Aleader, I think we need to flip this around: "Do
> the rules which govern cognitive empathy apply to our own personal
> cognitive appraisal process?"  I have been assuming all along
> that the answer is simply "yes".  Am I naive?  I'm not sure how
> to discuss this issue, whose other opinion, compare, contrast??
>
> Issue 3: I don't want to tackle this until I get some feedback
> about whether I understand issues 1 & 2.
>
> > Please mention these issues your (our?) writings.  You (me too!)
> > hypothesize that pursuing issue 3 is worth trying.  Nonetheless, it could
> > turn out that the answers to Issues 1 and 2 are so complex, so
> > non-intuitive that there's not much personal growth that can be obtained.
> >
> > Please mention something like the above (copy it in is fine with me for
> > present purposes) to the relevant part of your (our) writings.
>
> OK .. it probably goes in the introduction somewhere.
>
> > > > My intuition tells me that you are into both the researchy and the
> > > > personal growth aspects of this CD.  However, my intuition also tells
> > > > me that you have not yet developed separate strategies for these two
> > > > aspects.
> > >
> > > Correct.
> >
> > Great.  We have at least some resonance then.  Bill's
> > hopefullness/optimism potential just went up another notch.
>
> Cool.
>
> I just want to emphasize again that my ears are wide open.
> Suggest how to make the project more scientific-ish and
> I'll probably go for it.  If I forget, remind me.
>
> (The only thing I don't want to do is literally _destroy_ the
> writings I've done on philosophy and religion.  I don't expect
> you to suggest that though.)
>
> > > My main worry with putting the whole thing on a web site is that
> > > I'll attract a cease & desist court-order for broadcasting
> > > copywrited material (the films).
> >
> > Well, you don't *have* to use films that have big expensive lawyers
> > behind them, right?  I mean you can shoot your own.  You can find films
> > that actually *want* more distribution.  There are plenty of well made
> > films that are very emotionally evocative.  Student films are a good
> > example.
>
> I selected the films quite a while ago.  At the time, I was
> concerned about fine-tuning the appraisal model.  I selected a
> film for two reasons:
>
> + I felt like the emotional portrayals reflected reality.
>
> + I liked the film enough that was willing to watch it hundreds
> or thousands of times.
>
> Unfortunately I didn't seriously consider re-distribution rights.
>
> 20/20 hindsight ...
>
> I am ready to analyze re-distributable films.  Can you recommend
> any?  My downlink is 8kbytes per sec so I'm not going to be much
> help in solving this problem.  The films should be at least one
> hour long.  We'll analyze only the first 20 minutes.
>
> Once we get new films, it will take time to go through
> the analysis.  I estimate that 20 minutes of film takes me
> about a week to analyze.  I wonder if we can put together
> an initial article using material only on the existing CD?
>
> I guess it depends how many human subjects we can corral from
> our respective colleges.
>
> > > (Can you imagine my state of mind before I figured out how to make
> > > a bootable CD?  I had this cool project, but it was impossible to
> > > show to anyone!)
> >
> > Are you saying that distribution via CD is legal but on the web is
> > illegal?  (If so I would feel at least slightly surprised if that were
> > true).
>
> I have been acting according to the belief (correct or not) that
> the chance I'll draw a lawsuit is proportional to how much noise
> I make about giving away films.  At this point, I'm just seeking
> serious collaborators.  If we use a web site to collect test
> results for a research study then a lot more people are going to
> notice what we're doing.
>
> > A nice thing about a conference is that the bar for participation can be
> > lower.  You can sometimes get by with just a proposal -- and get good
> > feedback on how to improve it.  Or you can get by with more preliminary
> > data from a recently executed proposal.
>
> Sure, but I don't want to do a lot of expensive air-travel unless
> it is _really_ going to be worth it.  Round-trip USA-India tickets
> are about $1200 per seat (minimum) plus VISA hassels.  Europe is
> somewhat cheaper, but not much.
>
> Contrast that with my extended family's yearly cost-of-living
> of about $6000.  Do the math.  ;-)
>
> > > The other point is that, as an academic outsider, I suspect I
> > > will learn a lot from the publication process.  I bet my whole
> > > presentation will improve tremendously just by immersing myself
> > > in academic procedures and protocol.
> >
> > Yes.  Btw, my advisor said that reviewers anonomously review stuff.  Thus,
> > to the extent that anonymity really can be preserved, it should not matter
> > that you are not part of the academic regime.
>
> Yah, a research article seems like the way to go.
>
> > > Hrm, will a "human subjects review" also apply to any
> > > Indian subjects?
> >
> > Ask the professor with whom you meet.
> >
> > By the way, these issues fall under "scientific research ethics." So, if
> > you intelligently use that phrase in your language (e.g. with your
> > professor) you will seem more like an insider, less like some whacko that
> > the prof needs to be worried about.
>
> OK, I put it on my list.
>
> > > + Read my comments on Roseman96.  I emailed them yesterday.  If you
> > > didn't receive them then let me know.  I'll re-send.
> >
> > Eek.  I have not read this yet.  I believe I saw it in my mailbox.
>
> Here's another reminder.  ;-)
>
> > I'm happy enough with our
> > current modus operandi.  The key is to focus on deliverable writings --
> > proposals, drafts.  Many important nuggets are in the above email.
>
> Agreed.
>
> --
> .. Sensual .. Perceptual .. Cognitive .. Emotional .. Oh My!
>