Extending the Chain: Humor and Emotions in Human Computer Interaction
Pawel Dybala, Michal Ptaszynski, Rafal Rzepka, Kenji Araki
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2010.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v1n3/3.pdf
Abstract:
The issues of humor and emotions are strongly related to each other. Their role is recently being appreciated by HCI researchers, and numerous scientific ventures are launched to investigate this subject from various perspectives. Among others, research projects exist focusing on implementing humor generators into conversational systems, in order to facilitate their interaction with humans. In such research, evaluation experiments are often focused, if not limited to, examining usersâ€™ emotive reactions towards systems (both during and after the interactions). However, in HHI (Human- Human Interaction),humor is often used, be it intentionally or subconsciously, in reaction to interlocutorâ€™s emotions, in order to change them from negative to positive, as, for instance, anxiety into joy, or at least reduce the degree of negativity . This was showed in numerous research, mostly in the field of psychology. Thus, it can be said that in HHI, both emotions preceding and following humorous acts are taken into consideration, while most research in HCI focus only on the latter, thus representing what we call a â€œtwostage approachâ€ to humor and emotions. In this paper we first describe current state of the art in the field of research on humor and emotions, propose to distinguish two types of approach to relation between these two issues, next we compare existing research on this matter in HHI (psychology) and HCI, and describe our research progress. In our project, launched to construct a humor-equipped conversational system, we developed a system, which 1) analyses usersâ€™ emotions during the interaction, 2) uses humor as a reaction to usersâ€™ particular emotional states, and 3) analyses their reactions to it. Thus, the system represents what we defined as a â€œmulti-stage approachâ€ to humor and emotions, taking into consideration usersâ€™ emotive states both before and after humorous stimuli. We present the results of experiments conducted to evaluate our systemâ€™s performance, and propose an idea of a user-adapting humor sense model, in which the humor-emotion chain can be extended even further.