Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software. 1. Introduction In our previous work, we have developed virtual drama improvisational software for young people age 14–16 to engage in role-playing situations under the improvisation of loose scenarios. The human users could be creative at their roleplays. A human director normally monitors the improvisation to ensure that the human actors have kept the general spirit of the scenarios. In order to reduce the burden of the human director, we have developed an affect detection component, EMMA (emotion, metaphor, and affect), on detecting simple and complex emotions, meta-emotions, value judgments, and so forth. This affect sensing component has been embedded in an intelligent agent, which interacts with human users and plays a minor role with the intention to stimulate the improvisation. In one session, up to 5 characters are involved in. The affect sensing component can detect 25 affective states in our previous development [1]. Metaphorical language has also been intensively used to convey emotions and feelings in the collected transcripts during the testing. The work presented here reports further developments on metaphor interpretation and affect detection for several particular metaphorical expressions with affect implication, which include affects as physical objects metaphor (“anger ran through me,” “fear drags me down”), food metaphor (“X is walking meat”, “Lisa has a pizza face”, and “you are a peach”), animal and size metaphor (“X is a fat big pig”, “shut ur big fat mouth”) and anger metaphor (“she exploded completely”, “he fired up straightaway”, and “she heated up just as fast”). Size metaphor also plays an important role in indicating affect intensities. We have detected these several metaphorical language phenomena using decision tree, na？ve Bayes classifier, and support vector machine with the assistance of syntactic parsing and semantic analysis. WordNet and WordNet-affect domains have