Sentic Avatar: Multimodal Affective Conversational Agent with Common Sense

Abstract

The capability of perceiving and expressing emotions through different modalities is a key issue for the enhancement of human-computer interaction. In this paper we present a novel architecture for the development of intelligent multimodal affective interfaces. It is based on the integration of Sentic Computing, a new opinion mining and sentiment analysis paradigm based on AI and Semantic Web techniques, with a facial emotional classifier and Maxine, a powerful multimodal animation engine for managing virtual agents and 3D scenarios. One of the main distinguishing features of the system is that it does not simply perform emotional classification in terms of a set of discrete emotional lables but it operates in a continuous 2D emotional space, enabling the integration of the different affective extraction modules in a simple and scalable way.