Experts to research cyber emotions

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The CyberEmotions consortium is a European Commission funded project to look at the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking up e-communities.

The four-year research project involves nine partner institutions in six different countries in Europe, including the Cybermetrics research group at the University of Wolverhampton. Taking part from Wolverhampton are Professor Mike Thelwall, Dr Kevan Buckley, Dr Di Cai, Dr Georgios Paltoglou, and Sukhvinder Uppal.

The Wolverhampton team of researchers will be analysing online text to identify emotions. They will then create programs to automatically detect emotion in text, by initially using human input to identify emotion in text and then training the computer programs to identify the same emotions.

Professor Thelwall, Professor of Information Science at the School of Computing and Information Technology, said: “This research could have implications for chatrooms and social networking sites, such as MySpace. The system could step in if people become too emotional or upset and can also provide a way of identifying people who need some form of help.”

The project was launched in Warsaw and is funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, Future and Emerging Technologies initiative.

The consortium is coordinated by Warsaw University of Technology and the other partners are: EPFL (Switzerland); The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence – OFAI; ETH Zurich; Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana; Jacobs University, Bremen; TU Berlin; Gemius SA (Poland). The project involves experts in the psychology of emotions, complexity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

See also: http://www.cyberemotions.eu/

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