Human Emotion: A Survey focusing on Languages, Ontologies, Datasets, and Systems

Abstract

AbstractEmotions are an essential part of a person’s mental state and influence her/his behavior accordingly. Consequently, emotion recognition and assessment can play an important role in supporting people with ambient assistance systems or clinical treatments. Automation of human emotion recognition and emotion-aware recommender systems are therefore increasingly being researched. In this paper, we first consider the essential aspects of human emotional functioning from the perspective of cognitive psychology and, based on this, we analyze the state of the art in the whole field of work and research to which automated emotion recognition belongs. In this way, we want to complement the already published surveys, which usually refer to only one aspect, with an overall overview of the languages ontologies, datasets, and systems/interfaces to be found in this area. We briefly introduce each of these subsections and discuss related approaches regarding methodology, technology, and publicly accessible artefacts. This comes with an update to recent findings that could not yet be taken into account in previous surveys. The paper is based on an extensive literature search and analysis, in which we also made a particular effort to locate relevant surveys and reviews. The paper closes with a summary of the results and an outlook on open research questions.