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In the following paper, we investigated the usefulness of future reference sentence patterns in the prediction of the unfolding of future events. To obtain such patterns we first collected sentences that have any reference to the future from newspapers and Web news. Based on this collection, we developed a novel method for automatic extraction of frequent patterns from such sentences. The extracted patterns, consisting of multilayer semantic information and morphological information, were implemented in the formation of a general model of linguistically expressed future. To fully assess the performance of the proposed method we performed a number of evaluation experiments. In the first experiment, we evaluated the automatic extraction of future reference sentence patterns with the proposed extraction algorithm. In the second set of experiments, we estimated the effectiveness of those patterns and applied them to automatically classify sentences into future referring and other. The final model was then tested for performance in retrieving a new set of future reference sentences from a large news corpus. The obtained results confirmed that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art method in fully automatic retrieval of future reference sentences. Lastly, we applied the method in practice to confirm its usefulness in two tasks. The first is to support human readers in the everyday prediction of unfolding future events. In the second task, we developed a fully automatic prototype method for future prediction and tested its performance using the tasks included in the official Future Prediction Competence Test. The results indicate that the prototype system outperforms natural human foreseeing capability.

The ways of how people communicate on the Internet have adapted to the limited communication channel. Since the most meaning-rich while also concise and compressible mean of communication is still represented by textual information, Internet communication has adapted to support it with other information required for natural communication, while retaining the consistency of the medium. One of the means widely used by many generations of Internet users are the emoticons, used to express information that cannot be fully transmitted only by text, such as emotions or feelings. However, not all emoticons developed and widely used everyday are easily understandable to all users. Emoticon usage proficiency differs among specific persons, as well as between more general user groups. Moreover, the meaning of emoticons themselves can also be ambiguous, especially, when used without other information. In this research, we aimed to determine a correspondence between emoticons and linguistic expressions corresponding to them, such as onomatopoeia, etc., to estimate the general level of meaning ambiguity of emoticons. In the research, we first performed a survey in which we asked users about which emoticon conveys which meaning. Then we applied the results of the survey to quantify the understandability, or meaning ambiguity, of the emoticons. Based on the quantification, we propsed a method for specifying the emoticon’s meaning ambiguity, in which we applied the aility of the emotion to be expressed in everyday vocabulary, or its linguistic expressibility. Three versions of the proposed method showed that it is possible to estimate emoticon meaning ambiguity, although future experiments and additional data collection is required to maximize the performance. The method could help users apply more meaningful and understandable emoticons in their everyday communication.

In this paper, we study language used by suicidal users on Reddit social media platform. To do that, we firstly collect a large-scale dataset of Reddit posts and annotate it with highly trained and expert annotators under a rigorous annotation scheme. Next, we perform a multifaceted analysis of the dataset, including: (1) the analysis of user activity before and after posting a suicidal message, and (2) a pragmalinguistic study on the vocabulary used by suicidal users. In the second part of the analysis, we apply LIWC, a dictionary-based toolset widely used in psychology and linguistic research, which provides a wide range of linguistic category annotations on text. However, since raw LIWC scores are not sufficiently reliable, or informative, we propose a procedure to decrease the possibility of unreliable and misleading LIWC scores leading to misleading conclusions by analyzing not each category separately, but in pairs with other categories. The analysis of the results supported the validity of the proposed approach by revealing a number of valuable information on the vocabulary used by suicidal users and helped to pin-point false predictors. For example, we were able to specify that death-related words, typically associated with suicidal posts in the majority of the literature, become false predictors, when they co-occur with apostrophes, even in high-risk subreddits. On the other hand, the category-pair based disambiguation helped to specify that death becomes a predictor only when co-occurring with future-focused language, informal language, discrepancy, or 1st person pronouns. The promising applicability of the approach was additionally analyzed for its limitations, where we found out that although LIWC is a useful and easily applicable tool, the lack of any contextual processing makes it unsuitable for application in psychological and linguistic studies. We conclude that disadvantages of LIWC can be easily overcome by creating a number of high-performance AI-based classifiers trained for annotation of similar categories as LIWC, which we plan to pursue in future work.

In this paper, we present a Deep Learning-based system for the support of information triaging on Twitter during emergency situations, such as disasters, or other influential events, such as political elections. The system is based on the assumption that a different type of information is required right after the event and some time after the event occurs. In a preliminary study, we analyze the language behavior of Twitter users during two kinds of influential events, namely, natural disasters and political elections. In the study, we analyze the credibility of information included by users in tweets in the above-mentioned situations, by classifying the information into two kinds: Primary Information (first-hand reports) and Secondary Information (second-hand reports, retweets, etc.). We also perform sentiment analysis of the data to check user attitudes toward the occurring events. Next, we present the structure of the system and compare a number of classifiers, including the proposed one based on Convolutional Neural Networks. Finally, we validate the system by performing an in-depth analysis of information obtained after a number of additional events, including an eruption of a Japanese volcano Ontake on 27 September 2014, as well as heavy rains and typhoons that occurred in 2020. We confirm that the methods works sufficiently well even when trained on data from nearly 10 years ago, which strongly suggests that the model is well-generalized and sufficiently grasps important aspects of each type of classified information.

5.1 The socialized conversational agent algorithm With already started attempts of combining the systems described above, we decided to combine them all and make the next step on the path to a naturally chatting agent. As the first step we decided to implement the following algorithm (see Figure 7): first, the emotive recogniser tries to categorize the emotion included inside the user's utterance. Here

Accessibility and economic sustainability of public bus services (PBS) have been in a continuous decline in Japan’s countryside. Rural cities also suffer from population transformation toward industrial centers experiencing rapid economic growth. In the present study, we reviewed the current demand status of PBS in Kitami, a rural city in Japan that hosts a national university. The investigation was performed by examining students’ daily lives using a survey to collect data representing a portion of the population. The objective was to predict the change in demand rate for PBS concerning the necessities of everyday life from the perspective of university students as potential users of PBS. Intuitively, decision-makers at every level display a distinct prejudice toward alternatives that intend to change the long-lasting status quo, hence in the question sequence, a two-step verification probe was used to reveal a person’s actual perceived opinion. Accordingly, the respondents’ initial demand rate for PBS was around 60%, however, this score increased to 71% in the secondary confirmation. Afterward, using machine learning-based prediction methods, we could predict this demand at over 90% of F-measure, with the most reliable and stable prediction method reaching 80% by other daily life indicators’ weight. Finally, we supplied thorough evidence for our approach’s usability by collecting and processing the data’s right set regarding this study’s objective. This method’s highlighted outcomes would help to reduce the local governments’ and relevant initiatives’ adaptability time to demands and improve decision-making flexibility.

In this paper we present our research devoted to the development of Natural Language Processing technologies for the Ainu language, a critically endangered language isolate spoken by the Ainu people, the native inhabitants of northern parts of the Japanese archipelago. In particular, we focused on improving the existing tools for transcription normalization, word segmentation (tokenization) and part-of-speech tagging. In the experiments we applied two Ainu language dictionaries from different domains (literary and colloquial) and created a new data set by combining them. The experiments confirmed the positive effect of these modifications on the overall performance of the tools, especially with objective samples unrelated to the training data. We also discuss further improvements obtained by applying corpus-driven language models to the problem of word segmentation and using a state-of-the-art tool for training part-of-speech taggers.

E-mail is a communication tool widely used by people of all ages on the Internet today, often in business and formal situations, especially in Japan. Moreover, Japanese E-mail communication has a set of specific rules taught using specialized guidebooks. E-mail literacy education for many Japanese students is typically provided in a traditional, yet inefficient lecture-based way. We propose a system to support Japanese students in writing E-mails to superiors (teachers, job hunting representatives, etc.). We firstly make an investigation into the importance of formal E-mails in Japan, and what is needed to successfully write a formal E-mail. Next, we develop the system with accordance to those rules. Finally, we evaluated the system twofold. The results, although performed on a small number of samples, were generally positive, and clearly indicated additional ways to improve the system.

We study the effectiveness of Feature Density (FD) using different linguistically-backed feature preprocessing methods in order to estimate dataset complexity, which in turn is used to comparatively estimate the potential performance of machine learning (ML) classifiers prior to any training. We hypothesise that estimating dataset complexity allows for the reduction of the number of required experiments iterations. This way we can optimize the resource-intensive training of ML models which is becoming a serious issue due to the increases in available dataset sizes and the ever rising popularity of models based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The problem of constantly increasing needs for more powerful computational resources is also affecting the environment due to alarmingly-growing amount of CO2 emissions caused by training of large-scale ML models. The research was conducted on multiple datasets, including popular datasets, such as Yelp business review dataset used for training typical sentiment analysis models, as well as more recent datasets trying to tackle the problem of cyberbullying, which, being a serious social problem, is also a much more sophisticated problem form the point of view of linguistic representation. We use cyberbullying datasets collected for multiple languages, namely English, Japanese and Polish. The difference in linguistic complexity of datasets allows us to additionally discuss the efficacy of linguistically-backed word preprocessing., Comment: 73 pages, 4 figures, 19 tables, Information Processing and Management, Vol. 58, Issue 5, September 2021, paper ID: 102616

Irony and sarcasm detection is considered a complex task in Natural Language Processing. This paper set out to explore the sarcasm and irony on Twitter, using Machine Learning and Feature Engineering techniques. First we review and clarify the definition of irony and sarcasm by discussing various studies focusing on the terms. Next the first experiment is conducted comparing between various types of classification methods including some popular classifiers for text classification task. For the second experiment, different types of data preprocessing methods were compared and analyzed. Finally, the relationship between irony, sarcasm, and cyberbullying are discussed. The results are interesting as we observed high similarity between them.

We describe our attempt to apply a state-of-the-art sequential tagger – SVMTool – in the task of automatic part-of-speech annotation of the Ainu language, a critically endangered language isolate spoken by the native inhabitants of northern Japan. Our experiments indicated that it performs better than the custom system proposed in previous research (POST-AL), especially when applied to out-of-domain data. The biggest advantage of the model trained using SVMTool over the POST-AL tagger is its ability to guess part-of-speech tags for OoV words, with the accuracy of up to 63%.

We developed a supporting solution for “cyberbullying” prevention based on recent discoveries in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. Cyberbullying, defined as using the Internet to humiliate and slander other people has become a serious problem. In Japan members of the Parent–Teacher Association manually perform Web monitoring to stop cyberbullying activities. Unfortunately, reading through the whole Web manually is an impossible task. Although the complexity of cyberbullying makes it a problem unsolvable solely with the help of technology, we found that technology could make cyberbullying prevention more efficient. We developed a novel method of automatic detection of cyberbullying entries on the Internet. In the method we use seed words from three categories to calculate a semantic orientation score and then maximize the relevance of categories. The proposed method outperformed baseline settings in both laboratory and real world conditions. The developed system was deployed and tested in practice. After a year of testing we noticed a greater than 30 percent-point-drop in its performance. We hypothesize on the reasons for the drop. To regain the lost performance and retain it in the future we propose additional improvements including automatic acquisition and filtering of seed words. Experimentally selected optimal improvements regained much of the lost performance.

This paper presents game information analysis by utilizing a digital scorebook system, as the first tool for curling informatics, which supports coaches and players in realizing smart tactics and strategies in the sport of curling. Our research project, called “Curling Informatics,” aims to develop an environment to support curling strategies and tactics by realizing methods to record game information, perform analysis, and provide visualization and sharing of the information.We found a significant correlation between the differences in shot accuracies and scores from game information collected by our digital scorebook system for more than 200 games played by the Japanese national class. The results suggest that the difference in shot accuracies is related to the difference in game scores. This is valuable new knowledge to support strategic/tactical planning in curling games. However, the correlation for games involving world-class teams becomes weaker than for the Japanese national class because there is scarcely any difference in shot accuracies.

In this paper we introduce HEMOS (Humor-EMOji-Slang-based) system for fine-grained sentiment classification for the Chinese language using deep learning approach. We investigate the importance of recognizing the influence of humor, pictograms and slang on the task of affective processing of the social media. In the first step, we collected 576 frequent Internet slang expressions as a slang lexicon; then, we converted 109 Weibo emojis into textual features creating a Chinese emoji lexicon. In the next step, by performing two polarity annotations with new “optimistic humorous type” and “pessimistic humorous type” added to standard “positive” and “negative” sentiment categories, we applied both lexicons to attention-based bi-directional long short-term memory recurrent neural network (AttBiLSTM) and tested its performance on undersized labeled data. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the state-of-the-art methods in predicting sentiment polarity on Weibo, the largest Chinese social network.

Pictograms (emoticons/emojis) have been widely used in social media as a mean for graphical expression of emotions. People can express delicate nuances through textual information when supported with emoticons, and the effectiveness of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is also improved. Therefore it is important to fully understand the influence of emoticons on CMC. In this paper, we propose an emoticon polarity-aware recurrent neural network method for sentiment analysis of Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In the first step, we analyzed the usage of 67 emoticons with racial expression used on Weibo. By performing a polarity annotation with a new “humorous type” added, we have confirmed that 23 emoticons can be considered more as humorous than positive or negative. On this basis, we applied the emoticons polarity in a Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) for sentiment analysis of undersized labelled data. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the precision for predicting sentiment polarity on Weibo.

The paper presents a method of optimizing Quantitative Learner’s Motivation Model with the use of genetic algorithm. It is focused on optimizing the formula for prediction of learning motivation by means of different weights for three values: interest, usefulness in the future and satisfaction. For the purpose of this optimization, we developed a C++ library that implements a genetic algorithm and an application in C# which uses that library with data acquired from questionnaires enquiring about those three elements. The results of the experiment showed improvement in the estimation of student’s learning motivation.

The problem of humiliating and slandering people through Internet, generally defined as cyberbullying (later: CB), has been recently noticed as a serious social problem disturbing mental health of Internet users. In Japan, to deal with the problem, members of Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) perform Internet Patrol – a voluntary work by reading through the whole Web contents to spot cyberbullying entries. To help PTA members we propose a novel method for automatic detection of malicious contents on the Internet. The method is based on a brute force search algorithm-inspired combinatorial approach to language modeling. The method automatically extracts sophisticated sentence patterns and uses them in classification. We tested the method on actual data containing cyberbullying provided by Human Rights Center. The results show our method outperformed previous methods. It is also more efficient as it requires minimal human effort.

In everyday life people use past events and their own knowledge to predict future events. In such everyday predictions people use widely available resources (newspapers, Internet). This study focused on sentences referring to the future, such as the one below, as one of such resource.

This paper presents our research on automatic annotation of a five-billion-word corpus of Japanese blogs with information on affect and sentiment. We first perform a study in emotion blog corpora to discover that there has been no large scale emotion corpus available for the Japanese language. We choose the largest blog corpus for the language and annotate it with the use of two systems for affect analysis: ML-Ask for word- and sentence-level affect analysis and CAO for detailed analysis of emoticons. The annotated information includes affective features like sentence subjectivity (emotive/non-emotive) or emotion classes (joy, sadness, etc.), useful in affect analysis. The annotations are also generalized on a two-dimensional model of affect to obtain information on sentence valence (positive/negative), useful in sentiment analysis. The annotations are evaluated in several ways. Firstly, on a test set of a thousand sentences extracted randomly and evaluated by over forty respondents. Secondly, the statistics of annotations are compared to other existing emotion blog corpora. Finally, the corpus is applied in several tasks, such as generation of emotion object ontology or retrieval of emotional and moral consequences of actions.

This paper presents our research in detection of emotive (emotionally loaded) sentences. The task is defined as a text classification problem with an assumption that emotive sentences stand out both lexically and grammatically. The assumption is verified exper- imentally. The experiment is based on n-grams as well as more sophisticated patterns with disjointed elements. To deal with the sophisticated patterns a novel language modelling algorithm based on the idea of language combinatorics is applied. The results of experiments are explained with the standard means of Precision, Recall and balanced F-score. The algorithm also provides a refined list of most frequent sophisticated patterns typical for both emotive and non-emotive context.

Ainu is a critically endangered language spoken by the native inhabitants of northern Japan. This paper describes our research aimed at the development of technology for automatic processing of text in Ainu. In particular, we improved the existing tools for normalizing old transcriptions, word segmentation, and part-of-speech tagging. In the experiments we applied two Ainu language dictionaries from different domains (literary and colloquial) and created a new data set by combining them. The experiments revealed that expanding the lexicon had a positive impact on the overall performance of our tools, especially with test data unrelated to any of the training sets used.

Word segmentation is an essential task in automatic language processing for languages where there are no explicit word boundary markers, or where space-delimited orthographic words are too coarse-grained. In this paper we introduce the MiNgMatch Segmenter&mdash, a fast word segmentation algorithm, which reduces the problem of identifying word boundaries to finding the shortest sequence of lexical n-grams matching the input text. In order to validate our method in a low-resource scenario involving extremely sparse data, we tested it with a small corpus of text in the critically endangered language of the Ainu people living in northern parts of Japan. Furthermore, we performed a series of experiments comparing our algorithm with systems utilizing state-of-the-art lexical n-gram-based language modelling techniques (namely, Stupid Backoff model and a model with modified Kneser-Ney smoothing), as well as a neural model performing word segmentation as character sequence labelling. The experimental results we obtained demonstrate the high performance of our algorithm, comparable with the other best-performing models. Given its low computational cost and competitive results, we believe that the proposed approach could be extended to other languages, and possibly also to other Natural Language Processing tasks, such as speech recognition.

This paper introduces an early stage of a smart toy development project which combines several techniques to achieve a level of conversational skills and knowledge higher than currently available robots for children. We describe our ideas and achievements for three modules which we treat as the most important - topic unlimited talking engine, emotions recognizer and the moral behavior analyzer. We will also mention our novel evaluation method for freely speaking agents and possibilities of adding another module - an automatic joke generator. Index Terms—Intelligent systems, common sense, affect analysis, machine ethics

This paper presents our research in text-based affect analysis (AA) of narratives. AA represents a task of estimating or recognizing emotions elicited by a certain semiotic modality. In text-based AA the modality in focus is the textual representation of language. In this research we study particularly one type of language realization, namely narratives (e.g., stories, fairy tales, etc.). Affect analysis within the context of narratives is a challenging task because narratives are created of different kinds of sentences (descriptions, dialogs, etc.). Moreover, different characters become subjects of different emotional expressions in different parts of narratives. In this research we address the problem of person/character related affect recognition in narratives. We propose a method for emotion subject extraction from a sentence based on analysis of anaphoric expressions and compare two methods for affect analysis. We evaluate the system and discuss its possible future improvements.

In this paper, we present our progress so far in realization of project aimed to create a complex, modular humor-equipped conversational system. By complex, we mean that it should be able to: (1) detect users’ emotions, (2) detect users’ humorous behaviors and react to them properly, (3) generate humor according to users’ emotive states and (4) learn each user’s individual sense of humor. The research is conducted in Japanese. We chose puns as a relatively computable genre of humor. We describe a general outline of our system, as well as its four modules: humor detection module, emotion recognition module, response generator module and individualisation module. We present the algorithm of systems used in each module, along with some evaluation results.

This paper presents POST-AL, the first part-of-speech tagger for Ainu language. The system uses a hand-crafted dictionary based on Ainu narratives ''yukar''. The system provides three types of information: word/token, part of speech, and translation of the token (in Japanese). Evaluation on a training set provided positive results. The system could be useful in a great number of tasks related to the research on Ainu language, such as content analysis or translation, which till now have been done mostly manually.

The evaluation of subjective aspects of HCI, such as human-likeness, likeability or users' emotions towards computers is still quite a neglected issue, especially in the field of non-task oriented conversational systems (chatterbots). In this paper we try to bridge this gap by proposing a new methodology of evaluation. The methods presented were tested in our research on humor-equipped chatterbots. We describe them in details, discuss their drawbacks and usability. In one of the presented methods we used an emotiveness analysis system, which itself can be considered an AI tool, as it was used to detect users' emotions towards conversational systems, and to perform their automatic evaluation. We also propose some methods that we have not used yet, which, however, seem applicable in this field, such as brain scanning techniques. Finally, we give some ideas that should be addressed in the future.

Japan's domestic travel and tourism industry expenditure has been declining gradually since 1998 (from 33.5 in 1998 to 21.6 trillion JPY in 2016). Our research purpose is to construct a data analysis model to transform the collected data to a meaningful graphical format by using big data analytics techniques to discover anomalies and sustainable development possibilities for economy and tourism of Japan's rural areas, with a particular focus on the prefecture of Hokkaido, subprefecture of Okhotsk. To strengthen the reliability of this model we apply popular Monte Carlo simulation combined with Bayesian statistic and implement it on an Apache Spark platform to acquire results within the span of the study. Through this research, we focus on observing and analyzing interests, expectations and tendencies of Japanese people living in rural areas. From such collected information, we can obtain reasons for the decline of this sector’s impact on Japan’s economy. Measuring public awareness has become more efficient since the content generator role has been passed on to ordinary people. Therefore, the analysis of Big Data with the use of data science techniques has become important to comprehend human behavior from multiple points of view, including the scientific, economic, political, historical and sociological.

This paper presents CAO, a system for affect analysis of emoticons in Japanese online communication. Emoticons are strings of symbols widely used in text-based online communication to convey user emotions. The presented system extracts emoticons from input and determines the specific emotion types they express with a three-step procedure. First, it matches the extracted emoticons to a predetermined raw emoticon database. The database contains over 10,000 emoticon samples extracted from the Web and annotated automatically. The emoticons for which emotion types could not be determined using only this database, are automatically divided into semantic areas representing “mouths” or “eyes,” based on the idea of kinemes from the theory of kinesics. The areas are automatically annotated according to their co-occurrence in the database. The annotation is first based on the eye-mouth-eye triplet, and if no such triplet is found, all semantic areas are estimated separately. This provides hints about potential groups of expressed emotions, giving the system coverage exceeding 3 million possibilities. The evaluation, performed on both training and test sets, confirmed the system's capability to sufficiently detect and extract any emoticon, analyze its semantic structure, and estimate the potential emotion types expressed. The system achieved nearly ideal scores, outperforming existing emoticon analysis systems.

In this paper we present an innovative work on a multiagent joking conversational system. In our research so far we have shown that implementing humor into a chatterbot can visibly improve its performance. The results presented in this paper are the outcome of the next step of our work. They show that a multiagent system, combining a conversational agent, a pun generator and an emotiveness analysis engine, works reasonably well in interactions with users. In the setup used in this research, the emotiveness analysis agent analyses users' utterances and decides whether it is appropriate to tell a pun. Depending on the results of this analysis, the agent chooses either the pun generator, if the decision is that a joke should be told, or the non-humor-equipped agent when the decision is different. Two evaluation experiments were conducted: user (first person) focused and automatic (emotiveness-analysis-based). In both, we compared the performance of the multiagent joking system and a baseline (non-humorous) conversation agent. The results show that in both cases the humor-equipped engine was evaluated as better than the baseline agent. The results are discussed and some ideas for the future are given.

We propose a method for affect analysis of textual input in Japanese supported with Web mining. The method is based on a pragmatic reasoning that emotional states of a speaker are conveyed by emotional expressions used in emotive utterances. It means that if an emotive expression is used in a sentence in a context described as emotive, the emotion conveyed in the text is revealed by the used emotive expression. The system ML-Ask (Emotive Elements / Expressions Analysis System) is constructed on the basis of this idea. An evaluation of the system is performed in which two evaluation methods are compared. To choose the most objective evaluation method we compare the most popular method in the field and a method proposed by us. The proposed evaluation method was shown to be more objective and revealed the strong and weak points of the system in detail. In the evaluation experiment ML-Ask reached human level in recognizing the general emotiveness of an utterance (0.83 balanced F-score) and 63% of human level in recognizing the specific types of emotions. We support the system with a Web mining technique to improve the performance of emotional state types extraction. In the Web mining technique emotive associations are extracted from the Web using co-occurrences of emotive expressions with morphemes of causality. The Web mining technique improved the performance of the emotional states types extraction to 85% of human performance.

In this research we focus on discriminating between emotive (emotionally loaded) and non-emotive sentences. We define the problem from a linguistic point of view assuming that emotive sentences stand out both lexically and grammatically. We verify this assumption experimentally by comparing two sets of such sentences in Japanese. The comparison is based on words, longer n-grams as well as more sophisticated patterns. In the classification weuse a novelunsupervised learning algorithm based on the idea of language combinatorics. The method reached results comparable to the state of the art, while the fact that it is fully automatic makes it more efficient and language independent.

Emoticons are string of symbols representing body language in text-based communication. For a long time they have been considered as unnatural language entities. This chapter argues that, in over 40-year-long history of text-based communication, emoticons have gained a status of an indispensable means of support for text-based messages. This makes them fully a part of Natural Language Processing. The fact the emoticons have been considered as unnatural language expressions has two causes. Firstly, emoticons represent body language, which by definition is nonverbal. Secondly, there has been a lack of sufficient methods for the analysis of emoticons. Emoticons represent a multimodal (bimodal in particular) type of information. Although they are embedded in lexical form, they convey non-linguistic information. To prove this argument the authors propose that the analysis of emoticons was based on a theory designed for the analysis of body language. In particular, the authors apply the theory of kinesics to develop a state of the art system for extraction and analysis of kaomoji, Japanese emoticons. The system performance is verified in comparison with other emoticon analysis systems. Experiments showed that the presented approach provides nearly ideal results in different aspects of emoticon analysis, thus proving that emoticons possess features of multimodal expressions.

Humor processing is still a less studied issue, both in NLP and AI. In this paper we contribute to this field. In our previous research we showed that adding a simple pun generator to a chatterbot can significantly improve its performance. The pun generator we used generated only puns based on words (not phrases). In this paper we introduce the next stage of the system's development—an algorithm allowing generation of phrasal pun candidates. We show that by using only the Internet (without any hand-made humor-oriented lexicons), it is possible to generate puns based on complex phrases. As the output list is often excessively long, we also propose a method for reducing the number of candidates by comparing two web-query-based rankings. The evaluation experiment showed that the system achieved an accuracy of 72.5% for finding proper candidates in general, and the reduction method allowed us to significantly shorten the candidates list. The parameters of the reduction algorithm are variable, so that the balance between the number of candidates and the quality of output can be manipulated according to needs.

By our demonstration we want to introduce our achievements in combining different purpose algorithms to build a chatbot which is able to keep a conversation on any topic. It uses snippets of Internet search results to stay within a context, Nakamura's Emotion Dictionary to detect an emotional load existence and categorization of a textual utterance and a causal consequences retrieval algorithm when emotive features are not found. It is also able to detect a possibility to make a pun by analyzing the input sentence and create one if timing is adequate.

This paper contains the results of evaluation experiments conducted to investigate if implementation of a pun generator into a non-task oriented talking system improves the latter's performance. We constructed a simple joking conversational system and conducted one user evaluation experiment and two third person evaluation experiments. The results showed that humor does have a positive influence on the dialogue between humans and computers. The implications of this fact and problems that occurred during the research are discussed. We also propose how they can be solved in the future.

In this paper we propose a novel method for automatic evaluation of conversational agents. The method is based on analyzing the userpsilas affect conveyed in utterances. From analyzing: the userpsilas general emotional engagement in the conversation and the emotion types conveyed by the user in the conversation, a simple psychological reasoning is derived about the userpsilas sentiment about the agentpsilas performance. The evaluation experiment on two Japanese-speaking conversational agents showed the same tendencies in the results returned by the system constructed on the proposed method and the userpsilas opinion about the two agents checked in the afterward survey. Thus the method can be used for evaluation of Japanese-speaking conversational agents.

This paper presents a novel method for estimating speaker's affective states based on two contextual features: valence shifters and appropriateness. Firstly, a system for affect analysis is used to recognise specific types of emotions. We improve the baseline system with the analysis of Contextual Valence Shifters (CVS), which determine the semantic orientation of emotive expressions. Secondly, a web mining technique is used to verify the appropriateness of the recognised emotions for the particular context. Verification of contextual appropriateness of emotions is the next step towards implementation of Emotional Intelligence Framework in machines. The proposed method is evaluated using two conversational agents.