NAT: Towards an Emotional Agent

Emotions play an essential role in human behavior. It can be expressed in body language, facial expression, hand gesture, text, and many other ways. While recognizing emotions in human-human interaction is important, some individuals lack this ability. This is the case for individuals who have specific disabilities, for example, people diagnosed with autism, who may suffer from the inability to recognize emotions on faces, text, and figures. Some studies concentrate on developing approaches to assist individuals with this disability. In this regard, one can mention the studies dedicated to creating emotional agents to help in the recognition of emotions. However, there is a gap in studies that focus on the Portuguese language. This article presents an approach to bridge this gap by creating an emotional agent capable of processing voice and text in Portuguese. According to the sentiment present in words, the agent exhibits the emotions Joy, Sadness, and Neutral in a light-emitting diode matrix. Initial experiments indicate that it is possible to display these emotions based on the words' sentiments.