Towards affective state modeling in narrative and conversational settings

We carry out two studies on affective state modeling for communication settings that involve unilateral intent on the part of one participant (the evoker) to shift the affective state of another participant (the experiencer). The first investigates viewer response in a narrative setting using a corpus of documentaries annotated with viewer-reported narrative peaks. The second investigates affective triggers in a conversational setting using a corpus of recorded interactions, annotated with continuous affective ratings, between a human interlocutor and an emotionally colored agent. In each case, we build a “onesided” model using indicators derived from the speech of one participant. Our classification experiments confirm the viability of our models and provide insight into useful features.