Praiseworthy Acts Recognition Using Web-based Knowledge and Semantic Categories

In this paper we1 introduce our novel method for utilizing web mining and semantic categories for determining automatically if a given act is worth praising or not. We report how existing lexicons used in affective analysis and ethical judgement can be combined for generating useful queries for knowledge retrieval from a 5.5 billion word blog corpus. We also present how semantic categorization helped the proposed method to finally achieve 94% of agreement with human subjects who decided which act, behavior or state should be praised. We also discuss how our preliminary findings might lead to developing an important social skill of a robotic companion or an automatic therapist during their daily interaction with children, elderly or depressed users.