Ontological Reasoning to Configure Emotional Voice Synthesis

The adequate representation of emotions in affective computing is an important problem and the starting point of studies related to emotions. There are different approaches for representing emotions, selecting one of this existing methods depends on the purpose of the application. Another problem related to emotions is the amount of different emotional concepts which makes it very difficult to find the most specific emotion to be expressed in each situation. This paper presents a system that reasons with an ontology of emotions implemented with semantic web technologies. Each emotional concept is defined in terms of a range of values along the three-dimensional space of emotional dimensions. The capabilities for automated classification and establishing taxonomical relations between concepts are used to provide a bridge between an unrestricted input and a restricted set of concepts for which particular rules are provided. The rules applied at the end of the process provide configuration parameters for a system for emotional voice synthesis.