Towards semantic and affective coupling in emotionally annotated databases

Emotionally annotated databases are repositories of multimedia documents with annotated affective content that elicit emotional responses in exposed human subjects. They are primarily used in research of human emotions, attention and development of stress-related mental disorders. This can be successfully exploited in larger processes like selection, evaluation and training of personnel for occupations involving high stress levels. Emotionally annotated databases are also used in multimodal affective user interfaces to facilitate richer and more intuitive human-computer interaction. Multimedia documents in emotionally annotated databases must have maximum personal ego relevance to be the most effective in all these applications. For this reason flexible construction of subject-specific of emotionally annotated databases is imperative. But current construction process is lengthy and labor intensive because it inherently includes an elaborate tagging experiment involving a team of human experts. This is unacceptable since the creation of new databases or modification of the existing ones becomes slow and difficult. We identify a positive correlation between the affect and semantics in the existing emotionally annotated databases and propose to exploit this feature with an interactive relevance feedback for a more efficient construction of emotionally annotated databases. Automatic estimation of affective annotations from existing semantics enhanced with information refinement processes may lead to an efficient construction of high-quality emotionally annotated databases.