Taxonomy-Based Detection of User Emotions for Advanced Artificial Intelligent Applications

Catching the attention of a new acquaintance and empathize with her can improve the social skills of a robot. For this reason, we illustrate here the first step towards a system which can be used by a social robot in order to "break the ice" between a robot and a new acquaintance. After a training phase, the robot acquires a sub-symbolic coding of the main concepts being expressed in tweets about the IAB Tier-1 categories. Then this knowledge is used to catch the new acquaintance interests, which let arouse in her a joyful sentiment. The analysis process is done alongside a general small talk, and once the process is finished, the robot can propose to talk about something that catches the attention of the user, hopefully letting arise in him a mix of feelings which involve surprise and joy, triggering, therefore, an engagement between the user and the social robot.