[Air-L] emotion detection machine?

Aristea Fotopoulou A.Fotopoulou at brighton.ac.uk
Fri Sep 27 04:42:41 PDT 2019


Dear all, 

Just revisiting this thread, and noticed some folk raised ethical issues
in relation to sentiment analysis and emotional AI. I am looking for
literature on the ethics of research using sentiment analysis tools and
social media data (but also other types of data) and can¹t find much out
there - have you come across anything or, better even, are you working on
these issues?

Andrew, I had a look at your website and approach - the critical issues
you raise are interesting (summed up as 'is this OK?¹) and I¹d like to
know more about how your team answers these questions but I can¹t find any
answers. Are there any papers on methodologies and ethics at all coming
out of the project?

Many thanks,
Aristea



-----------------------------

Dr Aristea Fotopoulou
UKRI-AHRC Innovation Leadership Fellow
PI ART/DATA/HEALTH: Data as creative material for Health & Wellbeing
2019-2021
University of Brighton, School of Media
Watts Building, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4GJ

A.Fotopoulou at brighton.ac.uk |@aristeaf | https://aristeafotopoulou.org
ART/DATA/HEALTH Research project: http://artdatahealth.org
<http://artsdatahealth.org>







On 12/09/2019 11:01, "Air-L on behalf of Charles M. Ess"
<air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of c.m.ess at media.uio.no> wrote:

>Dear all -
>a belated but most sincere thanks for all of this!
>
>I'll bundle up the thread, forward it to my student, and see what sense
>we might be able to make of it all.
>
>Again, many thanks indeed and all best,
>- charles
>
>On 07/09/2019 13:53, Shulman, Stu wrote:
>> Sally,
>> 
>> Machine generated sentiment analysis scores are sometimes abused as a
>> shortcut to avoid certain forms of manual/mental labor in a variety of
>> commercial and academic contexts. Language tools are in this scenario
>> treated as a magic buttons to be deployed against corpora in the name
>>of 
>> charts untouched by serious validation. I prefer it when humans are
>> in-the-loop, which itself is recursive (meaning you repeat until there
>> is no room to improve), using tools as filters to generate purposive
>> samples that humans annotate and collectively validate using a
>> systematic process.
>> 
>> Sentiment problems range from hard to harder and hardest, where hardest
>> means you cannot do it in a manner that can be validated by any means.
>> There is no easy on this scale of tasks if false positive or negatives
>> could cost a life or some other serious consequence, but to make it
>> easier, requires a process, grossly boiled down below:
>> 
>> 1. Collect a relevant and representative corpus of data,
>> 2. Build a SPAM detection classifier to remove non-relevant data (ex.,
>> wrong language OR no discernible sentiment),
>> 3. Build a topic classifier and focus on one key topic first (not all
>> topics at once),
>> 4. Solve the Rubik's cube of how many codes and what they really mean
>> (ex., happy/sad OR angry/frustrated/both/neither...),
>> 5. Test the topic-specific annotation scheme with a group of no less
>> than five independent annotators (not just two),
>> 6. Crowd source the task to larger groups when possible, using memo
>> writing to identify boundary cases that kill/modify models,
>> 7. Use iteration to identify elite annotators through recursive
>> validation, memo reviews, and scoring against a gold standard.
>> 
>> The goal is to build task- and language-specific machine classifiers
>> using the best possible human experts in the process. The main idea,
>> however, is to keep a critical role for humans.
>> 
>> ~Stu
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 4:11 PM Dr. S.A. Applin <sally at sally.com
>> <mailto:sally at sally.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>     Dear Charles (and List),
>> 
>>     I see this as an ethics issue.
>> 
>>     How reliable are ³emotion analysis² tools? How would outcomes from
>>     them be used?
>> 
>>     As you say, there is a lack of clarity in some in terms of
>>     ³explaining emotional categories.²  To me, this signals (along with
>>     obvious knowledge about the limitations and problems with
>>     algorithms), that there is opportunity here to be very, very, very
>>     wrong about people¹s opinions, and any algorithmically interpreted
>>     ³emotional² state.
>> 
>>     For example, how would one interpret or finesse ³frustration,² vs
>>     ³anger²?  The written word is contained within a language. Not all
>>     commenters will be native speakers to that language, and not all
>>     native speakers have the language tools required (even within their
>>     own language) to adequately express themselves, even in the best of
>>     times. What makes anyone think an algorithm would do better at this
>>     than a human trained in qualitative methods and with cultural and
>>     media and language knowledge?
>> 
>>     There is way too much margin of potential error here for this to be
>>     automated, or  ³useful.² It is much more likely that things will be
>>     assumed incorrectly by limited algorithms in the first place.
>> 
>>     Furthermore, does your student see any problem with this exercise?
>>     That their tool analysis might get it very wrong? That the wrong
>>     might lead to assumptions or outcomes that are harmful to entities,
>>     people, governments?
>> 
>>     What safeguards are in place for wrong assumptions and outcomes?
>> 
>>     Kind regards,
>> 
>>     Sally
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>     Sally Applin, Ph.D.
>>     ..........
>>     Research Fellow
>>     HRAF Advanced Research Centres (EU), Canterbury
>>     Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC)
>>     ..........
>>     Research Associate
>>     Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)
>>     Yale University
>>     ..........
>>     Associate Editor, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
>>     Member, IoT Council
>>     Executive Board Member: The Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer
>>Foundation
>>     ..........
>>     http://www.posr.org
>>     http://www.sally.com
>>     I am based in Silicon Valley
>>     ..........
>>     sally at sally.com <mailto:sally at sally.com> | 650.339.5236
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>      > On Sep 5, 2019, at 3:52 AM, Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess at media.uio.no
>>     <mailto:c.m.ess at media.uio.no>> wrote:
>>      >
>>      > Dear colleagues,
>>      >
>>      > One of our students is wanting to analyze emotional content in in
>>     the comment fields of a major newspaper vis-a-vis specific
>>     hot-button issues.
>>      >
>>      > She has a good tool (I think) for scrapping the data - but she is
>>     stymied over the choice of an emotion analysis tool. She has looked
>>     at Senpy (http://senpy.gsi.upm.es/#test) and  Twinword
>>     <https://www.twinword.com/api/emotion-analysis.php> - the latter
>>     seems the most accurate, but it is also expensive.
>>      > She has recently discovered DepecheMood emotion lexicons
>>     (Staiano, J., & Guerini, M. (2014). Depechemood: a lexicon for
>>     emotion analysis from crowd-annotated news. arXiv preprint
>>     arXiv:1405.1605.) - but this suffers from a lack of clarity in terms
>>     of explaining its emotional categories: awe, indifference, sad,
>>     amusement , annoyance, joy, fear and anger.
>>      >
>>      > For my part, I am entirely clueless.  Any suggestions that she
>>     might pursue would be greatly appreciated.
>>      >
>>      > best,
>>      > - charles ess
>>      > --
>>      > Professor in Media Studies
>>      > Department of Media and Communication
>>      > University of Oslo
>>      > <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>
>>      >
>>      > Postboks 1093
>>      > Blindern 0317
>>      > Oslo, Norway
>>      > c.m.ess at media.uio.no <mailto:c.m.ess at media.uio.no>
>>      > _______________________________________________
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>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
>> Founder and CEO, Texifter
>> Cell: 413-992-8513
>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartwshulman
>> 
>
>-- 
>Professor in Media Studies
>Department of Media and Communication
>University of Oslo
><http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>
>
>Postboks 1093
>Blindern 0317
>Oslo, Norway
>c.m.ess at media.uio.no
>_______________________________________________
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