Affect and Interaction in Agent-Based Systems and Social Media: Guest Editors Introduction

Abstract

[EN] Today¿s Internet is evolving toward an open society of humans and computational entities, where intelligent agent systems increasingly support the interaction between users and computational components. In this scenario, affect plays a key role, with functions that span from creating and maintaining interpersonal relations, to establishing cooperation and trust. Artificial systems¿which can act as both actors and facilitators of these interactions¿are more and more requested to integrate affective components in order to achieve truly realistic social behaviors and foster the creation of bonds with the users, with timely reactions to their affective input and appropriate expressions of affect. Achieving this integration requires to understand and reproduce the role of affect in human expressive capabilities, and to account for affect-related phenomena (e.g., sentiment, emotions, and mood) that engage social abilities, such as empathy, and expressive means, such as irony. The expectation for complex phenomena such as empathy and irony is that effective approaches require an interdisciplinary approach and, above all, the integration of representational models and data-oriented processing techniques. The aim of this special section is to bring together leading research on computational models of affect-related phenomena in interactions occurring either in social media or agent-based systems, by attaining cross-fertilization between two relevant perspectives: on the one hand, research on agent architectures and cognitive models, mainly concerned with the integration of affective states into agents and open to the creation of virtual and embodied agents; on the other hand, research on techniques for sentiment analysis and opinion mining, mainly focused on the processing of affective information in social media, typically (but not only) expressed through text. The integration of models and methods between the two perspectives can open the way to the development of a new generation of social and interactive applications that leverage the affective dimension to promote improved, spontaneous technologymediated interactions, including human¿computer and human¿human interactions, on small and large scale. Our goal here is to provide an overview of the open research challenges for the community of researchers interested in analyzing and modeling the interplay between affect and interaction in agent-based systems and social media, as well as an introduction to the special section. The rest of the article is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses a set of research challenges relevant in the context of this special issue, Section 3 briefly introduces the articles included in this ACM TOIT special section. Section 4 concludes the article.