The ontology of emotion

Katrina E Triezenberg, Purdue University

Abstract

Nirenburg and Raskin's (2004) ontological semantics has been developed and implemented in applications sporadically for nearly fifteen years. Expansion of the resources (the ontology and the lexicons, for the most part, though some work has been done on the fact database and onomasticon) has focused on single domains. Special domain expansion, on a reasonably detailed level, is a vast research opportunity waiting to be explored---in fact, a new kind of field linguistics in which the acquirer discovers the structure of his world, and that this structure is not always immediately obvious, and then represents natural language meaning in terms of the elements of that structure. It is therefore reasonable, at this point in time, to formulate some kind of a methodology or heuristics for constructing a domain. How does one discover the structure of a domain; how does one gather together all of the necessary ideas, actions, and objects associated with it? This project is to outline heuristics and methodologies for domain acquisition, and to wade into the sticky waters of subjectivity---into the domain of emotions. It is proposed that the ontology of emotion should be based, primarily, on Plutchik's (1994) three-dimensional analysis of emotions (sometimes called the "emotional solid.") The study creates a formal semantic theory of emotion for use in the text processing system, formulate a methodology for domain acquisition, improve the ontology as a whole by using multidisciplinary sources, create the possibility of unifying, comparing, and comprehending all different approaches to the study of emotion on the basis of their implied ontological semantic foundation, and prepare a difficult domain for multiple applications.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Raskin, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics

COinS