Emotion detection in dialog systems: Applications, strategies and challenges

Emotion plays an important role in human communication and therefore also human machine dialog systems can benefit from affective processing. We present in this paper an overview of our work from the past few years and discuss general considerations, potential applications and experiments that we did with the emotional classification of human machine dialogs. Anger in voice portals as well as problematic dialog situations can be detected to some degree, but the noise in real life data and the issue of unambiguous emotion definition are still challenging. Also, a dialog system reacting emotionally might raise expectations with respect to its intellectual abilities that it can not fulfill.