NLP for Affective Science: Exploring Fundamental Questions on Emotions through Language and Computation

AbstractAffect refers to the fundamental neural processes that generate and regulate emotions, moods, and feeling states. Affect and emotions are central to how we organize meaning, to our behaviour, to our health and well-being, and to our very survival. Despite this, and even though most of us are all intimately familiar with emotions in everyday life, there is much we do not know about how emotions work, and how they impact our lives. Affective Science is a broad interdisciplinary field that explores these and other related questions about affect and emotions.Since language is a powerful mechanism of emotion expression, there is great potential in using language data and computation to shed light on fundamental questions about emotions. However, even though much progress has been made in areas such as sentiment analysis and affective computing, much of the research focus is squarely on automatically classifying pieces of text. In this tutorial, we will present an introduction to Affective Science and argue that NLP is uniquely positioned to contribute to it: to boldly explore a new frontier — to use language and computation to ask fundamental questions about how emotions and affect work. We will cover the broad areas of research within this nascent field of study - Computational Affective Science (CAS).