Design and Analysis of a Human–Machine Interaction System for Researching Human’s Dynamic Emotion

Dynamic emotion is typically used to facilitate human–machine interactions. Conversational data from social media contain a considerable amount of useful information, and such data are the foundation for researching dynamic and artificial emotion. At present, most human–machine interaction systems focus on the complexity and accuracy of the dialog but neglect the emotional characteristics of the speaker. When generating a dialog considering the emotional personality of the interlocutor, controlling, and guiding the dialog to a specified direction are essential. This article presents a system for studying dynamic emotions in human-computer interaction from the perspective of emotional transfer and guidance. Based on the emotional state of the interlocutor and the distribution of emotional transfer, the process of emotional transfer is simulated and sampled, and the sequence of emotional guidance is generated. In this system, two algorithms are proposed. A generative Markov chain Monte Carlo (GEN-MCMC) algorithm is proposed to generate a variety of emotional transfer sequences that fit the talke’s personality dynamically based on the real-world dialog. Further, a guiding MCMC (GUI-MCMC) algorithm-based GEN-MCMC is proposed to generate the emotional guiding sequences. The generated emotional sequences by GEN-MCMC were evaluated in two aspects: 1) consistency and 2) diversity. The experimental results show that the GEN-MCMC algorithm performs better than the general sequence generation algorithm in terms of consistency and diversity in generating emotional states. The GUI-MCMC was able to generate a proper stimulus sequence when given the first and target emotions. An emotional stimulus sequence can simulate the emotional transfer of the interlocutor in the process of dialogue, and give the observer appropriate reference to guide and control the emotions of dialogue. The experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively model the dynamic emotion in emotional transfer and guidance, which can be further used to build chat robots, intelligent assistants, and human–machine interaction systems. The models can also be used for emotional induction and enhance the feel-good or feel-terrible factor in human–machine communication applications, such as medical treatment of mental diseases, interrogation, and psychological attack and defense.