Subject: Introducing the Logical Language Group

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 18:37:04 -0500

[Prenote for lojban-list members: the Human Markup Language
web page is at http://humanmarkup.org]

This is to introduce the Logical Language Group to the Human
Markup Language effort. For the past 40+ years, the LLG and
its predecessors have been engaged in making a *fully explicit*
language for human communication. (Don't get hung up on the
word "logical" in our title; we *use* predicate logic but
we are not limited by it.) Our Web page is at http://www.lojban.org .

As part of this effort, we have devised a mechanism for expressing,
rather than stating or predicating, human emotions. Essentially,
short words formed mostly of vowels only are used to "decorate"
plain statements to supply the emotional or discursive context
for them.

In order to move from an abstract design to a fully functional
language, we have had to create a taxonomy of emotions. It seems
to me (speaking for myself, not the LLG) that adopting this
taxonomy would make a useful starting point for the HumanML
effort, at least for the following fields of expression:

attitudes/emotions (both propositional and "pure")
evidentials ("how the speaker know")
discourse functions
speech acts

We have nothing special to provide on gestures.

Our general design identified 39 emotional or attitudinal
scales. Each scale has end-points which can be thought of as
opposing emotions/attitudes, such as "surprise...expectation".
If you are surprised at something, you are not at all expecting it,
and vice versa. There is also a zero point on each scale, which in
this case can be labeled "no surprise": something which is neither
surprising nor expected.

Just 39 emotional scales are obviously not enough for completeness.
Starting with a much longer list, we were able to subcategorize our 39
emotions by employing 6 general categories and 8 more restricted
ones. The general categories can be applied to subdivide almost any
emotion. For example, "physical" is a general category and so is
"social": we can distinguish between physical caution (keeps you from
jumping off the roof) and social caution (keeps you from making
rude comments in a loud voice in public). The restricted
categories can formally be applied to any of the emotional
scales, but may only be useful with some.

Somewhat arbitrarily, we subdivide each scale into 7 points:
very negative, negative, slightly negative, neutral, slightly
positive, positive, very positive. For example, the scale
"pride...shame" has the points "very proud", "proud", "slightly
proud", "modest", "slightly ashamed", "ashamed", and "very
ashamed". The English words we use to describe the scales
don't always exactly fit the pure notion of a scale, which
is intended to take precedence.

The general model therefore is that one's emotional state is a
set of tuples {E x C x S}, where E is a principal emotion,
C is a general or restricted category, and S is a point on its scale.
By expressing the complete set of tuples, one can give one's
entire emotional state, but of course it will be typical to
express just a few. For completeness, we augment E with the
neutral or unspecified attitude/emotion, which can be used
to express a category or scale-point by itself when the
emotion is obvious.

Grammatically, we allow the attachment of an emotion to any amount of
text or speech, from a single word to a whole document or discussion.
This agrees well with hierarchical markup of documents.

I don't wish to overwhelm the HumanML (I favor this form, BTW) community
with too much detail all at once. The writeup at
http://www.lojban.org/files/reference-grammar/chap13.html
may not be very comprehensible out of its context, and is focused
on the specifics of the Lojban language rather than the design.
I will therefore enter into specifics about emotions and the
other categories mentioned above in future postings, assuming the
HumanML response is not too negative. (I am quite
prepared to be told that my efforts are premature or off the
point.)

-- 
There is / one art || John Cowan <[email-masked]>
no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein