EML

Those of you who are used to analysing sentiment will know it’s no easy task—even though some of our dashboards automate certain processes for us.

Programs are not good at understanding natural language and we have to configure them to recognise specific words that indicate different types of emotion and sentiment.

Through some recent poking around I have discovered that W3C have been working to develop Emotion Markup Language via the W3C Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group.

Their take on it is:

Emotion-oriented (or “affective”) computing is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format. Although several non-standard markup languages containing elements of emotion annotation have been proposed, none of these languages have undergone thorough scrutiny by emotion researchers, nor have they been designed for generality of use in a broad range of application areas.

The Emotion Incubator Group will discuss and propose scientifically valid representations of those aspects of emotional states that appear to be relevant for a number of use cases. The group will condense these considerations into a formal draft specification.

The formation of EML ties nicely into the work W3C are doing with semantics. It will be quite a while before these standards are fully developed and adopted, but this layer of additional data will—at some point—make our jobs easier.