This study analyzes emotions established between people while interacting in face-to-face conversation. By focusing on empathy and antipathy, especially the process by which they are perceived by external observers, this paper aims to elucidate the tendency of their perception and from it develop a computational model that realizes the automatic inference of perceived empathy/antipathy. This paper makes two main contributions. First, an experiment demonstrates that an observer's perception of an interacting pair is affected by the time lags found in their actions and reactions in facial expressions and by whether their expressions are congruent or not. For example, a congruent but delayed reaction is unlikely to be perceived as empathy. Based on our findings, we propose a probabilistic model that relates the perceived empathy/antipathy of external observers to the actions and reactions of conversation participants. An experiment is conducted on ten conversations performed by 16 women in which the perceptions of nine external observers are gathered. The results demonstrate that timing cues are useful in improving the inference performance, especially for perceived antipathy.

In this paper, we discuss the issue of empathy-inducing effect brought by Japanese Haiku, regarded as the world-shortest poetry. Its condensed form of word combination sometimes arouses deep impression and empathy in readers. Its possibilities as communication media would be enhanced in multimedia contexts, when considering educational purpose or cross-cultural interchanges. An experimental result is shown for evaluating multimedia effect on combined presentation of a CG drawing and its associated haiku in English. We confirmed that various aspects of visual impression and empathy were sometimes enhanced with certain haiku text as linguistic stimuli, compared with the condition of viewing a CG drawing only. The reason of raised empathy was analyzed from the various aspects of the content provided by the associated haiku text complementary for the drawing. Moreover, we examined the effects of poetic styles on subjects' empathy, using Japanese prose and conventional haiku style (5-7-5 syllabic rhyme), both of them were translated from the same haiku in English.

Naturalness of expressions reflects various pragmatic factors in addition to grammatical factors. In this paper, we discuss relations between expressions and two pragmatic factors: a point fo view of speaker and a hierarchical relation among participants. Degree of empathy" and class" is used to express these pragmatic factors as one-dimensional notion. Then inequalities and equalities of them become conditions for selecting natural expressions. The authors of this paper formulate conditions as principles about lexical and syntactical constraints, and have implemented a sentence generation grammar using the unification grammar formalism.