Expanding the Role of Affective Phenomena in Multimodal Interaction Research

In recent decades, the field of affective computing has made substantial progress in advancing the ability of AI systems to recognize and express affective phenomena, such as affect and emotions, during human-human and human-machine interactions. This paper describes our examination of research at the intersection of multimodal interaction and affective computing, with the objective of observing trends and identifying understudied areas. We examined over 16,000 papers from selected conferences in multimodal interaction, affective computing, and natural language processing: ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, AAAC International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. We identified 910 affect-related papers and present our analysis of the role of affective phenomena in these papers. We find that this body of research has primarily focused on enabling machines to recognize or express affect and emotion; there has been limited research on how affect and emotion predictions might, in turn, be used by AI systems to enhance machine understanding of human social behaviors and cognitive states. Based on our analysis, we discuss directions to expand the role of affective phenomena in multimodal interaction research.