Automatic Annotation of Corpora For Emotion Recognition Through Facial Expressions Analysis

The massive adoption of social networks has made available an unprecedented amount of user-generated content, which may be analyzed in order to determine people's opinions and emotions on a large variety of topics. Research has made many efforts in defining accurate algorithms for the analysis of emotions conveyed by texts, however their performance often relies on the existence of large annotated datasets, whose current scarcity represents a major issue. The manual creation of such datasets represents a costly and time-consuming activity and hence there is an increasing demand for techniques for the automatic annotation of corpora. In this work we present a methodology for the automatic annotation of video subtitles on the basis of the analysis of facial expressions of people in videos, with the goal of creating annotated corpora that may be used to train emotion recognition algorithms. Facial expressions are analyzed through machine learning algorithms, on the basis of a set of manually-engineered facial features that are extracted from video frames. The soundness of the proposed methodology has been evaluated through an extensive experimentation aimed at determining the performance on real datasets of each methodological step.