Identifying emotion by keystroke dynamics and text pattern analysis

Abstract

Emotion is a cognitive process and is one of the important characteristics of human beings that makes them different from machines. Traditionally, interactions between humans and machines like computers do not exhibit any emotional exchanges. If we could build any system that is intelligent enough to interact with humans that involves emotions, that is, it can detect user emotions and change its behaviour accordingly, then using machines could be more effective and friendly. Many approaches have been taken to detect user emotions. Affective computing is the field that detects user emotion in a particular moment. Our approach in this paper is to detect user emotions by analysing the keyboard typing patterns of the user and the type of texts (words, sentences) typed by them. This combined analysis gives us a promising result showing a substantial number of emotional states detected from user input. Several machine learning algorithms were used to analyse keystroke timing attributes and text pattern. We have chosen keystroke because it is the cheapest and most available medium to interact with computers. We have considered seven emotional classes for classifying the emotional states. For text pattern analysis, we have used vector space model with Jaccard similarity method to classify free-text input. Our combined approach showed above 80% accuracies in identifying emotions.

Keywords:

• human–computer interaction
• affective computing
• emotion detection
• keystroke dynamics
• machine learning
• text pattern analysis
• vector space model