There was a really old project from mit called conceptnet that I worked with many years ago. It was basically a graph of concepts (not exactly but close enough) and emotions came into it too just as part of the concepts. For example a cake concept is close to a birthday concept is close to a happy feeling.

What was funny though is that it was trained by MIT students so you had the concept of getting a good grade on a test as a happier concept than kissing a girl for the first time.

Another problem is emotions are cultural. For example, emotions tied to dogs are different in different cultures.

We wanted to create concept nets for individuals - that is basically your personality and knowledge combined but the amount of data required was just too much. You'd have to record all interactions for a person to feed the system.

> the concept of getting a good grade on a test as a happier concept than kissing a girl for the first time.

Were the concepts weighted by response counts? I’d imagine a good grade is a happy concept for everyone, but kissing a girl for the first time might only be good for about 50% of people.

Megacool project and your idea. Thanks for sharing.

Were there published results from the project?