Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic to Translate Emotion Words
From Spanish to English
Abe Kazemzadeh
Abstract— In this paper we describe a methodology that
uses interval type-2 fuzzy logic to translate words that refer
to emotions from Spanish to English. We build on previous
research that aimed to map between emotional labels used in
different natural language corpora. In this paper we extend
our previous work by showing how a similar method can be
used to translate between languages. First, we show how this
methodology relates to other fuzzy logic emotion research, then
we describe it, and finally show it in use and discuss its results.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In writing this paper, we have several goals. The first and
most obvious of these goals is to describe the experiment
we conducted using interval type-2 fuzzy logic predicates
to represent emotion words in English and Spanish for
the purpose of translation. Second, we want to review for
the benefit of the field of fuzzy logic some other ways
that researchers in the field of affective computing have
successfully used fuzzy logic. Finally, we want to continue
to benefit from the insights that new trends in fuzzy logic
may offer by participating in the fuzzy logic community.
This paper is organized as follows. The rest of the in-
troduction section will discuss ways that fuzzy logic has
impacted emotion research and how the experiments we
have conducted fit into this bigger picture. We also briefly
introduce interval type-2 fuzzy logic. In the methodology
section, we describe the experimental setup and the details
of the interval type-2 fuzzy logic we employ. In the results
section, we show the outcome of the experiments in terms
of tables and plots. In the discussion section, we evaluate
the results of the experiment and plan future work. The
conclusion is a review of the main points of the paper.
A. Fuzzy Logic and Affective Computing
Fuzzy logic has been used successfully in emotion re-
search in a number of different ways. This section aims to
introduce these uses of fuzzy logic in emotion research to
readers who may know more about fuzzy logic than affective
computing.
Affective computing [1] is a field of study that aims to
understand human emotions in ways that can be used by
computers. It can be seen as a branch of artificial intelligence,
but its interdisciplinary components are wide ranging. It
borrows from much earlier, non-computational fields such as
biology [2], psychology [3], and philosophy [4]. Though the
Abe Kazemzadeh is with the Department of Computer Sciences and
the SAIL Lab at University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of
Engineering, Los Angeles, CA USA (email: kazemzad@usc.edu ).
computational models developed in affective computing can
be though of as a branch of artificial intelligence, applications
draw upon fields like speech recognition and synthesis,
animation and computer vision, biological signal processing,
data mining, natural language processing, and user interfaces.
These diverse areas make it difficult to give a concise
overview of the field and this difficulty is compounded by
additional factors. The field still in an early stage so it is
changing and in the process of defining itself as it goes. Also,
like in the field of fuzzy logic, different applications can give
rise to different formulations and theories. Moreover, both
fuzzy logic and affective computing aim to model specific
aspects of human behavior and cognition which are highly
variable with respect to person, age, and culture. Our research
in this paper addresses some of these variables because it
attempts to build fuzzy models for words from individual
survey responses, and it aims to translate them to another
language.
Now, let us consider the intersection of fuzzy logic and
affective computing. Here, we mainly consider ways that
fuzzy logic has been used in affective computing. We propose
that this overlap can be broken down into three areas:
sensing, decision systems, and vocabulary.
1) Sensing: When fuzzy logic is used for sensing in
affective computing, the goal is to leverage the ability of
fuzzy logic to map continuous inputs into fuzzy sets through
fuzzification. Specifically, the continuous inputs can be ob-
servations of a human user’s voice, face, biological signals,
and so on, while the fuzzy sets are categories of emotions.
One of the first examples of using fuzzy logic for sensing is
the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) [5], which was
applied to emotion in [6]. This latter study used the fuzzy
logic of FLMP to model perception of emotion through two
modalities, speech and facial expressions. The inputs were
speech and images. The speech was happy or sad and the
images were 11 grades of facial expression between happy
and sad, and the output fuzzy sets were happy or sad. In
[7], the sensory input to the fuzzy system was 21 acoustic
features of speech, including both segmental (phoneme-level)
and suprasegmental (longer term features such as intonation
and speaking rate) and the output fuzzy sets were negative
and non-negative emotions.
In contrast to the previous references of using fuzzy logic
for sensing, [8] maps the sensory inputs to three emotional
dimensions, called primitives, instead of categories. This
representation of emotions as points in space is due to a
theory of emotion called the circumflex model of emotions
[9], where emotions are plotted against axes that represent
primitive emotional characteristics. These are valence, activa-
tion, and dominance (sometimes just the first two are used).
Valence represents a scale of emotions which is between
positive/desirable and negative/undesirable. Activation rep-
resents represents a scale between highly excited and calm
emotions. Dominance represents a scale between emotions
that are aggressive or powerful and ones that are submissive
or weak. In [8] the sensory input of speech features (speak-
ing rate features, spectral features, and intensity features)
were mapped to the fuzzy sets of high,medium,low for
each of features, based on the quantiles of these features.
These input fuzzy sets were mapped to output fuzzy sets,
high,medium,low for the three emotional primitive scales
using rules derived from correlation coefficients between the
input features and output scales. The output of the rules
were then defuzzified to points on these scales using the
centroid method. Some other examples of using fuzzy logic
for sensing in affective computing is classifying the emotion
of music [10],
2) Decision systems: Another use of fuzzy logic in affec-
tive computing is for decision making, either for the explicit
purpose of making decisions, or for the purpose of simulating
natural decision-making behavior. Contrary to the historically
held belief that emotions clouded rational decision making,
researchers now believe that emotions play a fundamental,
principled role in the human decision making process. Emo-
tion theories of this kind differ somewhat from those that
focus on sensing in that instead of taking perceptual data
as a basis for emotions, for example a set of emotions that
correspond to recognizable facial expressions, decision-based
theories have a complex structure that models cognitive and
social behavior. For example, where a sense-based emotion
theory might have the emotion “happy”, a decision based
theory might make distinctions between ‘happy-for”, when
someone is happy about something good that happened to a
friend, “gloating”, when someone is happy about something
bad that happened to an enemy, “satisfaction” when someone
is happy about a confirmed positive event, and “relief”
when someone is happy about a disconfirmed negative event
[11]. An example of how emotions affect decision making
processes can is the relation of pain and fear through memory
[12]. A person who gets hurt in some activity will likely fear
getting hurt again and decide to take preventative measures
in the future.
[13] proposes a model called fuzzy logic adaptive model
of emotions (FLAME) which is based on decision-making
theories of emotion. They implemented an agent-based sim-
ulation of a pet, named PETEEI for “PET with Evolving
Emotional Intelligence”. They used fuzzy logic to represent
emotions and they mapped events and expectations of events
to emotional states and behaviors with a fuzzy logic system
of rules that enabled smooth transitions between states. The
emotional process occurs as follows. First, perceptions from
the environment are evaluated in two steps: the experience
model determines which goals are affected to what degree by
the perceptual event and then fuzzy mapping rules calculate
the overall desirability of the event from the importance
of goals and the degree the event affects them. Then, this
desirability measure is passed to an appraisal process which
updates the agent’s emotional state and triggers any emo-
tional behaviors. Each iteration causes the emotional state to
decay and information is passed to the learning component.
3) Vocabulary: The previous work by authors of this
paper [14] focus on using fuzzy logic not to sense emotion
inputs or act on the environment in an emotional way, but
rather use words as inputs and outputs and use fuzzy logic
to relate between different fuzzy sets that represent words.
In sensing or acting on the environment, the inputs are
fuzzified into fuzzy and outputs are defuzzified from fuzzy
sets to an output value. However, in certain use-cases, such as
interaction between a human and a computer through natural
language, inputs and outputs will need to be words [15]. For
emotions, an example of this is annotated corpora where data
is given some emotional labels or descriptions. Since there
is no single accepted emotional theory for all applications,
many times different approaches will use different emotional
terms as labels. Converting between these different sets of
emotion words would enable corpora which have been la-
beled differently to be used at the same time. Some examples
of the various sets of emotional labels that researchers use
are: {negative, non-negative}, {happy,sad, angry, neutral},
{angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral, sad, surprised},
and {happy-for, resentment, gloating, pity, satisfaction, fears-
confirmed, relief, disappointment, joy, distress, pride, shame,
admiration, reproach, gratification, remorse, gratitude, anger,
love, hate}. If each emotional term of these vocabularies is
represented by a fuzzy set, then it is possible to use similarity
metrics over fuzzy sets [16] to map from a word in one
vocabulary to the most similar word in another vocabulary.
This can serve to achieve a systematic interoperability be-
tween different sets of emotion terms that would otherwise
be incompatible. More will be said about the methodology of
this study in the methodology section because the methodol-
ogy is similar to that of the present paper. The present paper
extends this to the case when the vocabularies are in different
languages.
The work presented in this paper considers the case where
fuzzy logic is used to map from one controlled vocabulary to
another. [17] presents a framework for the more general case
when each word in a natural language sentence is represented
as a fuzzy set for emotion classification.
B. Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic
Here, we briefly introduce interval type-2 fuzzy logic.
Practitioners of fuzzy logic will be familiar with how fuzzy
logic generalizes traditional sets (a.k.a., “crisp” or “type-0”
logic). In this generalization, the binary set membership func-
tions of traditional sets was extended to a continuous range
between in [0,1]. This formulation of fuzzy sets, currently the
most prevalent, is known as type-1 fuzzy sets. Type-2 fuzzy
logic further extends the generalization by defining a mem-
bership functions value to be a distribution in [0,1], which
captures uncertainty in the membership function’s value [15].
However, full type-2 fuzzy logic systems add much more
computational complexity, which makes them difficult to
use in practice. Interval type-2 fuzzy logic uses intervals
to capture uncertainty in the membership [18]. Instead of
a distribution in [0,1] for fully type-2 fuzzy logic systems,
interval type-2 fuzzy logic systems use an interval in [0,1]
to represent an area of equal uncertainty in the membership
function’s value. This area of uncertainty is known as the
footprint of uncertainty. The reduction in complexity from
full type-2 fuzzy sets comes from the fact that interval type-
2 fuzzy sets can be represented as two type-1 membership
functions: an upper membership function, which defines an
interval’s high point, and a lower membership function,
which represents an interval’s low point.
II. M ETHODOLOGY
This section contains two parts. The first covers the web-
based survey that was used to collect data from users.
The second part describes how membership functions were
estimated. The third section describes how the estimated
membership functions were used to create a translation via
a similarity metric on membership functions.
A. Web-Based Interval Survey
The data used to estimate fuzzy sets for emotion words
was obtained through an online survey of 8 native speakers of
Spanish from Spain and Mexico dialects. This type of survey Fig. 1. Web Interface Screenshot
uses interval scales to collect human intuition about fuzzy
predicates, in this case emotions. The survey can be thought
of as a Likert scale with interval values instead of single
points. The methodology of this type of survey is described One example of a difficulty in translation was for the emotion
in [19]. characteristic “valence”. The literal spanish translation is
The survey began by giving the users instructions. Then “valencia”, however this usage is rare compared to the the
the survey sequentially provided the users with emotional name of the third largest Spanish city, Valencia, so the
words as stimuli, which were presented in a randomized “valence” was instead translated as “polaridad”.
order. Below the stimulus, three double ended sliders enabled
the users to define ranges for the three emotion characteris- To establish a mapping from the words of the Spanish
tics, valence, activation, and dominance. These scales were survey to English, we relied on previous experiments that
aligned with a cartoon representation of the scale to help were conducted in English. There were three sets that we
users better understand the somewhat abstract scales. The considered: (1) a set 7 of primary emotions used as labels
scales went from 0 to 10 and the user-selected range in in the IEMOCAP corpus [20], (2) a set of phrases based
this scale was constrained to be one or greater. A screenshot on (1) created by adding the modifying adverbs “very” and
can be seen in figure 1 for the word “agotado”. The double “sort of”, and (3) a set of 40 emotions taken from the most
slider functionality was provided by JQuery UI library for frequent “mood” labels of the blogging site livejournal.com
javascript, while the rest of the interface was created by . A description of these prior experiments can be found
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl (LAMP). The survey in [14]. These sets of output words are henceforth termed
can be found at http://compling.org/fuzzyEmotionEvaluation/ output vocabularies. The members of each vocabulary is as
experiment6 spanish.pl follows: (1) contains angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral,
The overall structure of the survey was much the same sad, surprised, (2) contains (1) plus all of the words except
as in [14], but special care was required for the translation neutral preceded by “very” and “sort of”, and (3) contains
of the instructions and interface elements since the authors accomplished, aggravated, amused, angry, annoyed, anxious,
are not native speakers of Spanish. The first version of the awake, blah, blank, bored, bouncy, calm, cheerful, chipper,
translation was done by a proficient second-language Spanish cold, confused, contemplative, content, cranky, crazy, cre-
speaker and later versions were corrected by Mexican and ative, curious, depressed, disgusted, drained, ecstatic, excited,
Iberian native Spanish speakers. The list of emotion 30 words exhausted, fearful, frustrated, good, happy, hopeful, hungry,
was taken from mental health promotional material from a neutral, okay, pissed off, sad, sick, sleepy, stressed, thought-
Southern California medical service provider (see table I). ful, tired.
 TABLE I
This involves a decision about whether this membership
S PANISH E MOTION W ORDS AND D ICTIONARY T RANSLATIONS
function is an internal or a right or left shoulder. The union
Spanish English of these person specific membership functions defines the
aburrido bored footprint of uncertainty of an interval type-2 fuzzy set. The
agobiado overwhelmed, weighed-down
Matlab code used to estimate the interval type-2 membership
agotado exhausted
functions can be found at [25]
ansioso anxious, impatient,eager, uneasy
apenado grieved, pained, embarrassed C. Fuzzy Similarity Metrics
asqueado disgusted Once we have estimated membership functions from the
asustado scared, frightened
survey data, we can calculate the similarity of each word
avergonzado ashamed, embarrassed
with respect to its membership function. Calculating this
cauteloso cautious
similarity can serve several purposes. A similarity matrix
celoso jealous
between fuzzy membership functions can be used to project
cómodo comfortable
the related distances for visualization using multidimensional
confiado confident, trusting
scaling. This can be useful to see which associated sets are
confundido confused, embarrassed
close to each other. By picking a subset of the sets that are
culpable guilty
evenly distributed through out the projected space is a way
deprimido depressed, sad
of choosing a controlled vocabulary.
enamorado in love, amorous
enojado angry, annoyed
Another use of a similarity metric on membership func-
esperanzado hopeful
tions is to produce a mapping from one set of fuzzy sets
extático ecstatic, overjoyed
to another. This mapping can be used to translate between
feliz happy different vocabularies of terms, provided that the terms are
frustrado frustrated represented by fuzzy sets. In the literature, this is known as
histérico hysterical “linguistic approximation” . The mapping used in linguistic
malicioso malicious, mischievious, vicious approximation simply picks the membership function from
pasmado astonished, bewildered, stunned the output set which is most similar to the input. This
rabioso furious, mad, fierce, raging methodology, the general notion of which is a computing
solitario lonely, isolated system that has words as inputs and outputs, is known as
sorprendido surprised “Computing With Words” [15]. A description of various
sospechoso suspicious, doubtful similarity measures for fuzzy sets can be found in [16],
timido shy, timid which suggests that Jaccard distance should be used in the
triste sad, gloomy computation of similarity between two interval type-2 fuzzy
sets. This is the method used in this paper and the Matlab
coade used for this purpose can be found at [25].
A since similarity can range from 0, being least similar,
B. Estimating Fuzzy Membership Functions from Survey
to 1, being completely similar, the similarity values can be
Data
seen as a fuzzy value. In this case, the similarity between the
The method for estimating interval type-2 membership input word and output word can be seen as a fuzzy relation
functions from the type of survey described above is known translates(x, y) where x is the input word and y is the output
as the interval approach was first described in [19] and word. The similarity is thus the degree of truth of this relation
refined in [21]. Interesting readers should consult this paper between the input and output words.
for details, but for completeness we give an overview of
the procedure here. This approach can be seen as taking the III. R ESULTS
strengths of two previous approaches, the interval endpoints Figure 2 shows the membership functions that were es-
aproach [22] [23] and the person membership function timated from the survey data. Based on these membership
approach [24]. functions from the Spanish survey and the membership
The interval approach consists of taking the survey data, functions from previous English surveys, we constructed sim-
in the form of intervals, and for each word given in the ilarity matrices between the input Spanish words and output
survey and for each subject, a type-1 person-specific mem- English words, as described in the methodology section.
bership function is estimated. Then these type-1 membership The similarity matrix of the Spanish words and the smallest
functions of each person are considered to be embedded output vocabulary are shown in table II. Using similarity
membership functions within an interval type-2 membership matrices like these for the other output vocabularies. the
function. Starting from the raw intervals from the survey, resulting mappings are shown in table III.
there is a data preprocessing stage where improper intervals
and outliers are removed. IV. D ISCUSSION
Then with the results of this preprocessing, the data are One thing to notice in table 2 is membership functions
converted to person-specific type-1 membership functions. that are broader and have footprints of uncertainty with
 aburrido, val. act. dom. agobiado, val. act. dom. agotado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
ansioso, val. act. dom. apenado, val. act. dom. asqueado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
asustado, val. act. dom. avergonzado, val. act. dom. cauteloso, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
celoso, val. act. dom. comodo, val. act. dom. confiado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
confundido, val. act. dom. culpable, val. act. dom. deprimido, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
enamorado, val. act. dom. enojado, val. act. dom. esperanzado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
extatico, val. act. dom. feliz, val. act. dom. frustrado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
histerico, val. act. dom. malicioso, val. act. dom. pasmado, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
rabioso, val. act. dom. solitario, val. act. dom. sorprendido, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
sospechoso, val. act. dom. timido, val. act. dom. triste, val. act. dom.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10

Fig. 2. Membership functions of the Spanish emotion words for dimensions valence (val.), activation (act.), and dominance (dom.).

greater areas. This indicates that there is more uncertainty
for that given emotion with respect to the one of three
emotion dimensions. For example, in the valence dimension
for “malicioso”, we can see that it is quite broad and also
it has a large footprint of uncertainty. The uncertainty could
be due to inherent vagueness in the meaning of the word,
but it could also be due to the fact that this word carries
meaning that is not well determined by these dimensions.
In so far as “malicioso” can be compared with English
“malicious”, we can say that there is a notion of intentions
that are not captured by the three dimensions. In this case,
a malicious person’s intentions could be negative, while
they themselves are in fact happy about this. In the case
of “sorprendido” (“surprised”), the valence is undetermined
because surprised can encompass very pleasant surprises as
well as very unpleasant ones.
We can note several things by examining the mappings
produced from the membership functions’ similarity metrics.
First, it is important to note that although the first output
vocabulary is a proper subset of the second, the data used for
the membership functions for each vocabulary was collected
in separate experiments. This led to what seems to be
a discrepancy where, for example, “triste” at the bottom
of table III is mapped to “fearful” in the first column
(IEMOCAP labels), but mapped to “sad” in the second
column (IEMOCAP labels with modifier words). Though this
discrepancy can be explained, it highlights a problem that the
results were not stable across similar experiments. In terms of
the circumflex theory of emotion, sadnes and fear are similar
emotions. Both have low valence and activation, but fear has
a lower dominance than sadness, which has a medium or low
 TABLE II
S IMILARITY MATRIX WITH S PANISH WORDS ( ROWS ) VERSUS E NGLISH WORDS ( COLUMNS ).

angry disgusted fearful happy neutral sad surprised

aburrido 0.2284 0.2335 0.6370 0.1965 0.3196 0.4610 0.1230
agobiado 0.4762 0.5696 0.4611 0.3122 0.1495 0.2895 0.2175
agotado 0.2250 0.2344 0.4883 0.1425 0.4081 0.5135 0.1012
ansioso 0.4579 0.4748 0.2837 0.3655 0.2703 0.1728 0.3598
apenado 0.2915 0.2928 0.7711 0.3128 0.1219 0.4065 0.1211
asqueado 0.5445 0.5969 0.3885 0.4538 0.2045 0.2784 0.3199
asustado 0.4610 0.5324 0.3209 0.3508 0.2213 0.2141 0.3489
avergonzado 0.2701 0.2663 0.6345 0.2393 0.0660 0.4737 0.0713
cauteloso 0.0918 0.0957 0.5357 0.1848 0.3784 0.3126 0.0958
celoso 0.7396 0.6880 0.3335 0.1832 0.0515 0.2444 0.2390
cómodo 0.0436 0.0510 0.3363 0.3686 0.3963 0.3518 0.2240
confiado 0.2835 0.3307 0.2382 0.4753 0.1393 0.0562 0.2821
confundido 0.2488 0.2531 0.7690 0.2202 0.1286 0.4498 0.0878
culpable 0.3275 0.3445 0.7051 0.2916 0.1375 0.3921 0.1401
deprimido 0.2893 0.2914 0.5585 0.1529 0.3380 0.7058 0.0978
enamorado 0.4371 0.5611 0.0942 0.4572 0.1055 0.0351 0.5774
enojado 0.8732 0.7125 0.3596 0.1940 0.1054 0.2654 0.3494
esperanzado 0.0929 0.0987 0.4023 0.5903 0.1798 0.1625 0.3270
extático 0.3140 0.3108 0.0611 0.4305 0.1337 0.0268 0.7222
feliz 0.1329 0.1655 0.2293 0.6020 0.1796 0.0770 0.5046
frustrado 0.6414 0.7271 0.3003 0.3021 0.1677 0.3026 0.3337
histérico 0.6522 0.6566 0.2804 0.2340 0.1550 0.1874 0.4272
malicioso 0.3347 0.4270 0.3427 0.3540 0.2273 0.1322 0.2325
pasmado 0.3102 0.3480 0.3910 0.2544 0.1931 0.3231 0.2654
rabioso 0.5416 0.4616 0.2190 0.0945 0.0018 0.1402 0.3598
solitario 0.2657 0.2672 0.6091 0.0904 0.2549 0.5565 0.0396
sorprendido 0.3405 0.3803 0.1229 0.3336 0.1706 0.0746 0.3675
sospechoso 0.3026 0.3497 0.5129 0.3883 0.2084 0.2425 0.2900
timido 0.0844 0.0857 0.3925 0.1092 0.3578 0.4436 0.0515
triste 0.3376 0.3396 0.6502 0.1477 0.2389 0.5882 0.0852

amount of dominance. In general, the scale of dominance has
been difficult for participants of the surveys to understand,
so perhaps this could be remedied by better instructions or
by using experts such as psychologists, rather than an open
survey.
Comparing the mappings produced across different output
vocabularies, we can note several salient differences. The
output vocabularies differed in size, with the first output
vocabulary being much smaller than the input vocabulary,
the second slightly smaller, and the third slightly bigger. The
first and second were controlled in that they were chosen by
the authors, while the third output vocabulary was more ad
hoc. When the output vocabulary is smaller than the input,
errors can occur due to the smaller vocabulary being less
expressive. However, when the output vocabulary is larger
than the input, errors can occur due to having more fine
grained distinctions in the output vocabulary than in the input
vocabulary. Furthermore, the third output vocabulary in our
experiment is both larger and less controlled than the input
vocabulary. This can lead to errors, for example where “an-
sioso” is mapped to “busy” instead of “anxious”. Although
“busy” may not be a name for a true emotion, it carries
some emotional connotations which overlap somewhat with
“anxious”. Furthermore, errors in the third set, due to being
less formal, have a more human-like aspect.
Although it is difficult to objectively quantify the results of
translation, the results show a much higher correspondence
than would be predicted by random translations. Methods
like BLEU score, used in machine translation, would not be
applicable in this case since the words are not translated in
the context of a sentence but rather as keywords. The true test
of such a translation would be a Turing test type experiment
where this methods output would be judged by whether it
could be confused for a human translator (c.f. [26]). Since
work of this type is arguably best judged by such type of
applications, our future work in this area will concentrate
on developing applications that use such a method. One
example of a possible application would be indexing and
search of materials that can be described with emotion words,
such as text from literature and blogs and audio visual data
 TABLE III
T RANSLATIONS FROM S PANISH TO 3 OUTPUT VOCABULARIES : IEMOCAP LABELS , IEMOCAP LABELS WITH MODIFIERS , AND
LIVEJOURNAL . COM ’ S TOP 40 MOOD LABELS .

Spanish IEMOCAP Labels IEMOCAP w/Modifiers LiveJournal

aburrido fearful sort of fearful blah
agobiado disgusted disgusted cranky
agotado sad sad blah
ansioso disgusted very disgusted busy
apenado fearful sort of fearful stressed
asqueado disgusted very disgusted frustrated
asustado disgusted sort of angry anxious
avergonzado fearful sad exhausted
cauteloso fearful sort of sad contemplative
celoso angry angry pissed off
cómodo neutral neutral calm
confiado happy happy hopeful
confundido fearful sort of fearful bored
culpable fearful fearful stressed
deprimido sad sad sad
enamorado surprised happy excited
enojado angry angry aggravated
esperanzado happy sort of fearful good
extático surprised very happy ecstatic
feliz happy sort of happy accomplished
frustrado disgusted very disgusted frustrated
histérico disgusted angry busy
malicioso disgusted sort of fearful curious
pasmado fearful sort of sad fearful
rabioso angry very angry crazy
solitario fearful sad bored
sorprendido disgusted very fearful frustrated
sospechoso fearful sort of angry curious
timido sad sort of sad drained
triste fearful sad sad

from movies, recorded conversations, and human-computer
interaction. In the Turing test framework, methods like those
described in this paper could be compared with human
behavior to better assess their performance.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper we presented an experiment that used interval
type-2 fuzzy logic to translate from a fixed vocabulary of
Spanish words that refer to emotions to appropriate En-
glish words among three different vocabularies. Our method
consisted of a survey that prompted users with words in
Spanish that refer to emotions. Using an interval approach,
we collected user data that associated each emotion word
with intervals on three scales of emotional characteristics,
valence, activation, and dominance, and estimated interval
type-2 fuzzy membership functions for each scale. Using data
from previous experiments that did the same with English
surveys, we translated from the Spanish words to the most
similar English words, based upon a similarity metric for
interval type-2 fuzzy membership functions. The results show
promising results but the performance of a translation task
is difficult to assess. Better assessment of this method will
come from comparing it with human performance and future
work will focus on this aspect.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Rebeka Campos Astork-
iza, Eduardo Medoza, and Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva for help
in translating the survey.
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