Research on facial expression recognition for establishing intelligent human-machine interfaces has been actively conducted. In recognizing human facial expressions, it is essential to learn new patterns of facial expression that appear with the lapse of time. In this paper, we propose a facial expression recognition model incorporating adaptive resonance theory in a counter propagation network, and evaluate the additional learning function of the model when targeting three types of facial expressions. In addition, we propose a brightness value correction processing method for reducing influence of difference in illuminance, and evaluate its usefulness.

This paper proposes a method to converge the number of trees in the evolution to improve the performance of GP_CN. GP_CN is GP expanded to allow individuals to have multiple trees. The number of multiple trees must be decided in advance. In the previous work, the number of trees was determined manually. In this paper, to determine the number of trees automatically, the fitness function was changed and the mutation of individuals was introduced to GP_CN. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed method is examined by using a garbage collection problem and Santa Fe Trail problem.

In order to examine how the stimuli of picture books induces a variety of reactions in infants, we take an approach of applying a text mining technique to a large amount of the reviews on picture books written by their parents or the childcare personnel. This paper especially studies the relation between the contents of picture books and an infant’s developmental reactions. We further classify subcategories of an infant’s developmental reactions as well as picture books according to the contents of picture books, and compare them with examples of infants’ developmental reactions reported in the developmental psychology literature. We conclude that the proposed approach of applying a text mining technique to the reviews on picture books is quite effective.

Recently, a portable digital device equipped with voice guidance has been widely used, increasing the demand for the usability-conscious dialogue system. One of the problems with the existing dialogue system is its immature application to non-task-oriented dialogue. Non-task-oriented dialogue requires some scheme that enables smooth and flexible conversations with a user. For example, it would be possible to provide topics related to a person who is familiar with a user or avoid providing topics related to a person who is not a good friend with the user, by considering relationship with others in real life of the user.

In this paper, we focus on the dialogue made by the two characters in a drama scenario, and tried to express their relationship with a scale of “intimacy degree.” There will be such various elements related to the intimacy degree as the frequency of response to the utterance and the attitude of a speaker during the dialogue. We focus on the emotional state of the speaker during the utterance and try to realize an intimacy estimation with high accuracy. As the evaluation result, we achieved high accuracy in intimacy estimation than the existing method based on speech role.