EmoBalloon - Conveying Emotional Arousal in Text Chats with Speech Balloons

Text chat applications are an integral part of daily social and professional communication. However, messages sent over text chat applications do not convey vocal or nonverbal information from the sender, and detecting the emotional tone in text-only messages is challenging. In this paper, we explore the effects of speech balloon shapes on the sender-receiver agreement regarding the emotionality of a text message. We first investigated the relationship between the shape of a speech balloon and the emotionality of speech text in Japanese manga. Based on these results, we created a system that automatically generates speech balloons matching linear emotional arousal intensity by Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Networks (ACGAN). Our evaluation results from a controlled experiment suggested that the use of emotional speech balloons outperforms the use of emoticons in decreasing the differences between message senders’ and receivers’ perceptions about the level of emotional arousal in text messages.