People

Raoul N. Smith Professor PhD, Brown University
rnsmith@ccs.neu.edu Personal Home Page

Professor Smith is examining emotions and computers from both theoretical and applied perspectives. He is formalizing what until now have been expository descriptions of a wide and disparate set of criteria, expanding an earlier frame representation into a richer semantic network.

His long-term goal is to develop computer applications that use emotions. These may include computer-human interface design, computer art and music, text analysis and synthesis, and medical aids. Professor Smith has collected 7,500 words for emotions or those with emotional connotations, and built two systems involving emotions.

The first, called Dr. Bob, retrieves stories from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and those on childhood sexual abuse. It is a memory-based reasoning system about emotions. The second, named Alex, is a computer aid for treating alexithymia, a cognitive-affective disorder that causes patients to have difficulty identifying their emotions. In clinical settings, patients present vague symptoms, such as "I feel bad," but cannot elaborate. Physicians then order numerous, often expensive tests to determine what is wrong. About 30 percent of people are alexithymic, placing a heavy burden on the health-care system. Alex helps patients become aware of their emotions more quickly, allowing physicians to diagnose problems sooner.

In addition to researching emotions, Professor Smith has written three books, cowritten a fourth, and written or cowritten more than fifty scholarly articles.

Career Publication Highlights

Smith, Raoul N. 1973. Probabilistic performance models of language. The Hague: Mouton and Company.

---. 1989. Dictionary of artificial intelligence. New York: Facts on File Publishers, Inc.

Smith, Raoul N., Martha B. Evens, Bonnie E. Litowitz, Judy S. Markowitz, and Oswald Werner. 1983. Reprint. Lexical-semantic relations: A comparative survey. Original edition, Champaign, Ill., and Alberta, Canada: Linguistics Research, Inc., 1980.

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