Emotions play a key role in the interactions that occur in a multi-agent system. Relevant perspectives include, on the one hand, research on architectures and cognitive models, which is concerned with the integration of emotional states into agents and the role of emotions in agent communication; on the other hand, research on techniques for sentiment analysis and opinion mining, devoted to automatic processing of affective information conveyed by spontaneous, multi-faceted user responses about shared contents.
The main goal of the workshop is to attain cross-fertilization between the two perspectives. While the former relies mainly on cognitively inspired agent models, the latter relies on the use of statistical and learning techniques supported by resources such as corpora and linguistic datasets. By proposing ESSEM15 as an AAMAS workshop, we intend to stimulate a tighter integration of agent-based paradigms with techniques for sentiment and opinion mining, which have raised a growing interest in a social web and big data perspective. We think that, since they typically involve interaction and feedback as part of their functioning, social and expressive media — ranging from online communities, blogs and fan-generated narratives to interactive art installations and digital-based performances — will provide an effective testbed for:

- integrating complementary aspects: emotion generation and detection, affect expression and reception;
- studying the role of affect in the generation of social behavior, and communicative behavior in particular.

As the paradigmatic situation, we envisage a range of applicative contexts that involve a ‘performance’ of some kind, targeted to some audience/user, and possibly an interactive one. The performance/reception paradigm, be it a live execution of an interactive score, a digitally mediated co-creation session or the contribution of a single user in a social forum, provides a conceptual framework for studying affect generation and detection in an integrated approach. Reception can take the form of immediate feedback, possibly regulated by a protocol, or of asynchronous response (such as tags and comments) conveyed through a plurality of media, against a background shaped by reputation and trust, intended as a relevant part of the audience value systems. Performance/reception becomes the common ground where the two communities meet in a set of tasks that range from managing the expressive aspects of performance (e.g. embodiment) and its interactive aspects (e.g. emergent behaviour) to analysing and measuring the reception by the audience/users, with linguistic levels ranging from text, music, image, acting, etc. to multimodality.
ESSEM 2015 follows the 1st edition of the workshop, held in Turin in 2013: http://di.unito.it/essem. With about 40 registered attendees and a full-day program, the 2013 edition was an encouraging start for the ESSEM series.

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ESSEM aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners both from academy and industry. The workshop wants to take an active part in growing a new field in terms of multi-disciplinary research and to identify and investigate important open issues by cross-validating different approaches in emotion research. Therefore we encourage the submission of research papers from different areas: intelligent agents and multi/agent systems, natural language processing, affective computing, interactive multimodal systems semantic web. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- emotions in virtual agents
- emotion-aware multi agent systems
- subjectivity, sentiment and emotion detection in social & expressive media
- sentiment-based indexing, search and retrieval in social & expressive media
- emotion models and ontologies of emotions
- social simulation and emotions in cooperative MAS environments
- emotions and regulation of agent interaction
- emotions in cooperation and teamwork
- role of emotions in agent negotiation
- emotions in interactive entertainment (drama, storytelling, games, etc.)
- emotions in embodiment
- emotions and norms in agent societies
- emotions in multimodal agent interaction
- affective behavior
- agency and affect in natural language
- emotions in human-agent interaction and communication
- emotions and models of reputation and trust
- applications of sentiment analysis on social & expressive media