anima /ˈæn.ɪ.mə/
the soul, especially the irrational part of the soul as distinguished from the rational mind.
Anima extracts a living emotional state from raw text, and outputs a vector that can be broadcast to any downstream consumer.
One example use is generating in-flight modifications to body language and changes in eye-color with the related Reachy Mini Conversational App behavioral adapter for the Reachy Mini robot. To get a better sense of how the affect extraction engine works you can check out this writeup explaining the approach.
You can get a quick sense for how the engine converts text to an emotional vector by running:
uv run pytest tests/smoke.py
pip install anima-engine
This project uses the NRC Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) Lexicon (v2.1) created by Saif M. Mohammad at the National Research Council Canada.
Project Homepage: http://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/nrc-vad.html
Author Email: saif.mohammad@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
If you use this project in academic work, please cite: Mohammad, Saif M. (2025). NRC VAD Lexicon v2: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 55k English Terms. arXiv:2503.23547.
Daniel Ritchie is an independent technologist and founder of the Brain Wave Collective.
LinkedIn
Email