What Killed the Cat? Towards a Logical Formalization of Curiosity (And Suspense, and Surprise) in Narratives

Authors Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr , Anne-Gwenn Bosser , Benjamin Callac, Eric Maisel



PDF
Thumbnail PDF

File

LIPIcs.TIME.2024.10.pdf
  • Filesize: 0.72 MB
  • 16 pages

Document Identifiers

Author Details

Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr
  • Lab-STICC CNRS UMR 6285, ENIB, Brest, France
  • IRIT, Université de Toulouse, France
Anne-Gwenn Bosser
  • Lab-STICC CNRS UMR 6285, ENIB, Brest, France
Benjamin Callac
  • Lab-STICC CNRS UMR 6285, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
Eric Maisel
  • Lab-STICC CNRS UMR 6285, ENIB, Brest, France

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their relevant suggestions that helped them to improve the paper.

Cite As Get BibTex

Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Benjamin Callac, and Eric Maisel. What Killed the Cat? Towards a Logical Formalization of Curiosity (And Suspense, and Surprise) in Narratives. In 31st International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 318, pp. 10:1-10:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.TIME.2024.10

Abstract

We provide a unified framework in which the three emotions at the heart of narrative tension (curiosity, suspense and surprise) are formalized. This framework is built on non-monotonic reasoning which allows us to compactly represent the default behavior of the world and to simulate the affective evolution of an agent receiving a story. After formalizing the notions of awareness, curiosity, surprise and suspense, we explore the properties induced by our definitions and study the computational complexity of detecting them. We finally propose means to evaluate these emotions’ intensity for a given agent listening to a story.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Theory and algorithms for application domains
Keywords
  • Knowledge Representation
  • Narration
  • Cognition

Metrics

  • Access Statistics
  • Total Accesses (updated on a weekly basis)
    0
    PDF Downloads

References

  1. Carole Adam, Andreas Herzig, and Dominique Longin. A logical formalization of the OCC theory of emotions. Synthese, 168(2):201-248, May 2009. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9460-9.
  2. Carlos E Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson. On the logic of theory change: Partial meet contraction and revision functions. The journal of symbolic logic, 50(2):510-530, 1985. URL: https://doi.org/10.2307/2274239.
  3. Guillaume Aucher and Thomas Bolander. Undecidability in epistemic planning. In F. Rossi, editor, Proc. of Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'2013), pages 27-33, Beijing, China, 2013. URL: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IJCAI/IJCAI13/paper/view/6903.
  4. Heather Barber and Daniel Kudenko. Generation of dilemma-based interactive narratives with a changeable story goal. In 2nd International Conference on INtelligent TEchnologies for interactive enterTAINment. ICST, May 2010. URL: https://doi.org/10.4108/ICST.INTETAIN2008.2477.
  5. Raphaël Baroni. La tension narrative: suspense, curiosité et surprise. Poétique. Éd. du Seuil, Paris, 2007. Google Scholar
  6. Salem Benferhat, Claudette Cayrol, Didier Dubois, Jérôme Lang, and Henri Prade. Inconsistency management and prioritized syntax-based entailment. In Proc. of Int. Joint. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'93), volume 93, pages 640-645, 1993. Google Scholar
  7. Salem Benferhat, Didier Dubois, and Henri Prade. Nonmonotonic reasoning, conditional objects and possibility theory. Artif. Intell., 92(1-2):259-276, 1997. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0004-3702(97)00012-X.
  8. Thomas Bolander and Mikkel Birkegaard Andersen. Epistemic planning for single-and multi-agent systems. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics, 21(1):9-34, 2011. URL: https://doi.org/10.3166/JANCL.21.9-34.
  9. Lorenzo Bonoli. Raphaël Baroni, La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité, surprise, Paris, Seuil, 2007. Cahiers de Narratologie. Analyse et théorie narratives, 14, February 2008. URL: https://doi.org/10.4000/narratologie.608.
  10. Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Marc Cavazza, and Ronan Champagnat. Linear Logic for Non-Linear Storytelling. ECAI 2010, pages 713-718, 2010. Publisher: IOS Press. URL: https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-60750-606-5-713.
  11. Tom Bylander. The computational complexity of propositional strips planning. Artificial Intelligence, 69(1-2):165-204, 1994. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(94)90081-7.
  12. Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Bradley A. Cassell, Stephen G. Ware, and R. Michael Young. Indexter : A Computational Model of the Event-Indexing Situation Model for Characterizing Narratives, 2012. Google Scholar
  13. Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Arnav Jhala, Julie Porteous, and R. Michael Young. The story so far on narrative planning. Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 34(1):489-499, May 2024. URL: https://doi.org/10.1609/icaps.v34i1.31509.
  14. Noël Carroll. Narrative closure. Philosophical Studies, 135(1):1-15, August 2007. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9097-9.
  15. Yun-Gyung Cheong and R. Michael Young. Suspenser: A Story Generation System for Suspense. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 7(1):39-52, March 2015. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2014.2323894.
  16. Christophe Dousson and Pierre Le Maigat. Chronicle recognition improvement using temporal focusing and hierarchization. In IJCAI, volume 7, pages 324-329. Citeseer, 2007. URL: http://ijcai.org/Proceedings/07/Papers/050.pdf.
  17. Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr. Scenario Update Applied to Causal Reasoning. In Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference, KR 2008, pages 188-197, January 2008. URL: http://www.aaai.org/Library/KR/2008/kr08-019.php.
  18. Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr, Andreas Herzig, Jérôme Lang, and Pierre Marquis. Reasoning About Action and Change. In Pierre Marquis, Odile Papini, and Henri Prade, editors, A Guided Tour of Artificial Intelligence Research, volume 1 / 3 of Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Learning, pages 487-518. Springer International Publishing, May 2020. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06164-7_15.
  19. Florence Dupin De Saint-Cyr and Jérôme Lang. Belief extrapolation (or how to reason about observations and unpredicted change). Artificial Intelligence, 175(2):760-790, February 2011. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2010.11.002.
  20. Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr and Henri Prade. Belief revision and incongruity: Is it a joke? Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics, 33(3-4):467-494, October 2023. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/11663081.2023.2244379.
  21. Thomas Eiter and Thomas Lukasiewicz. Default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases: Complexity and tractable cases. Artificial Intelligence, 124(2):169-241, 2000. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0004-3702(00)00073-4.
  22. Paul Ekman. An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3-4):169-200, May 1992. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068.
  23. Jeffrey Ely, Alexander Frankel, and Emir Kamenica. Suspense and Surprise. Journal of Political Economy, 123(1):215-260, February 2015. URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/677350.
  24. Joseph Jeffrey Finger. Exploiting constraints in design synthesis. PhD thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1987. Google Scholar
  25. Gerard Genette. Nouveau Discours du Récit. Seuil, 1983. Google Scholar
  26. Moisés Goldszmidt and Judea Pearl. On the consistency of defeasible databases. Artificial Intelligence, 52(2):121-149, 1991. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(91)90039-M.
  27. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock. The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narrative. Journal of personality and social psychology, 79:701-21, November 2000. URL: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701.
  28. Joseph Y. Halpern. Alternative Semantics for Unawareness. Games and Economic Behavior, 37(2):321-339, November 2001. URL: https://doi.org/10.1006/game.2000.0832.
  29. Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka. Knowledge and belief: An introduction to the logic of the two notions. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1962. Google Scholar
  30. Hirofumi Katsuno and Alberto O Mendelzon. On the difference between updating a knowledge base and revising it. KR, 91:387-394, 1991. Google Scholar
  31. Sarit Kraus, Daniel Lehmann, and Menachem Magidor. Nonmonotonic reasoning, preferential models and cumulative logics. Artificial intelligence, 44(1-2):167-207, 1990. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(90)90101-5.
  32. Daniel Lehmann. Another perspective on default reasoning. Annals of mathematics and artificial intelligence, 15:61-82, 1995. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01535841.
  33. Emiliano Lorini and Cristiano Castelfranchi. The cognitive structure of surprise: looking for basic principles. Topoi, 26(1):133-149, 2007. Google Scholar
  34. Emiliano Lorini and François Schwarzentruber. A logic for reasoning about counterfactual emotions. Artificial Intelligence, 175(3):814-847, March 2011. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2010.11.022.
  35. Chris Martens. Ceptre: A language for modeling generative interactive systems. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, volume 11, pages 51-57, 2015. URL: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE15/paper/view/11536.
  36. Lawrence J. Mazlack. Granular causality speculations. In IEEE Annual Meeting of the Fuzzy Information, 2004. Processing NAFIPS '04., volume 2, pages 690-695 Vol.2, 2004. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/NAFIPS.2004.1337385.
  37. John McCarthy. Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence. In Proc. Int. Joint Conf on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'77), pages 1038-1044. Elsevier, 1977. URL: http://ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-2/Papers/094.pdf.
  38. John McCarthy and Patrick J Hayes. Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Machine Intelligence, 4:463-502, 1969. Google Scholar
  39. Salvatore Modica and Aldo Rustichini. Awareness and partitional information structures. Theory and decision, 37:107-124, 1994. Google Scholar
  40. Emma Norling. Capturing the quake player: Using a BDI agent to model human behaviour. In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1080-1081, Melbourne Australia, July 2003. ACM. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/860575.860805.
  41. Andrew Ortony, Gerald L Clore, and Allan Collins. The cognitive structure of emotions. Cambridge university press, 2022. Google Scholar
  42. Judea Pearl. System Z: A natural ordering of defaults with tractable applications to nonmonotonic reasoning. In Proc. 3rd Conf. on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, pages 121-135, 1990. Google Scholar
  43. David Pizzi, Fred Charles, Jean-Luc Lugrin, and Marc Cavazza. Interactive Storytelling with Literary Feelings, April 2007. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74889-2_55.
  44. Robert Plutchik. A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In Theories of emotion, pages 3-33. Elsevier, 1980. Google Scholar
  45. Vladimir Propp. Morphology of the Folktale: Second Edition. University of Texas Press, 1968. URL: https://doi.org/10.7560/783911.
  46. Raymond Reiter. A logic for default reasoning. Artificial intelligence, 13(1-2):81-132, 1980. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(80)90014-4.
  47. Jessica Rivera-Villicana, Fabio Zambetta, James Harland, and Marsha Berry. Using BDI to Model Players Behaviour in an Interactive Fiction Game. In Frank Nack and Andrew S. Gordon, editors, Interactive Storytelling, volume 10045, pages 209-220. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_19.
  48. George Lennox Sharman Shackle. Decision, Order and Time in Human Affairs. (2nd edition), Cambridge University Press, UK, 1961. Google Scholar
  49. Khaled Skander Ben Slimane, Alexis Comte, Olivier Gasquet, Abdelwahab Heba, Olivier Lezaud, Frederic Maris, and Maël Valais. Twist your logic with touist. CoRR, abs/1507.03663, 2015. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03663.
  50. Tran Cao Son, Enrico Pontelli, Marcello Balduccini, and Torsten Schaub. Answer set planning: a survey. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 23(1):226-298, 2023. URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1471068422000072.
  51. Meir Sternberg. How Narrativity Makes a Difference. Narrative, 9(2):115-122, 2001. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/20107236.
  52. David Thue and Vadim Bulitko. Modelling goal-directed players in digital games. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, volume 2, pages 86-91, 2006. URL: http://www.aaai.org/Library/AIIDE/2006/aiide06-018.php.
  53. Tom Trabasso and Linda L Sperry. Causal relatedness and importance of story events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24(5):595-611, October 1985. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(85)90048-8.
  54. Johan Van Benthem and Fernando R Velázquez-Quesada. The dynamics of awareness. Synthese, 177:5-27, 2010. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/S11229-010-9764-9.
  55. Marianne Winslett. Updating Logical Databases. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Google Scholar
Questions / Remarks / Feedback
X

Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing


Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail