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

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 nonmonotonic 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.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Time

• Publication date

  2024-10-11

• Fields of study

  Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.4230/LIPIcs.TIME.2024.10arXiv 2410.08597
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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