What killed the cat? Towards a logical formalization of curiosity (and suspense, and surprise) in narratives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework based on nonmonotonic reasoning to model and analyze curiosity, suspense, and surprise in narratives, enabling the simulation and evaluation of emotional responses in storytelling.

Contribution

It provides a unified logical formalization of narrative emotions and explores their properties, complexity, and intensity assessment methods.

Findings

Formal definitions of curiosity, suspense, and surprise

Analysis of properties and computational complexity

Proposed methods for evaluating emotion intensity

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 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.