[Aleader-dev] Re: [opencyc - Open Discussion] RE: emotions & films in cyc

[Joshua N Pritikin]

[Since this email isn't really related to Cyc, I'm posting to
the Aleader discussion list instead.]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 02:08:19PM -0700, SourceForge.net wrote:
> but I think you should drastically reduce the scope of your project.
> Paul Cohen's (an AI prof at UMass Amherst) advice to me was to focus
> on just a few, maybe even just one emotion.  I am glad I followed it.
> I ended up focusing my model on distinguishing Happy vs Sad vs Indifferent.
> You should probably reduce the size of your input space too.
> All of film is pretty ambitious.

I'm afraid the scope of my project is not something I'm willing
to change.  I want to make a significant contribution to the field
of emotion research and I believe I am capable of doing so.

> For starters, how are you going to translate a given film into
> your "seven logical questions."?

As objectively as possible.  ;-)

No seriously, it is a good question.  I am going to use a decision
tree.  Interested in hearing more details?

> This is what I used for my input space.  I ended up choosing about
> 9 vignettes from a manual for mental health professionals called
> _Teaching Children with Autism How to Mindread_.  Although this
> is a pitifully small input and output space, the new thing about
> my dissertation is that it addresses the issue of how to
> empirically validate a KR model in this context.

"empirically validate a KR model" .. can you expand on that please?

> You should probably also have a theory or seven driving
> your KR work.  In terms of theories, maybe you want to do
> one better than currently  existing theories, but you might
> want to look at existing cognitive appraisal theories if you have
> not already.  Try Ortony Clore and Collins 1988 _The Cognitive
> Structure of Emotion_.

Yah, that's one is very popular.

> Or try Ira Roseman (if you ask again I can dig out some references).

I see a lot of papers on her (his?) home page.  Can you suggest
one which is particularly relevant?

> Craig Smith is at the start of his career perhaps he has something useful

Yah, I was surprised to find this one:

  McHugo, G. J., Smith, C. A., & Lanzetta, J. T. (1982). The structure
  of self-reports of emotional responses to film segments. Motivation
  and Emotion, 6, 365-385.

The title sounds intriguing, but it's really not that similar
to what I'm doing.

> There
> are many more emotion theorists out there too.  As my dissertation
> argues, Theory of Mind is also relevant to the endeavor of reasoning
> about another person's emotion (and this includes people in films).
> Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen are two dudes into this theory
> of mind stuff.

I propose an emotion predictor that can be tested empirically.
My primary interest is whether statistics suggest that it
works empirically.

How the emotion predictor compares to the other hundred theories
about emotion is of secondary interest.  On the other hand, I know
I have to do a survey of others' work as part of my research article.
So I _do_ want to collect these references.  I wish Jarrold, W. (2001)
was available online ... *grumble*

-- 
Victory to the Divine Mother!!         after all,
  http://sahajayoga.org                  http://why-compete.org