[Aleader-dev] Re: busy busy

[Joshua N Pritikin]

[I am CC'ing to aleader-dev because other folks might like to
read this and I want a permenant record.  You'll have to tell
me explicitly if you don't want something broadcast through
a mailing list.]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 12:20:54AM -0500, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> My life has been and probably always will be frantic and behind.  
> ... I am
> hoping beyond all hope to get serious about responding to your emails
> over the weekend.  I took on a neuropsych assessment today that
> will spill over into tommorrow (Friday).
> 
> .. I'll give you some random thoughts that have been
> on my mind...
> 
> Here's one question...You seem to say there is only one objective
> emotional response to a given situation.  You don't seriously
> believe this do you?

No, but ...

> For starters, some situations make one feel happy and sad.  There
> is the idea of mixed emotions.

Yah, yah.  With this idea of "one correct objective emotional
response," I am aiming to make the analysis more tractable and
postpone generativity.  Here's how:

I ask people to narrow down on the emotion of shortest duration
("duration" with respect to time) and ignore emotions which have
longer duration.  This actually works pretty well.  I'd estimate
that about 70-80% of film simplifies nicely this way.  However,
there are cases when there is still more than one emotion going
on at the same time even after narrowing down on the immediate
emotion.  For example:

  What if I am struggling against a pick-pocket?  Both
  participants are trying to take initiative.  This must
  produce two different emotions (one for each person)
  because initiative is one of the key-questions of the
  classification scheme.

Actually there are quite a few different kinds of exceptional
circumstances.  The pick-pocket is easy to explain.  I have
developed some rules describing how to classify exceptional
circumstances.  Using these rules, I estimate that 95-98% of a
film can be classified unambiguously.  This is how Aleader is
used to build a library of narrow, unambiguous emotion
classifications.

Now we can try to scale the model up to see how well it works
in the general case.  I have made some steps in this direction
by introducing an explicit notation for tracking conversation.
However, I am not sure how much more the model can expand
without being forced to admit multiple correct interpretations
(a.k.a. generativity).  At some point, generativity
comes back again because there just isn't a single correct
way to understand a complex layered emotional story.

On the other hand, please recognize that if we stick with
Aleader's simple, narrow view of emotion then we still
get useful classifications ("useful" meaning that the
classifications subjectively feel correct) without
resorting to generativity.

I am curious to know how much of Ortony works without
generativity, and how much of a role generativity plays
in the full version of Ortony.

Perhaps the Ortony model can be stacked on top of the Aleader
model to produce a fully general theory?

> Here's another one...You really need to have a controlled list of terms.
> How many terms are emotion terms?  50, 5, 100, 500, 1000?

Hrm .. I thought I explained in the prototype research paper
that emotion _terms_ are secondary to the collection of
examples of a given emotion.  In other words, emotion
categories are defined by example and not by _terms_.

So far, the Aleader classification scheme has partitioned
examples into about 50 categories.  I expect another 10-20
categories as our survey expands, but not much more than that.

If we increase the complexity of the model by tracking
conversations then we may find quite a lot (10s or 100s)
of recognizable emotion sequences 

Even so, I deny that I have identified any "emotion terms."

Does that address your question?

> You should buy
> _The Cogntitive Structure of Emotion_ by Ortony Clore and Collins.

Yah, I should .. OK, I spoke with a friend about a good book shop.
I'll have a copy within a few days.

> My friend Dan probably has a CD burner.  Maybe I can get him interested
> in this project.

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