ABSTRACT
As a natural expansion from the tradition of natural language processing research, this chapter presents our approach toward the poetic and artistic aspects of the human cognitive system. Cognitive science needs to invent vocabularies to describe these aspects of mental processes. The concept of affective computing has advanced the way we talk about cognitive activities. Our treatment of aesthetic emotions described here is based on the cognitive theories of emotion. We identify a cognitive appraisal component and an action readiness component for various aesthetic experiences and propose computational mechanisms to implement those components in the Knowledge and Emotion Workbench Programs (KEWP) model. Cognitive factors each component can deal with are: Cognitive appraisal component--completeness, novelty, memory, ability recognition, competence, assimilation, and Action readiness component--possession, re-experience, creation, evangelic. In the set of programs called KEWP, we have been formalizing people’s emotional experiences evoked by stories and other multimedia objects, which include content oriented emotions and aesthetic emotions.
