9. The information processing apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein when the content has time information attached thereto, the obtaining means extracts the meta-information in accordance with the progress of the content according to the time information.
1. An information processing apparatus for recognizing a user's emotion, said apparatus comprising: obtaining means for obtaining meta-information concerning content; predicting means for predicting an emotion of a user who is viewing the content from the meta-information obtained by the obtaining means; and recognizing means for recognizing an emotion of the user using the emotion predicted by the predicting means and user information acquired from the user, wherein said recognizing means comprises a prediction information obtaining means, a recognition-model selection means, a recognition-model holding means, and a matching means, wherein a method for recognizing a user's emotion is based on the Bayes decision rule, wherein said prediction information obtaining means obtains prediction information from said predicting means and supplies said prediction information to said recognition-model selection means to select appropriate recognition model(s) from said recognition-model holding means based on said prediction information, and supplies the selected recognition model(s) to said matching means, wherein an emotion recognition result output from said emotion recognizing means is fed back to said emotion predicting means so that said emotion predicting means can be adapted to said user, and wherein the emotion recognition result is used as information indicating the user's preference to obtain information suited to the preference of the user when obtaining information via a network, wherein the emotion is an emotion of a user who is viewing the content.