Sentiment Analysis of Homeric Text: The 1st Book of Iliad

John Pavlopoulos, Alexandros Xenos, Davide Picca


Abstract
Sentiment analysis studies are focused more on online customer reviews or social media, and less on literary studies. The problem is greater for ancient languages, where the linguistic expression of sentiments may diverge from modern linguistic forms. This work presents the outcome of a sentiment annotation task of the first Book of Iliad, an ancient Greek poem. The annotators were provided with verses translated into modern Greek and they annotated the perceived emotions and sentiments verse by verse. By estimating the fraction of annotators that found a verse as belonging to a specific sentiment class, we model the poem’s perceived sentiment as a multi-variate time series. By experimenting with a state of the art deep learning masked language model, pre-trained on modern Greek and fine-tuned to estimate the sentiment of our data, we registered a mean squared error of 0.063. This low error indicates that sentiment estimators built on our dataset can potentially be used as mechanical annotators, hence facilitating the distant reading of Homeric text. Our dataset is released for public use.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.765
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7071–7077
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.765
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Pavlopoulos, Alexandros Xenos, and Davide Picca. 2022. Sentiment Analysis of Homeric Text: The 1st Book of Iliad. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7071–7077, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Sentiment Analysis of Homeric Text: The 1st Book of Iliad (Pavlopoulos et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.765.pdf