Scent and Sensibility: Perception Shifts in the Olfactory Domain

Teresa Paccosi, Stefano Menini, Elisa Leonardelli, Ilaria Barzon, Sara Tonelli


Abstract
In this work, we investigate olfactory perception shifts, analysing how the description of the smells emitted by specific sources has changed over time. We first create a benchmark of selected smell sources, relying upon existing historical studies related to olfaction. We also collect an English text corpus by retrieving large collections of documents from freely available resources, spanning from 1500 to 2000 and covering different domains. We label such corpus using a system for olfactory information extraction inspired by frame semantics, where the semantic roles around the smell sources in the benchmark are marked. We then analyse how the roles describing Qualities of smell sources change over time and how they can contribute to characterise perception shifts, also in comparison with more standard statistical approaches.
Anthology ID:
2023.lchange-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, David Alfter, Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
143–152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Teresa Paccosi, Stefano Menini, Elisa Leonardelli, Ilaria Barzon, and Sara Tonelli. 2023. Scent and Sensibility: Perception Shifts in the Olfactory Domain. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 143–152, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scent and Sensibility: Perception Shifts in the Olfactory Domain (Paccosi et al., LChange 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.15.pdf