Sentimental Matters - Predicting Literary Quality by Sentiment Analysis and Stylometric Features

Yuri Bizzoni, Pascale Moreira, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Kristoffer Nielbo


Abstract
Over the years, the task of predicting reader appreciation or literary quality has been the object of several studies, but it remains a challenging problem in quantitative literary studies and computational linguistics alike, as its definition can vary a lot depending on the genre, the adopted features and the annotation system. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of sentiment arc modelling versus more classical stylometric features for user-ratings of novels. We run our experiments on a corpus of English language narrative literary fiction from the 19th and 20th century, showing that syntactic and surface-level features can be powerful for the study of literary quality, but can be outperformed by sentiment-characteristics of a text.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–18
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuri Bizzoni, Pascale Moreira, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Kristoffer Nielbo. 2023. Sentimental Matters - Predicting Literary Quality by Sentiment Analysis and Stylometric Features. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 11–18, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sentimental Matters - Predicting Literary Quality by Sentiment Analysis and Stylometric Features (Bizzoni et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.2.mp4