The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels

Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Adam Hammond, Graeme Hirst, Saif Mohammad


Abstract
Stories are rich in the emotions they exhibit in their narratives and evoke in the readers. The emotional journeys of the various characters within a story are central to their appeal. Computational analysis of the emotions of novels, however, has rarely examined the variation in the emotional trajectories of the different characters within them, instead considering the entire novel to represent a single story arc. In this work, we use character dialogue to distinguish between the emotion arcs of the narration and the various characters. We analyze the emotion arcs of the various characters in a dataset of English literary novels using the framework of Utterance Emotion Dynamics. Our findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.150
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2557–2574
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.150
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.150
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Adam Hammond, Graeme Hirst, and Saif Mohammad. 2024. The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2557–2574, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels (Vishnubhotla et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.150.pdf