Early Modern Dutch Comedies and Farces in the Spotlight: Introducing EmDComF and Its Emotion Framework

Florian Debaene, Kornee van der Haven, Veronique Hoste


Abstract
As computational drama studies are developing rapidly, the Dutch dramatic tradition is in need of centralisation still before it can benefit from state-of-the-art methodologies. This paper presents and evaluates EmDComF, a historical corpus of both manually curated and automatically digitised early modern Dutch comedies and farces authored between 1650 and 1725, and describes the refinement of a historically motivated annotation framework exploring sentiment and emotions in these two dramatic subgenres. Originating from Lodewijk Meyer’s philosophical writings on passions in the dramatic genre (±1670), published in Naauwkeurig onderwys in de tooneel-poëzy (Thorough instruction in the Poetics of Drama) by the literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum in 1765, a historical and genre-specific emotion framework is tested and operationalised for annotating emotions in the domain of early modern Dutch comedies and farces. Based on a frequency and cluster analysis of 782 annotated sentences by 2 expert annotators, the initial 38 emotion labels were restructured to a hierarchical label set of the 5 emotions Hatred, Anxiety, Sadness, Joy and Desire.
Anthology ID:
2024.lt4hala-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
Venues:
LT4HALA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
144–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Florian Debaene, Kornee van der Haven, and Veronique Hoste. 2024. Early Modern Dutch Comedies and Farces in the Spotlight: Introducing EmDComF and Its Emotion Framework. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024, pages 144–155, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Early Modern Dutch Comedies and Farces in the Spotlight: Introducing EmDComF and Its Emotion Framework (Debaene et al., LT4HALA-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.17.pdf