RAGE: Roman and Greek Emotions

Frederick Riemenschneider, Jonathan D. Geiger, Thomas Kuhn-Treichel, Anette Frank


Abstract
The study of emotions in ancient Greek and Latin literature has largely been qualitative, relying on close reading, while existing computational methods often focus on coarse-grained sentiment polarity, which limits their use for nuanced literary analysis. To bridge this gap, we present RAGE (Roman And Greek Emotions), a new corpus of approximately 100 000 words of annotated classical literature spanning multiple genres and authors. Our multi-layered annotation framework, inspired by semantic role labeling, is designed for fine-grained analysis, capturing not only the emotion itself but also its experiencer, cause, and target. We adopt a nuanced emotion taxonomy and enrich each emotion instance with additional layers for intensity, explicitness, and negation. To facilitate comparative analysis, characters are linked to Wikidata or a local ontology. We demonstrate the utility of our corpus through corpus-level exploratory analyses and an in-depth case study. RAGE and its accompanying guidelines provide a valuable resource for applying quantitative methods to the study of emotions in classical texts.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
947–957
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-073
DOI:
10.63317/5dgh2dbex43c
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederick Riemenschneider, Jonathan D. Geiger, Thomas Kuhn-Treichel, and Anette Frank. 2026. RAGE: Roman and Greek Emotions. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 947–957, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
RAGE: Roman and Greek Emotions (Riemenschneider et al., LREC 2026)
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