Modeling Word Emotion in Historical Language: Quantity Beats Supposed Stability in Seed Word Selection

Johannes Hellrich, Sven Buechel, Udo Hahn


Abstract
To understand historical texts, we must be aware that language—including the emotional connotation attached to words—changes over time. In this paper, we aim at estimating the emotion which is associated with a given word in former language stages of English and German. Emotion is represented following the popular Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) annotation scheme. While being more expressive than polarity alone, existing word emotion induction methods are typically not suited for addressing it. To overcome this limitation, we present adaptations of two popular algorithms to VAD. To measure their effectiveness in diachronic settings, we present the first gold standard for historical word emotions, which was created by scholars with proficiency in the respective language stages and covers both English and German. In contrast to claims in previous work, our findings indicate that hand-selecting small sets of seed words with supposedly stable emotional meaning is actually harm- rather than helpful.
Anthology ID:
W19-2501
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, USA
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2501
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2501
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Johannes Hellrich, Sven Buechel, and Udo Hahn. 2019. Modeling Word Emotion in Historical Language: Quantity Beats Supposed Stability in Seed Word Selection. In Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 1–11, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Word Emotion in Historical Language: Quantity Beats Supposed Stability in Seed Word Selection (Hellrich et al., LaTeCH 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2501.pdf