PO-EMO: Conceptualization, Annotation, and Modeling of Aesthetic Emotions in German and English Poetry

Abstract

Most approaches to emotion analysis regarding social media, literature, news, and other domains focus exclusively on basic emotion categories as defined by Ekman or Plutchik. However, art (such as literature) enables engagement in a broader range of more complex and subtle emotions that have been shown to also include mixed emotional responses. We consider emotions as they are elicited in the reader, rather than what is expressed in the text or intended by the author. Thus, we conceptualize a set of aesthetic emotions that are predictive of aesthetic appreciation in the reader, and allow the annotation of multiple labels per line to capture mixed emotions within context. We evaluate this novel setting in an annotation experiment both with carefully trained experts and via crowdsourcing. Our annotation with experts leads to an acceptable agreement of κ = .70, resulting in a consistent dataset for future large scale analysis. Finally, we conduct first emotion classification experiments based on BERT, showing that identifying aesthetic emotions is challenging in our data, with up to .52 F1-micro on the German subset. Data and resources are available at https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion.

Lexico-semantic and affective modelling of Spanish poetry: A semi-supervised learning approach

“…It would be interesting to perform it over a bigger corpus of annotated sonnets. However, we think that the corpus size is big enough for carrying out these analyses and obtain statistically meaningful results, since our corpus is has more poems per independent category than other corpora from the literature (Ullrich et al 2017), (Aryani et al 2016), (Jacobs et al 2017), (Obermeier et al 2013), (Haider et al 2020). Also, the threshold found using the statistical power serves as another reason to support the statistical analyses carried out.…”

Effects of an Onscreen Instructor’s Emotions and Picture Types on Poetry Aesthetic Appreciation

“…Indeed, aesthetic appreciation is the consequence of a complex dynamics between the text contents and context factors such as reader motivation and skill (Lüdtke et al, 2014). Another explanation may lie in the complex and subtle nature of aesthetic emotions, which are a key component of aesthetic appreciation (Haider et al, 2020;Menninghaus et al, 2019) and go beyond basic emotion categories as de ned by Ekman et al (1978). Concerning the valence of emotions, the instructor's expressions were not limited to negative and positive, learners identi ed and understood these emotions and eventually generated their own aesthetic appreciation.…”

Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features

“…We annotate prosodic features in two small poetry corpora that were previously collected and annotated for aesthetic emotions by Haider et al (2020).…”

“…We used the German dataset here, as the annotation is generally more reliable (e.g., POS). In this experiment we also try to learn the annotation of aesthetic emotions that was described for this dataset by Haider et al (2020). Each line was annotated with one or two emotions from a set of nine emotions.…”

“…Other work has focused on specific genres like Spanish sonnets (Ruiz Fabo et al, 2020), limericks (Jhamtani et al, 2019), or Chinese Tang poetry (Zhang and Lapata, 2014). There are further resources with rhyme patterns (Reddy and Knight, 2011;Haider and Kuhn, 2018) or emotion annotation (Haider et al, 2020). Truly large corpora are still hard to find, besides the Gutenberg project for English and Textgrid and DTA for German.…”