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The emotion dynamics of literary novels

From National Research Council Canada

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Linkhttps://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.150
AuthorSearch for: ; Search for: ; Search for: ; Search for: 1ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2716-7516
Affiliation
  1. National Research Council Canada. Digital Technologies
FormatText, Article
Conference62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), August 11-16, 2024, Bangkok, Thailand
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.
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PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
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  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 (August 2024): 2557–2574.
LanguageEnglish
Peer reviewedYes
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Record identifier60fb6722-234b-407f-979a-5657071c8c92
Record created2024-09-11
Record modified2024-09-11
Date modified: