Fractality of sentiment arcs for literary quality assessment: The case of Nobel laureates
Yuri Bizzoni, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Abstract
In the few works that have used NLP to study literary quality, sentiment and emotion analysis have often been considered valuable sources of information. At the same time, the idea that the nature and polarity of the sentiments expressed by a novel might have something to do with its perceived quality seems limited at best. In this paper, we argue that the fractality of narratives, specifically the long-term memory of their sentiment arcs, rather than their simple shape or average valence, might play an important role in the perception of literary quality by a human audience. In particular, we argue that such measure can help distinguish Nobel-winning writers from control groups in a recent corpus of English language novels. To test this hypothesis, we present the results from two studies: (i) a probability distribution test, where we compute the probability of seeing a title from a Nobel laureate at different levels of arc fractality; (ii) a classification test, where we use several machine learning algorithms to measure the predictive power of both sentiment arcs and their fractality measure. Our findings seem to indicate that despite the competitive and complex nature of the task, the populations of Nobel and non-Nobel laureates seem to behave differently and can to some extent be told apart by a classifier.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nlp4dh-1.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Venue:
- NLP4DH
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 31–41
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4dh-1.5
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuri Bizzoni, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. 2022. Fractality of sentiment arcs for literary quality assessment: The case of Nobel laureates. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, pages 31–41, Taipei, Taiwan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Fractality of sentiment arcs for literary quality assessment: The case of Nobel laureates (Bizzoni et al., NLP4DH 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2022.nlp4dh-1.5.pdf