@inproceedings{guhr-2026-whispers,
    title = "Between Whispers and Screams: Loudness Standard Deviation as a Proxy for Explicit Content Detection in {US} {R}omance Novels",
    author = "Guhr, Svenja",
    editor = {Hamilton, Sil  and
      {\"O}hman, Emily  and
      Hicke, Rebecca M. M.  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Bax, Axel  and
      Matthews, Jacob A.  and
      H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.33/",
    pages = "368--380",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
    abstract = "This study proposes and tests loudness standard deviation (SD) of fictional sound events as an acoustically grounded proxy for detecting explicit content in romance fiction. Working with a subcorpus of novels from the Harlequin \textit{Men Made in America} series, scenes were annotated for character and ambient sound with loudness levels. Additionally, the scenes were annotated on a ternary severity scale with two content advisory categories drawn from the PG-story taxonomy, Sex {\&} Nudity and Violence {\&} Scariness (CITATION), and tested whether within-scene loudness SD of character and ambient sound correlates with either category. Loudness standard deviation analyses of character and ambient sounds in scenes featuring explicit content reveal that erotic scenes are acoustically marked by significantly higher variability in character-produced sounds, reflecting the dynamic range from whispered dialogue to vocalized arousal, while no significant correlation was found between high ambient sound loudness SD and scenes of elevated Violence {\&} Scariness."
}