People associate affective meanings to words - “death” is scary and sad while “party” is connotated with surprise and joy. This raises the question if the association is purely a product of the learned affective imports inherent to semantic meanings, or is also an effect of other features of words, e.g., morphological and phonological patterns. We approach this question with an annotation-based analysis leveraging nonsense words. Specifically, we conduct a best-worst scaling crowdsourcing study in which participants assign intensity scores for joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise to 272 non-sense words and, for comparison of the results to previous work, to 68 real words. Based on this resource, we develop character-level and phonology-based intensity regressors. We evaluate them on both nonsense words and real words (making use of the NRC emotion intensity lexicon of 7493 words), across six emotion categories. The analysis of our data reveals that some phonetic patterns show clear differences between emotion intensities. For instance, s as a first phoneme contributes to joy, sh to surprise, p as last phoneme more to disgust than to anger and fear. In the modelling experiments, a regressor trained on real words from the NRC emotion intensity lexicon shows a higher performance (r = 0.17) than regressors that aim at learning the emotion connotation purely from nonsense words. We conclude that humans do associate affective meaning to words based on surface patterns, but also based on similarities to existing words (“juy” to “joy”, or “flike” to “like”).

Anonymisation, that is identifying and neutralising sensitive references, is a crucial part of dataset creation. In this paper, we describe the anonymisation process of a Turkish-German code-switching corpus, namely SAGT, which consists of speech data and a treebank that is built on its transcripts. We employed a selective pseudonymisation approach where we manually identified sensitive references to anonymise and replaced them with surrogate values on the treebank side. In addition to maintaining data privacy, our primary concerns in surrogate selection were keeping the integrity of code-switching properties, morphosyntactic annotation layers, and semantics. After the treebank anonymisation, we anonymised the speech data by mapping between the treebank sentences and audio transcripts with the help of Praat scripts. The treebank is publicly available for research purposes and the audio files can be obtained via an individual licence agreement.