Willkommens-Merkel, Chaos-Johnson, and Tore-Klose: Modeling the Evaluative Meaning of German Personal Name Compounds
Annerose Eichel, Tana Deeg, Andre Blessing, Milena Belosevic, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Abstract
We present a comprehensive computational study of the under-investigated phenomenon of personal name compounds (PNCs) in German such as Willkommens-Merkel (‘Welcome-Merkel’). Prevalent in news, social media, and political discourse, PNCs are hypothesized to exhibit an evaluative function that is reflected in a more positive or negative perception as compared to the respective personal full name (such as Angela Merkel). We model 321 PNCs and their corresponding full names at discourse level, and show that PNCs bear an evaluative nature that can be captured through a variety of computational methods. Specifically, we assess through valence information whether a PNC is more positively or negatively evaluative than the person’s name, by applying and comparing two approaches using (i) valence norms and (ii) pre-trained language models (PLMs). We further enrich our data with personal, domain-specific, and extra-linguistic information and perform a range of regression analyses revealing that factors including compound and modifier valence, domain, and political party membership influence how a PNC is evaluated.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1534
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 17637–17650
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1534
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Annerose Eichel, Tana Deeg, Andre Blessing, Milena Belosevic, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2024. Willkommens-Merkel, Chaos-Johnson, and Tore-Klose: Modeling the Evaluative Meaning of German Personal Name Compounds. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17637–17650, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Willkommens-Merkel, Chaos-Johnson, and Tore-Klose: Modeling the Evaluative Meaning of German Personal Name Compounds (Eichel et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1534.pdf