How to Annotate Emotions in Historical Italian Novels: A Case Study on I Promessi Sposi

Rachele Sprugnoli, Arianna Redaelli


Abstract
This paper describes the annotation of a chapter taken from I Promessi Sposi, the most famous Italian novel of the 19th century written by Alessandro Manzoni, following 3 emotion classifications. The aim of this methodological paper is to understand: i) how the annotation procedure changes depending on the granularity of the classification, ii) how the different granularities impact the inter-annotator agreement, iii) which granularity allows good coverage of emotions, iv) if the chosen classifications are missing emotions that are important for historical literary texts. The opinion of non-experts is integrated in the present study through an online questionnaire. In addition, preliminary experiments are carried out using the new dataset as a test set to evaluate the performances of different approaches for emotion polarity detection and emotion classification respectively. Annotated data are released both as aggregated gold standard and with non-aggregated labels (that is labels before reconciliation between annotators) so to align with the perspectivist approach, that is an established practice in the Humanities and, more recently, also in NLP.
Anthology ID:
2024.lt4hala-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
Venues:
LT4HALA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
105–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.13
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rachele Sprugnoli and Arianna Redaelli. 2024. How to Annotate Emotions in Historical Italian Novels: A Case Study on I Promessi Sposi. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024, pages 105–115, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
How to Annotate Emotions in Historical Italian Novels: A Case Study on I Promessi Sposi (Sprugnoli & Redaelli, LT4HALA-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lt4hala-1.13.pdf