Abstract
Literary language presents an ongoing challenge for Sentiment Analysis due to its complex, nuanced, and layered form of expression. It is often suggested that effective literary writing is evocative, operating beneath the surface and understating emotional expression. To explore features of implicitness in literary expression, this study takes Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a case for examining implicit sentiment expression. We examine sentences where automatic sentiment annotations show substantial divergences from human sentiment annotations, and probe these sentences for distinctive traits. We find that sentences where humans perceived a strong sentiment while models did not are significantly lower in arousal and higher in concreteness than sentences where humans and models were more aligned, suggesting the importance of simplicity and concreteness for implicit sentiment expression in literary prose.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.unimplicit-1.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Malta
- Editors:
- Valentina Pyatkin, Daniel Fried, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Alisa Liu, Sandro Pezzelle
- Venues:
- unimplicit | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 54–61
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.unimplicit-1.5
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuri Bizzoni and Pascale Feldkamp. 2024. Below the Sea (with the Sharks): Probing Textual Features of Implicit Sentiment in a Literary Case-study. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language, pages 54–61, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Below the Sea (with the Sharks): Probing Textual Features of Implicit Sentiment in a Literary Case-study (Bizzoni & Feldkamp, unimplicit-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.unimplicit-1.5.pdf