Sentiment Classification of Historical Danish and Norwegian Literary Texts

Ali Allaith, Kirstine Degn, Alexander Conroy, Bolette Pedersen, Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Daniel Hershcovich

Abstract
Sentiment classification is valuable for literary analysis, as sentiment is crucial in literary narratives. It can, for example, be used to investigate a hypothesis in the literary analysis of 19th-century Scandinavian novels that the writing of female authors in this period was characterized by negative sentiment, as this paper shows. In order to enable a data-driven analysis of this hypothesis, we create a manually annotated dataset of sentence-level sentiment annotations for novels from this period and use it to train and evaluate various sentiment classification methods. We find that pre-trained multilingual language models outperform models trained on modern Danish, as well as classifiers based on lexical resources. Finally, in classifier-assisted corpus analysis, we confirm the literary hypothesis regarding the author’s gender and further shed light on the temporal development of the trend. Our dataset and trained models will be useful for future analysis of historical Danish and Norwegian literary texts.
Anthology ID:
2023.nodalida-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
324–334
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nodalida-1.34
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ali Allaith, Kirstine Degn, Alexander Conroy, Bolette Pedersen, Jens Bjerring-Hansen, and Daniel Hershcovich. 2023. Sentiment Classification of Historical Danish and Norwegian Literary Texts. In Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 324–334, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Sentiment Classification of Historical Danish and Norwegian Literary Texts (Allaith et al., NoDaLiDa 2023)
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