@inproceedings{schneider-2026-pop,
    title = "Pop Lyrics through Time: Challenges in Corpus-Based Modeling of Linguistic and Emotional Dynamics in {G}erman Pop Lyrics",
    author = "Schneider, Roman",
    editor = "Ba{\'n}ski, Piotr  and
      Knight, Dawn  and
      Kupietz, Marc  and
      Witt, Andreas  and
      Wr{\'o}blewska, Alina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/test-year-match/2026.cmlc-1.4/",
    doi = "10.63317/4dh6sfnuqcnr",
    pages = "32--43",
    abstract = "This paper presents a large-scale diachronic analysis of German pop lyrics based on a linguistically rich, TEI-encoded monitoring corpus. We describe multi-layer annotation and reproducible workflows for deriving higher-level features at scale, including lexical diversity indices, a pronoun-based subjectivity measure, modal particle density, and a length-normalized sentiment intensity score. Particular attention is paid to the development and evaluation of pipelines for two notoriously challenging phenomena: modal particles and sentiment. For modal particles, we build a manually curated gold standard and train sequence models whose performance we relate to inter-annotator agreement. For sentiment, we integrate a lexicon-based resource with a dedicated human annotation experiment to assess reliability and alignment with expert judgments. On this basis, we investigate how structural and affective features co-vary in the corpus and how they change over time, showing, among other trends, declining lexical diversity and sentiment intensity alongside a slight increase in first- and second-person pronouns. Beyond the empirical findings, the paper highlights practical challenges in managing culturally specific corpora, and makes evaluation materials available to support transparent, reusable corpus-based research on popular music and related domains."
}