Feelings from the Past---Adapting Affective Lexicons for Historical Emotion Analysis

Abstract

We here describe a novel methodology for measuring affective language in historical text by expanding an affective lexicon and jointly adapting it to prior language stages. We automatically construct a lexicon for word-emotion association of 18th and 19th century German which is then validated against expert ratings. Subsequently, this resource is used to identify distinct emotional patterns and trace long-term emotional trends in different genres of writing spanning several centuries.

Tasks

Reproductions