Early modern Dutch comedies and farces in the spotlight : introducing EmDComF and its emotion framework

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Debaene, F, van der Haven, K., & Hoste, V.
Editor
Rachele Sprugnoli and Marco Passarotti
Series
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024
Pagination
144-155
Publisher
ELRA and ICCL (Torino, Italia)
Conference
2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (Turin, Italy)
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Abstract

As computational drama studies are developing rapidly, the Dutch dramatic tradition is in need of centralisation still before it can benefit from state-of-the-art methodologies. This paper presents and evaluates EmDComF, a historical corpus of both manually curated and automatically digitised early modern Dutch comedies and farces authored between 1650 and 1725, and describes the refinement of a historically motivated annotation framework exploring sentiment and emotions in these two dramatic subgenres. Originating from Lodewijk Meyer{'}s philosophical writings on passions in the dramatic genre ({\mbox{$±$}}1670), published in Naauwkeurig onderwys in de tooneel-poëzy (Thorough instruction in the Poetics of Drama) by the literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum in 1765, a historical and genre-specific emotion framework is tested and operationalised for annotating emotions in the domain of early modern Dutch comedies and farces. Based on a frequency and cluster analysis of 782 annotated sentences by 2 expert annotators, the initial 38 emotion labels were restructured to a hierarchical label set of the 5 emotions Hatred, Anxiety, Sadness, Joy and Desire.