The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates
In the few works that have used NLP to study literary quality, sentiment and emotion analysis have often been considered valuable sources of information. At the same time, the idea that the nature and polarity of the sentiments expressed by a novel might have something to do with its perceived quali...
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| Language: | English |
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Nicolas Turenne
2023-08-01
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| Series: | Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities |
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| Online Access: | https://jdmdh.episciences.org/11406/pdf |
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| author | Yuri Bizzoni Pascale Moreira Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Kristoffer L. Nielbo |
| author_facet | Yuri Bizzoni Pascale Moreira Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Kristoffer L. Nielbo |
| author_sort | Yuri Bizzoni |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | In the few works that have used NLP to study literary quality, sentiment and emotion analysis have often been considered valuable sources of information. At the same time, the idea that the nature and polarity of the sentiments expressed by a novel might have something to do with its perceived quality seems limited at best. In this paper, we argue that the fractality of narratives, specifically the longterm memory of their sentiment arcs, rather than their simple shape or average valence, might play an important role in the perception of literary quality by a human audience. In particular, we argue that such measure can help distinguish Nobel-winning writers from control groups in a recent corpus of English language novels. To test this hypothesis, we present the results from two studies: (i) a probability distribution test, where we compute the probability of seeing a title from a Nobel laureate at different levels of arc fractality; (ii) a classification test, where we use several machine learning algorithms to measure the predictive power of both sentiment arcs and their fractality measure. Lastly, we perform another experiment to examine whether arc fractality may be used to distinguish more or less popular works within the Nobel canon itself, looking at the probability of higher GoodReads’ ratings at different levels of arc fractality. Our findings seem to indicate that despite the competitive and complex nature of the task, the populations of Nobel and non-Nobel laureates seem to behave differently and can to some extent be told apart by a classifier. Moreover, the probability of Nobel titles having better ratings appears higher at different levels of arc fractality. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-107cc3d6e1514c73b61ba51e51603296 |
| institution | OA Journals |
| issn | 2416-5999 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2023-08-01 |
| publisher | Nicolas Turenne |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities |
| spelling | doaj-art-107cc3d6e1514c73b61ba51e516032962025-08-20T02:10:31ZengNicolas TurenneJournal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities2416-59992023-08-01NLP4DH10.46298/jdmdh.1140611406The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel LaureatesYuri Bizzoni0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6981-7903Pascale Moreira1Mads Rosendahl Thomsen2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4975-6752Kristoffer L. Nielbo3https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5116-5070Aarhus UniversityAarhus UniversityAarhus UniversityAarhus UniversityIn the few works that have used NLP to study literary quality, sentiment and emotion analysis have often been considered valuable sources of information. At the same time, the idea that the nature and polarity of the sentiments expressed by a novel might have something to do with its perceived quality seems limited at best. In this paper, we argue that the fractality of narratives, specifically the longterm memory of their sentiment arcs, rather than their simple shape or average valence, might play an important role in the perception of literary quality by a human audience. In particular, we argue that such measure can help distinguish Nobel-winning writers from control groups in a recent corpus of English language novels. To test this hypothesis, we present the results from two studies: (i) a probability distribution test, where we compute the probability of seeing a title from a Nobel laureate at different levels of arc fractality; (ii) a classification test, where we use several machine learning algorithms to measure the predictive power of both sentiment arcs and their fractality measure. Lastly, we perform another experiment to examine whether arc fractality may be used to distinguish more or less popular works within the Nobel canon itself, looking at the probability of higher GoodReads’ ratings at different levels of arc fractality. Our findings seem to indicate that despite the competitive and complex nature of the task, the populations of Nobel and non-Nobel laureates seem to behave differently and can to some extent be told apart by a classifier. Moreover, the probability of Nobel titles having better ratings appears higher at different levels of arc fractality.https://jdmdh.episciences.org/11406/pdfcomputational narratology; sentiment analysis; fractal analysis; literary quality assessment; stylometry |
| spellingShingle | Yuri Bizzoni Pascale Moreira Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Kristoffer L. Nielbo The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities computational narratology; sentiment analysis; fractal analysis; literary quality assessment; stylometry |
| title | The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates |
| title_full | The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates |
| title_fullStr | The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates |
| title_short | The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment: the Case of Nobel Laureates |
| title_sort | fractality of sentiment arcs for literary quality assessment the case of nobel laureates |
| topic | computational narratology; sentiment analysis; fractal analysis; literary quality assessment; stylometry |
| url | https://jdmdh.episciences.org/11406/pdf |
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