How to Annotate Emotions in Historical Italian Novels: A Case Study on I Promessi Sposi

Poster presented at the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2024) on May 25 2024.

This paper describes the annotation of a chapter taken from I Promessi Sposi, the most famous Italian novel of the 19th century written by Alessandro Manzoni, following 3 emotion classifications. The aim of this methodological paper is to understand: i) how the annotation procedure changes depending on the granularity of the classification, ii) how the different granularities impact the inter-annotator agreement, iii) which granularity allows good coverage of emotions, iv) if the chosen classifications are missing emotions that are important for historical literary texts. The opinion of non-experts is integrated in the present study through an online questionnaire. In addition, preliminary experiments are carried out using the new dataset as a test set to evaluate the performances of different approaches for emotion polarity detection and emotion classification respectively. Annotated data are released both as aggregated gold standard and with non-aggregated labels (that is labels before reconciliation between annotators) so to align with the perspectivist approach, that is an established practice in the Humanities and, more recently, also in NLP.

Questa pubblicazione è stata realizzata da ricercatrice con contratto di ricerca cofinanziato dall’Unione europea - PON Ricerca e Innovazione 2014-2020 ai sensi dell’art. 24, comma 3, lett. a, della Legge 30 dicembre 2010, n. 240 e s.m.i. e del D.M. 10 agosto 2021 n. 1062. Questa ricerca è stata anche finanziata dall’Università degli Studi di Parma attraverso l’azione Bando di Ateneo 2022 per la ricerca co-finanziata dal MUR-Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca - D.M. 737/2021 - PNR - PNRR - NextGenerationEU.