DISCO PAL: Diachronic Spanish Sonnet Corpus with Psychological and Affective Labels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Spanish sonnet corpus annotated with psychological and affective labels, enabling affective modeling of poetry and exploring the relationship between emotional content and psychological themes.

Contribution

It presents a novel annotated corpus of Spanish sonnets with affective, lexical, and psychological labels, facilitating affective analysis and applications in poetry and psychology.

Findings

Feasibility of predicting General Affective Meaning from word features in sonnets

Correlation between sonnet affective content and psychological themes

Annotated corpus supports diverse applications like poetry recommendation and therapy

Abstract

Nowadays, there are many applications of text mining over corpora from different languages. However, most of them are based on texts in prose, lacking applications that work with poetry texts. An example of an application of text mining in poetry is the usage of features derived from their individual words in order to capture the lexical, sublexical and interlexical meaning, and infer the General Affective Meaning (GAM) of the text. However, even though this proposal has been proved as useful for poetry in some languages, there is a lack of studies for both Spanish poetry and for highly-structured poetic compositions such as sonnets. This article presents a study over an annotated corpus of Spanish sonnets, in order to analyse if it is possible to build features from their individual words for predicting their GAM. The purpose of this is to model sonnets at an affective level. The article also analyses the relationship between the GAM of the sonnets and the content itself. For this, we consider the content from a psychological perspective, identifying with tags when a sonnet is related to a specific term. Then, we study how GAM changes according to each of those psychological terms. The corpus used contains 274 Spanish sonnets from authors of different centuries, from 15th to 19th. This corpus was annotated by different domain experts. The experts annotated the poems with affective and lexico-semantic features, as well as with domain concepts that belong to psychology. Thanks to this, the corpus of sonnets can be used in different applications, such as poetry recommender systems, personality text mining studies of the authors, or the usage of poetry for therapeutic purposes.