Text Analyzer Reveals Emotional 'Temperature' of Novels and Fairy Tales

KentuckyFC writes "Stories are a powerful channel for communicating emotions. But while they have been studied in detail by generations of critics, there is little in the way of objective tools for analyzing and comparing their emotional content. That looks set to change thanks to one data mining researcher who has applied the process of sentiment analysis to novels and fairy tales that have been digitized on Project Gutenburg and the Google Books Corpus. The results show the density of emotions in different parts of a story and how the emotional 'temperature' changes throughout the tale. For example, this guy has used the technique to compare the emotional content of the entire collection of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to reveal that the darkest story is a tale called Gambling Hansel; clearly a lesson to us all."

Comments

I usually start with a Gambling Hansel....

[Anonymous Coward]

then I move to a Dirty Gretel and finish all off with a move I call the Sugar Fairy Plums.

Ironic captcha: bodice

The "eight fundamental emotions"

[PapayaSF]

From TFA:

Analysing the emotional content of text is also becoming easier. In recent years, researchers have built up significant databases of the emotions that a given word evokes. This is part of the new field of sentiment analysis in which common words are categorised as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions—joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.

I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit? Shouldn't it count as a fundamental emotion? Or is it considered just a sub-category of "surprise" or "joy"?

In any case, I wonder if someone could combine all that with the 36 dramatic situations and a few other components, and create a program that writes stories....

Re:The "eight fundamental emotions"

[sconeu]

That's because the authors couldn't get no satisfaction, though they tried and they tried, and they tried, and they tried.

Here is the PowerPoint for the paper

[TedTschopp]

Here is the a good summary of the work in a PDF of a PPT.

http://www.saifmohammad.com/WebDocs/LaTeCH-emotions-in-books.pdf

Ted

Gambling Hansel: not dark at all

[themushroom]

I didn't find it dark at all, not nearly as dark as the tales Disney sanitized. I mean, it's about a gambler who beats both God and the Devil even if he has lousy luck with mortals prior to getting rigged cards and dice.

Related stuff by my wife on tagging narratives

[Paul Fernhout]

Mainly by hand though. Free book: http://www.workingwithstories.org/
Free software for communtieis: http://www.rakontu.org/
Related business process patent (sadly) when at IBM Research: http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&lr=&vid=USPAT7136791
Past commercial software: http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/
National security (does have some automatic aspects): http://app.rahs.gov.sg/public/www/content.aspx?sid=2955

There is a lot you can do with stories once they are tagged for emotional intensity, whether automatically, by the teller, or by other people. Stories are all around us, as we try to make sense of our lives and events in our communities. So this sort of technology to tag emotions in stories is much more far reaching than just being about fiction. It can be used to design better products, to help communities figure out what to do about a pressing issue, to resolve conflicts, and to see emerging trends. That is one reason such work is funded by the intelligence sector (as well as businesses and some non-profits). She's been trying to make these ideas freely available to everyone, but it has been a slow going slog to follow the path of free and open source for all this.

By someone else on the relation between emotion and reason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error