Diachronic predictor of affective ratings of English words

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bochkarev, Vladimir V.^{; *} | Savinkov, Andrey V. | Shevlyakova, Anna V. | Solovyev, Valery D.

Affiliations: Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Vladimir V. Bochkarev, Kazan Federal University, 18 Kremlyovskaya str., 420008 Kazan, Russia. E-mail: vbochkarev@mail.ru.

Abstract: This work considers implementation of a diachronic predictor of valence, arousal and dominance ratings of English words. The estimation of affective ratings is based on data on word co-occurrence statistics in the large diachronic Google Books Ngram corpus. Affective ratings from the NRC VAD dictionary are used as target values for training. When tested on synchronic data, the obtained Pearson‘s correlation coefficients between human affective ratings and their machine ratings are 0.843, 0.779 and 0.792 for valence, aroused and dominance, respectively. We also provide a detailed analysis of the accuracy of the predictor on diachronic data. The main result of the work is creation of a diachronic affective dictionary of English words. Several examples are considered that illustrate jumps in the time series of affective ratings when a word gains a new meaning. This indicates that changes in affective ratings can serve as markers of lexical-semantic changes.

Keywords: Affective words, affective norms, sentiment dictionary, word valence ratings, lexical semantic change

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-219358

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. Pre-press, no. Pre-press, pp. 1-13, 2024