Exploring senses, emotions, and their interconnections throughout literary periods

Literature presents a unique platform to experience senses and emotions. Particularly, fiction literature brings alive sensory perception and emotional experiences in its language. This study reports on the semantic organization of English sensory descriptors of the five basic senses, their interconnections, and their associations with emotions in a large corpus of over 7,000 Project Gutenberg fiction books. In addition, this study reports on a distributional-semantic word embeddings approach to identify and extract these descriptors and analyze their mixing interconnections in the resulting conceptual and sensory space in three important periods: 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, as well as overall. In the analysis, I attempt to understand the how the semantic sensory space is organized for each literary period and the general sensory interactions seen across all literary periods. This work also tries to align the sensory spaces of different literary periods with literary movements. Furthermore, I explore different techniques to extract and rank the sensory descriptors seen in each corpus and describe the strengths and drawbacks of each approach. This research is novel in the the visualizations, which catch a glimpse of the perceptual spaces of sensory experiences in fiction narratives. The results are presented in multiple formats, including insightful and interactive interfaces for colorful data visualization and linguistic analysis. The findings are relevant for research on concept acquisition and representation as well as for applications that can benefit from a better understanding of perceptual spaces of sensory and emotion experience in fiction, in particular, and in language, in general.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ashokan, Akhila

Contributors dc:contributor

• Girju, Roxana

• Language
• Experience of emotion
• Verbal behavior
• Linguistics analysis
• Computational Modeling
• Data-driven

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Akhila Ashokan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115606

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115606