Sentiment Analysis as Proxy for Plot

Matthew Jockers
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Jockers will discuss his continued development and validation of the Syuzhet R software package that implements sentiment analysis as a way to track emotional valence in a narrative fiction. Jockers will show how the highs and lows of emotional language serve as a reliable proxy for plot movement, and he'll describe how he validated Syuzhet's output against a collection of 167,034 human coded sentences, and then used that data to construct a new sentiment dictionary tuned to the emotional language characteristically seen in fiction.

Presentation (PDF File)

Back to Workshop IV: Mathematical Analysis of Cultural Expressive Forms: Text Data