A Survey on Sentiment and Emotion Analysis for Computational Literary Studies
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Emotions have often been a crucial part of compelling narratives: literature tells about people with goals, desires, passions, and intentions. In the past, classical literary studies usually scrutinized the affective dimension of literature within the framework of hermeneutics. However, with emergence of the research field known as Digital Humanities (DH) some studies of emotions in literary context have taken a computational turn. Given the fact that DH is still being formed as a science, this direction of research can be rendered relatively new. At the same time, the research in sentiment analysis started in computational linguistic almost two decades ago and is nowadays an established field that has dedicated workshops and tracks in the main computational linguistics conferences. This leads us to the question of what are the commonalities and discrepancies between sentiment analysis research in computational linguistics and digital humanities? In this survey, we offer an overview of the existing body of research on sentiment and emotion analysis as applied to literature. We precede the main part of the survey with a short introduction to natural language processing and machine learning, psychological models of emotions, and provide an overview of existing approaches to sentiment and emotion analysis in computational linguistics. The papers presented in this survey are either coming directly from DH or computational linguistics venues and are limited to sentiment and emotion analysis as applied to literary text.
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