The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels
Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla Adam Hammond Graeme Hirst Saif M. Mohammad
Stories are rich in the emotions they exhibit in their narratives and evoke
in the readers. The emotional journeys of the various characters within a story
are central to their appeal. Computational analysis of the emotions of novels,
however, has rarely examined the variation in the emotional trajectories of the
different characters within them, instead considering the entire novel to
represent a single story arc. In this work, we use character dialogue to
distinguish between the emotion arcs of the narration and the various
characters. We analyze the emotion arcs of the various characters in a dataset
of English literary novels using the framework of Utterance Emotion Dynamics.
Our findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate
emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or
differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by
those associated with individual characters.