Digital Approaches to Analyzing and Translating Emotion

Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

“…It could be that the genre of texts would be relevant here, as Akkadian genres tend to use specific vocabulary, and this therefore could mean some words related to emotions may not be as frequent in certain genres. This has already been suggested by a quantitative study of Akkadian concept of 'love'9 .…”

“…One option may be to focus directly on the collocates of emotion and body words within Akkadian texts, where the focus is on which other words co-occur close to emotion or body words. Such an approach has already begun to be explored with studies focussing on cultural elements like seeing, age and masculinities, and love have already been carried out in Assyriology 9,14,20 . This would enable direct exploration of which other words occur with each emotion-body word pair.…”

“…Word embeddings are used commonly in modern corpus linguistics, but explorations into word embedding approaches with Akkadian corpora have been limited thus far. Experiments with algorithms like Word2Vec and FastText have provided results which are similar to a word co-occurrence approach alone, likely partially due to the unique challenges of Akkadian corpora in comparison to the larger training corpora from modern languages used for these algorithms 9,24 . However, the PMIembeddings toolkit addresses the unique issues of Akkadian corpora for this purpose (https://github.com/asahala/pmi-embeddings).…”

“…Whilst a general rule is that verbs appear at the end of a sentence, this is not the case in every text (and not every text has a verb preserved). Scholars investigating co-occurrences in Akkadian datasets therefore prefer to use window sizes to define the idea of how 'close' a word is to the target word 7,9,20,24,26 . In effect, this method ignores syntax, which runs the risk of identifying false collocates that are actually words that span sentences or line breaks in the texts.…”

“…To evaluate how individuals in distant cultures-in time, geography, and customs-may have experienced emotions, it is possible to analyse emotion expressions in written documents, which have been dutifully compiled and analysed in many languages 6 . Semantic analysis of text corpora from the premodern era can give us a glimpse into the emotional lives of civilisations that have long ago ceased to be [7][8][9] . Comparison of emotion expressions across languages is however difficult.…”