Annotation and Detection of Emotion Polarity in “I Promessi Sposi”: Dataset and Experiments

Emotions play a crucial role in literature and are studied by various disciplines, e.g. literary criticism, psychology, anthropology and, more recently, also with computational methods in NLP. However, studies in the Italian context are still limited. This work therefore aims to advance the state of the art in the field of emotion analysis applied to historical texts by proposing a new dataset and describing the results of a set of emotion polarity detection experiments. The text analyzed is “I Promessi Sposi” in its final edition (published in 1840), one of the most important novels in the Italian literary and linguistic canon.