Analysis of Modern and Ancient Chinese Literature Using a Chinese Emotional Expression Analysis System

Abstract

Emotional analysis techniques for text are very useful for analyzing public opinions on social media, and user reputation and opinions about products and services on electronic commerce sites. The Chinese Emotional Word Dictionary (CEWD) was created and has a very rich vocabulary for the fine-grained (11 emotion categories) emotional analysis of Chinese text. Additionally, the Chinese Emotional Expression Analysis System (CEEAS) that uses CEWD was developed to analyze emotions in Chinese text relatively accurately and quickly. In this study, we apply CEEAS to the emotional analysis of modern Chinese literature to investigate the characteristics of the appearance of emotional categories in modern Chinese literary works. Then, we apply CEEAS to modern translations of ancient Chinese literary works to perform emotional analysis, and compare the appearance characteristics of emotional expressions with those of modern literary works. Furthermore, we report on the changes in the appearance characteristics of emotional expressions between modern Japanese novels and their Chinese translations. We are convinced that literary research using the emotional analysis techniques proposed in this study will be useful as a new digital approach to literary research.