Ethnic minorities' mentality and homosexuality psychology in literature: A text emotion analysis with NRC lexicon

Abstract

As a significant subfield of natural language processing (NLP), text emotion analysis has been extensively researched and applied in various domains, such as media, education, and medicine. It has shown significant results in annotating blog posts that rely on an extensive corpus of short phrases. However, in interdisciplinary fields like literary pragmatics, character emotion analysis in literature becomes crucial. Despite the importance of this topic, there are fewer studies, especially for niche subjects such as ethnic minorities' mentality and homosexuality psychology. This paper examines the effectiveness of the widely used lexicon National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in detecting metaphorical words in the famous homosexual novel Maurice. To increase the accuracy of the test, we classified and cleaned the stop words using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) before the analysis step. Our results indicate that the lexicon is able to demonstrate reasonable emotional changes in the story.