Abstract
This paper introduces a new corpus of paired football match reports, the Multilingual Emotional Football Corpus, (MEmoFC), which has been manually collected from English, German, and Dutch websites of individual football clubs to investigate the way different emotional states (e.g. happiness for winning and disappointment for losing) are realized in written language. In addition to the reports, it also contains the statistics for the selected matches. MEmoFC is a corpus consisting of comparable subcorpora since the authors of the texts report on the same event from two different perspectives—the winner’s and the loser’s side, and from an arguably more neutral perspective in tied matches. We demonstrate how the corpus can be used to investigate the influence of affect on the reports through different approaches and illustrate how game outcome influences (1) references to the own team and the opponent, and (2) the use of positive and negative emotion terms in the different languages. The MEmoFC corpus, together with the analyzed aspects of emotional language will open up new approaches for targeted automatic generation of texts.
Highlights
This paper introduces a new corpus of paired football match reports, the Multilingual Emotional Football Corpus, (MEmoFC), which has been manually collected from English, German, and Dutch websites of individual football clubs to investigate the way different emotional states are realized in written language
This paper introduces the Multilingual Emotional Football Corpus (MEmoFC),1 a new corpus consisting of pairs of football reports, which can be used for the study of affective language
This paper presented a new multilingual corpus, MEmoFC, consisting of pairs of reports for soccer matches, taken from the respective websites of the competing teams, combined with game statistics
Summary
This paper introduces the Multilingual Emotional Football Corpus (MEmoFC), a new corpus consisting of pairs of football reports, which can be used for the study of affective language. Sports reportage provided by sports clubs themselves is arguably one of the most interesting registers available for linguistic analyses of affect-laden language from different perspectives. It opens up room for creative language, starting already with the headlines of the match reports (Smith and Montgomery 1989). ‘‘If all League One games at the Pirelli Stadium this season are going to be like this it is going to be an entertaining if nerve jangling season.’’ (BA220815, MEmoFC) Both describe the exact same match and events, but the affective nuances are completely different. In the remainder of this introduction, we position the corpus more broadly in the research field studying the influence of emotion on language, and link it to applications in sentiment analysis and affective natural language generation
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