Using weighted directed graphs for identification of flow of emotions in poems

Abstract

Poem is a spontaneous flow of emotions. There are several emotion detection systems to identify emotions from speech, gestures, and text (blogs, newspapers, stories and medical reports). Since such systems do not exist for poetry, we take the first step in building a system to recognize emotions in poetry by constructing a benchmark corpus, the PERC (Poem Emotion Recognition Corpus), of poems written by Indian poets in English. In this research a novel graphical method, Poem Emotion Trajectory System (PETS), is proposed to depict the flow of emotion in a poem. PETS is based on the construction of a weighted directed graph as a means to represent the emotion flow among the verses of a given poem. The weights represent the transition probability among the emotion states considered. The significant advantage is that a dominant path for each emotion category is identified. Emotion flow along verses is analyzed using a graph-based approach. This method, applied to each emotion category, generalizes the emotion flow in each emotion class. This PETS can be applied in poetry therapy and to enhance creative thinking and writing.