Corpus-based Explorations of Affective Load Differences in Arabic-Hebrew-English

What it is about

The authors ask whether words with roughly the same denotation in Arabic, Hebrew and English carry different emotional load, a difference that translation often loses. They use news corpora in the three languages (about 1.5 million Arabic newswire documents from 1995–2007, about 400,000 English Google News documents from 2008–2009, and 11,474 Hebrew newspaper documents from 1990–2002), POS-tag them, and compare terms by similarity of their distributional contexts. The terms (emotion, conflict, conciliation and trust) come from questionnaires given to Arabic and Hebrew speakers, and a human expert supplies the equivalents in the other languages. The output is a similarity profile per term and language. The extracted text of the result table is not reliable enough to quote figures from, so this card gives none.

Ideas

• I1. A seed list of affect terms for Modern Hebrew: the questionnaire-derived emotion, conflict and trust words, with their English equivalents, as a labelled list the pragmatic layer can use to flag a word as affect-laden or conflict-laden instead of guessing from the dictionary entry.
• I2. A divergence check for translation pairs: for a Hebrew word and its English equivalent, compare their context profiles in a Hebrew and an English corpus; where they diverge strongly, mark the pair as needing a connotation note rather than a plain translation.
• I3. A gold set for connotation: the paper's term lists, with the translation pairs chosen by the expert, can serve as items against which a future affect rule is checked, with the expected direction of difference written down before the run.

For Mova

I1 goes into 9. Pragmatics and politeness and 8. Lexicon and register. I2 is a feature idea for prag on Hebrew lexicon entries, documented in 8. Lexicon and register. I3 is a test set, to be built from the term lists; no rule comes from it directly.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{strapparava2012corpus,
  title = {{Corpus-based Explorations of Affective Load Differences in Arabic-Hebrew-English}},
  author = {Strapparava, Carlo and Stock, Oliviero and Alon, Ilai},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C12-2117/}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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