=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2607/short3
|storemode=property
|title=Looking at Body Expressions to Enrich Emotion Clusters
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2607/short3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2607
|authors=Barbara Ramos,Diana Santos,Cláudia Freitas
}}
==Looking at Body Expressions to Enrich Emotion Clusters==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2607/short3.pdf
Looking at Body Expressions to Enrich Emotion
Clusters
Barbara Ramos1,2[0000−0002−0583−5109] , Diana Santos3,2[0000−0002−3108−7706] ,
and Cláudia Freitas1,2[0000−0001−6807−8558]
1
PUC-Rio
2
Linguateca
3
University of Oslo
barbaracmpramos@gmail.com,d.s.m.santos@ilos.uio.no,maclaudia@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper combines two of Linguateca’s projects – Esqueleto
(on the human body) and Emocionário (on emotions), to investigate
which areas of the human body and, therefore, body words or expres-
sions, are mentioned when Portuguese speakers want to describe emo-
tions or opinions. We present a body map as a novel research tool to
describe the connections between the two domains.
Keywords: Emotions · Body · Corpus annotation · Visualization.
1 Introduction
This paper describes an attempt to cross-fertilize two projects which have used
the same empirical basis (Linguateca’s AC/DC cluster) to get at corpus-based
descriptions of respectively the human body and the emotional realm in Por-
tuguese, but have so far been developed independently. Given the widely ac-
knowledged close connections between body and emotion, it seems a natural
next step to probe how these projects can illuminate each other. In this paper,
we look at the following aspects:
1. from the point of view of the work on emotions, we want to investigate a)
whether the already identified bodily expressions are specific to particular
emotions/emotion clusters, and b) whether they are either just an expressive
extension of an already identified emotion cluster or constitute rather new
cases that have not yet been considered in the emotion framework, as was
often the case in a previous experiment for increasing emotion coverage[3],
where 90% of the lemmas found matching the pattern ”sentimento de N”
(feeling of N ) were classified as emotion.
2. from the point of view of studying the body, we want to investigate whether
there is correlation between some emotions and body parts so as to under-
stand better how the body is conceived in Portuguese, see also [8].
Copyright c 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Com-
mons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). DHandNLP, 2 March 2020,
Evora, Portugal.
2 B. Ramos et al.
The research was conducted using the Gramateca framework [4, 7] and the
underlying annotated corpora [6, 5].
2 Body-related emotions
In the Esqueleto project we compiled a sizeable lexicon of words and expressions
containing reference to the human body, classifying them further as to whether
the body was taken literally, or used with ten different meaning extensions [1].
Two of the extended meanings connected with the human body were precisely
feelings and opinions, as in the case of the following examples: estar de pé atrás
(lit. to have one foot back, mistrust), dor de cotovelo (lit. elbow pain, envy),
ficar com a pulga atrás da orelha (lit. to have a flea on the back of the ear, being
suspicious) for feelings (corpo:sentimento) or ver com bons olhos (lit. see with
good eyes, to approve), cabeça dura (headstrong) for opinion (corpo:opiniao).
In addition there was a group of cases where in Esqueleto we had assigned
both feeling and opinion, such as encher o saco (lit. fill the stomach, bother/be
bothered), coração de manteiga (lit. butter heart, to have a soft heart).
Independently we also started the annotation of emotions, see [2], considering
20 and then 24 emotion groups into which to classify the ca 500 words with
emotional content. This project is still being actively pursued, giving rise to a
more extensive documentation of the choices in what we call Emocionário.
It was therefore natural to look at the body expressions already classified as
emotions to see whether they would bring a more complete picture of emotion
in Portuguese.
As might be expected, it was not easy to assign them to particular clusters:
one thing is to agree that some emotion is involved in a particular expression,
another is to identify which.
Our initial attempts can be described this way:
– We could place ca. 70% of the cases marked as emotions in one or several
clusters: we have now to either create further clusters to handle the remaining
emotions, or remove the emotion label
– Only a fourth of those marked as opinion could find an appropriate emotion:
this we believe reinforces the need to separate between the two cases – an
opinion can be uttered without emotional involvement
– The most common emotions expressed by the body expressions were dissat-
isfaction (insatisfaç~ao) and surprise (surpresa)
We still need to check how complex the task is and how subjective the emotion
assignment task is, not least for fixed or semifixed expressions, which seem to
have a wide range of meanings and interpretations, displaying even regional or
variety differences in Portuguese (for example, both dor de cotovelo and com
o coração nas mãos have slightly different meanings in Brazil and in Portugal.
Since the first author will be developing a set of criteria to judge emotionality and
emotion group membership in her Phd thesis, we will postpone exact numbers
until these criteria can be applied.
Looking at Body Expressions to Enrich Emotion Clusters 3
3 Co-occurrence of emotions and body in context
Another study about the interrrelationship of both semantic domains can be
done by looking at the (more or less) free co-occurrence of words or expressions
of the two domains.
Using Gramateca, a dedicated environment for doing grammar-based studies,
we counted the cases where both an emotion and a body part were mentioned
in the same sentence, and confirmed that these two semantic domains strongly
co-occur, especially in the literary genre. In the Literateca corpus (version 3.2,
ca 40 million tokens), 49.0% of the sentences with a body word also include an
emotion word, while 12.9% of sentences with emotions have a body word in the
same sentence. In Table 1 we present the numbers for some specific emotions:
Table 1. How often do some emotions occur, and occur with a body word, and the
most common emotion word in the co-occurrences.
Emotion group Total With body Relative Most common word
gen (generic) 31,733 8,156 0.257 sentir (feel)
furia (anger) 31,091 6,914 0.222 violento (violent)
surpresa (surprise) 22,759 4,680 0.214 admirar (astonish)
vergonha (shame) 29,949 6,224 0.207 vergonha
feliz (joy) 88,662 16,908 0.191 sorriso (smile)
medo (fear) 46,567 8,810 0.189 medo
admirar (admiration) 13,900 2,776 0.164 respeito (respect)
grato (gratitude) 8,668 1,382 0.159 agradecer (thank)
ingrato (ungratefulness) 2,238 329 0.147 ingrato
Briefly, one can see that one in five expressions of a generic emotion co-occurs
with a body word in the same sentence, but it is also important to note that the
emotion classification has not yet been revised. So sentir (feel) can be about a
physical sensation as well.
The other way around, we counted how often emotions are associated with
one body part and created a ”body map” with all related emotions, shown in
Figure 1. Body parts in the map only include literal instances of body parts,
classified in larger groups such as Head, Arms, Legs, Body, Internal and Hair.
In Table 2 we show the numbers of sentences including a body word classified
as belonging to that body part, together with the most frequent co-occurring
emotion.
From a cursory analysis of 200 random instances, we could identify some
recurring cases of co-occurrence:
– cases where an emotion is assigned to a part of the body, like in olhos tristes
or rosto triste (sad eyes or face) or riram-se-lhe olhos e dentes (both his eyes
and teeth laughed)
– expressions where body is related to health, and health is a positive quality
along moral ones, like in tão feliz, tão sadio de olhos, (so happy, so healthy
in his eyes).
4 B. Ramos et al.
Fig. 1. The body is coloured depending on how much emotion co-occurs with it. The
pie charts show, for each body part, how much comes from FURIA (rage), SURPRESA
(surprise) and ADMIRAR (awe) in purple, blue and turquoise respectively.
Looking at Body Expressions to Enrich Emotion Clusters 5
Table 2. Body parts with emotions
Body part size with emotion relative most frequent emotion group
Cabeça (head) 82,932 40,221 0.48 feliz
Braço (arm) 48,473 21,220 0.44 amor
Tronco (body) 39,977 20,308 0.51 amor
Interno (internals) 33,222 17,324 0.52 amor
Perna (leg) 19,864 8,119 0.41 amor
Cabelo (hair) 10,327 4,420 0.43 feliz
– expressions where a body part is used metaphorically, either in standardised
expressions like in sangue derramado (spilt blood), entregar-lhe em mão (give
in his hand), or in specific literary descriptions such as atirava as tranças
negras (...) à cara da sociedade (she threw her black tresses to the face of
the society) or estas lágrimas de velho mas enxuguem eles com a sua alegria
(these old man’s tears should they dry with their joy). (These should not
have been classified as literally body, but not all instances of human body
have been revised, which means that the results in this mapping are not
precise, containing as well a large amount of free metaphorical cases.)
4 Concluding remarks
Although this is still preliminary work and we cannot present a rigorous quan-
titative summing up of the several experiments and explorations, we believe we
are in the right path to improve both emotion annotation and evaluate it, this
way getting and sharing further insights on the semantics of the Portuguese
language.
We also expect that by using a methodology inspired in geographical infor-
mation systems (GIS) for visualization of the interaction of body and emotion
we may be able to identify further alleys for investigating the connection be-
tween these two fields, if we agree with White [9] that spatial visualization is
more than just communicating results – it is a way of doing research.
References
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anotação de sentidos em grandes corpora: o projeto Esqueleto. Revista de Estudos
da Linguagem 23(3), 641–680 (2015)
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