Not just Plot(ting): A Comparison of Two Approaches for Understanding Narrative Text Dynamics

This paper presents the outcomes of a study that leverages emotion annotation to investigate the narrative dynamics in novels. We use two lexicon-based models, VADER sentiment annotation and a novel annotation of 8 primary NRC emotions, comparing them in terms of overlaps and assessing the dynamics of the sentiment and emotional arcs resulting from these two approaches. Our results indicate that whereas the simple valence annotation does not capture the intricate nature of narrative emotions, the two types of narrative profiling exhibit evident correlations. Additionally, we manually annotate selected emotion arcs to comprehensively analyse the resource.