TY - GEN
T1 - Recognizing euphemisms and dysphemisms using sentiment analysis
AU - Felt, Christian
AU - Riloff, Ellen
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - This paper presents the first research aimed at recognizing euphemistic and dysphemistic phrases with natural language processing. Euphemisms soften references to topics that are sensitive, disagreeable, or taboo. Conversely, dysphemisms refer to sensitive topics in a harsh or rude way. For example, “passed away” and “departed” are euphemisms for death, while “croaked” and “six feet under” are dysphemisms for death. Our work explores the use of sentiment analysis to recognize euphemistic and dysphemistic language. First, we identify near-synonym phrases for three topics (FIRING, LYING, and STEALING) using a bootstrapping algorithm for semantic lexicon induction. Next, we classify phrases as euphemistic, dysphemistic, or neutral using lexical sentiment cues and contextual sentiment analysis. We introduce a new gold standard data set and present our experimental results for this task.
AB - This paper presents the first research aimed at recognizing euphemistic and dysphemistic phrases with natural language processing. Euphemisms soften references to topics that are sensitive, disagreeable, or taboo. Conversely, dysphemisms refer to sensitive topics in a harsh or rude way. For example, “passed away” and “departed” are euphemisms for death, while “croaked” and “six feet under” are dysphemisms for death. Our work explores the use of sentiment analysis to recognize euphemistic and dysphemistic language. First, we identify near-synonym phrases for three topics (FIRING, LYING, and STEALING) using a bootstrapping algorithm for semantic lexicon induction. Next, we classify phrases as euphemistic, dysphemistic, or neutral using lexical sentiment cues and contextual sentiment analysis. We introduce a new gold standard data set and present our experimental results for this task.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85106091389
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85106091389#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.18653/v1/P17
DO - 10.18653/v1/P17
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
SP - 136
EP - 145
BT - ACL 2020 - Figurative Language Processing, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
T2 - 2nd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing 2020 at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020
Y2 - 9 July 2020
ER -