Lexicons for Sentiment, Affect, and Connotation

23.9 Connotation frames

1. What is a connotation frame?
   A lexicon combining affect with frame semantics: a predicate expresses connotations about its arguments, e.g. sentiment of writer and reader toward each role, and of roles toward each other.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, §23.9, p. 535
2. Contrast the connotation frames of violate and survive.

   	Role1 (subject)	Role2 (object)
   Country A violated the sovereignty of Country B	antagonist: writer −	victim: writer +
   the teenager survived the bombing	sympathetic victim: writer +	hardship: writer −

   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, §23.9, p. 536
3. Besides sentiment, what other aspects can connotation frames express?
   Effect (something bad happened to x), value (x is valuable), mental state (x is distressed), power differential between arguments, and agency of the agent.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, §23.9, p. 536
4. What do connotation frames say about implore, demand and wait?
   He implored the tribunal: agent has less power than the theme (power(AG<TH)); demanded implies the reverse. The princess waited for her prince: low agency for the agent (agency(AG)=−).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, §23.9, p. 537
5. How are connotation frames built?
   By hand (crowdsourced, as in Sap et al.) or learned by supervised classifiers for each relation (e.g. whether S(writer→Role1) is + or −), with global constraints across relations.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, §23.9, pp. 536–537