PERC-An Emotion Recognition Corpus for Cognitive Poems

There are several emotion detection systems to identify emotions from speech, gestures, and text (blogs, newspapers, stories and medical reports). Since such systems do not exist for poetry, we take the first step in building a system to recognize emotions in poetry by constructing a benchmark corpus, the PERC (Poem Emotion Recognition Corpus), of poems written by Indian poets in English. This novel corpus is based on the Navarasa (nine emotions), described in the Natya Shastra, and is annotated by experts. Experimental results obtained using the Fleiss kappa measurement and further analyzed by the central-limit theorem prove that the PERC is indeed a benchmark corpus revealing excellent inter-annotator reliability. This novel corpus is publicly available for the research in computational poetry.