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Willkommens-Merkel, Chaos-Johnson, and Tore-Klose: Modeling the Evaluative Meaning of German Personal Name Compounds

Authors :
Eichel, Annerose
Deeg, Tana
Blessing, André
Belosevic, Milena
Arndt-Lappe, Sabine
Walde, Sabine Schulte im
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

We present a comprehensive computational study of the under-investigated phenomenon of personal name compounds (PNCs) in German such as Willkommens-Merkel ('Welcome-Merkel'). Prevalent in news, social media, and political discourse, PNCs are hypothesized to exhibit an evaluative function that is reflected in a more positive or negative perception as compared to the respective personal full name (such as Angela Merkel). We model 321 PNCs and their corresponding full names at discourse level, and show that PNCs bear an evaluative nature that can be captured through a variety of computational methods. Specifically, we assess through valence information whether a PNC is more positively or negatively evaluative than the person's name, by applying and comparing two approaches using (i) valence norms and (ii) pretrained language models (PLMs). We further enrich our data with personal, domain-specific, and extra-linguistic information and perform a range of regression analyses revealing that factors including compound and modifier valence, domain, and political party membership influence how a PNC is evaluated.<br />Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 2024

Details

Database :
arXiv
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.2404.04031
Document Type :
Working Paper