NLP From the Underground Part I
A sentiment analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s greatest novels
Reading the great works of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is like having your amygdala stung by wasps for roughly 500 pages straight. It’s emotional. His five masterpieces, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov, are considered some of the darkest and most violent novels of the 19th century. The following sentiment analysis is my effort to leverage the tools of Natural Language Processing to gain new insight into these groundbreaking pieces of literature.
This article is intended for readers with an understanding of some basic concepts of data science and natural language processing. The analysis was performed in Python, so familiarity with the language will help you to follow along and adapt the code for your own work. All code needed is shown throughout the article. You can also check it out on Github.
Crucial to this analysis are the AFINN and NRC lexicons:
“The AFINN lexicon is a list of English terms manually rated for valence with an integer between -5 (negative) and +5 (positive) by Finn Årup Nielsen between 2009 and 2011.” http://corpustext.com/reference/sentiment_afinn.html
