This project was conducted during my Master's degree in Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, inspired by the reasearch of Prof. Elisabeth Verhoeven and Hartshorne et al. on psych-verbs.
Psych-verbs (also psychological verbs or experiencer verbs/predicates) express the mental state or emotion of an experiencer. The experiencer role refers to a participant that undergoes an event affecting consciousness. The experiencer can appear in one of two positions: as subject (subject experiencer - SE) or as object (object experiencer - OE). For example, in the sentences:
- Jack scares Wendy. - Wendy is the OE of an action (emotion) inflicted by Jack upon her.
- Wendy fears Jack. - Wendy is the SE of an emotion that arises within her in response to Jack being perceived as a threat.
To explore psych verbs in Romanian, I compiled a list of verbs and asked native speakers to rate them on duration, valence, and arousal. The analysis of the results can be found in the psych-verbs Jupyther Notebook and includes:
- descriptive analysis (by experiencer, emotion domain, rating feature, and verb)
- clustering (K-Means)
- classification (KNN, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest).