Paraphrasing Emotions in Portuguese

Cristina Mota, Diana Santos, Anabela Barreiro

Abstract: In this paper we describe the cooperation between the NooJ-based paraphrasing system eSPERTo and the broad-coverage emotion annotation of Linguateca’s corpora, Emocionário, to develop strategies for analyzing the paraphrasing of emotions. We start by briefly introducing these two projects. Then, we describe how we selected five parallel texts in European and Brazilian Portuguese, automatically annotated them with Emocionário, and carefully revised the annotation, while paying special attention to multiword units and other phrases representing emotion paraphrastic units, and created a set of putative paraphrasing grammars in NooJ. We also comment on the translations and discuss disagreements on the annotation of emotions, as well as on formalization strategies used in the internal structure of the paraphrases.