NUS, AI Singapore
Yosephine is a linguist in AI Singapore, National University of Singapore. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore under the supervision of Prof Ng Bee Chin and Prof Erik Cambria. Her research mainly focused on emotion and sentiment analysis. Currently, her research interests still lie at the intersection of human-interaction and artificial intelligence, particularly the development of this field in the Southeast Asian region.
Do You Feel Less Emotional When Speaking Javanese?: A Comprehensive Study on the Classification and Dimensional Measurement of the Indonesian Emotion Lexicon
People from Javanese culture are expected to meticulously regulate their emotion, a characteristic that is a crucial part of socialisation process in their community. An emphasis on the controlled emotion is highly encouraged since early childhood, with caution against extreme displays of frustration or excitement, for the purpose of promoting the preservation of social harmony (Lee, 1999). The expectations to suppress emotion are significantly heightened for females, as it is seen as a way to be the “ideal and true” Javanese women (Koentjaraningrat, 1985; Berman, 1999). Fascinatingly, Heider (1991) also unveiled the observations that Javanese, in contrast to other ethnicities in Indonesia, converse less about their emotions. This suggests the existence of potential discrepancies in emotional regulation profiles within Indonesia.
This study aims at exploring how Javanese speakers use and assess emotions and how they differ from their monolingual Indonesian counterparts. This research is grounded on the emotion-identification model proposed by Ng, Cui, and Cavallarao (2019). Here, we compiled Indonesian emotion lexicon annotated with part-of-speech and valence. Our analysis will particularly concentrate on a group of emotion words (590 Indonesian words, excluding proverbs and idioms), which is derived from a larger emotion lexicon encompassing over 6,000 emotion terms. In line with Pavlenko’s (2008) categorization of emotions, these emotion words were further grouped into:
- emotion words: words which denote an emotion state (e.g sad and happy) or a process (e.g. to worry and to rage) directly.
- emotion-laden words: words which describe human’s behaviors in its relation to emotion (e.g. to scream and to cry).
- emotion-related words: words which can be used to evoke emotions from our interlocutors (e.g. divorce and stupid).
More than 3,000 speakers of Javanese and monolingual Indonesian speakers were asked to rate those emotion terms in the first group with respect to their categories (anger, happiness, disgust, sadness, etc.), intensity (low, neutral, high), and valence (positive, negative, neutral). A thorough comparative analysis was conducted between the data gathered from Javanese and monolingual Indonesian speakers. This dimensional approach shows a unique pattern of emotion mapping among Javanese speakers that are different from monolingual Indonesian speakers. The discussion probes ethnic and gender differences in detail and advocates cautions against the inclination to oversimplify “Indonesian” as a homogeneous cultural group.