Olfaction is a rather understudied sense compared to the other senses. In NLP, however, there have been recent attempts to develop taxonomies and benchmarks specifically designed to capture smell-related information. In this work, we further extend this research line by presenting a supervised system for olfactory information extraction in English. We cast this problem as a token classification task and build a system that identifies smell words, smell sources and qualities. The classifier is then applied to a set of English historical corpora, covering different domains and written in a time period between the 15th and the 20th Century. A qualitative analysis of the extracted data shows that they can be used to infer interesting information about smelly items such as tea and tobacco from a diachronical perspective, supporting historical investigation with corpus-based evidence.

Scent Mining: Extracting Olfactory Events, Smell Sources and Qualities

Menini, Stefano
;
Paccosi, Teresa;Tekiroglu, Serra Sinem;Tonelli, Sara
2023-01-01

Abstract

Olfaction is a rather understudied sense compared to the other senses. In NLP, however, there have been recent attempts to develop taxonomies and benchmarks specifically designed to capture smell-related information. In this work, we further extend this research line by presenting a supervised system for olfactory information extraction in English. We cast this problem as a token classification task and build a system that identifies smell words, smell sources and qualities. The classifier is then applied to a set of English historical corpora, covering different domains and written in a time period between the 15th and the 20th Century. A qualitative analysis of the extracted data shows that they can be used to infer interesting information about smelly items such as tea and tobacco from a diachronical perspective, supporting historical investigation with corpus-based evidence.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11582/339187
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