Tracing Taste over Time: Automatic Extraction and Diachronic Analysis of Gustatory Language in English

In this paper, we present a benchmark of texts manually annotated with gustatory information, following a FrameNet-like approach previously applied to olfactory language and here adapted to capture taste-related events. We explore the benchmark to illustrate the possible insights this approach can offer, focusing in particular on the expression of emotional valence across different textual genres. Building on this resource, we train a supervised system for the automatic extraction of gustatory information from both historical and contemporary texts. The system is then applied to a variety of corpora, and we provide a publicly available notebook for exploring the extracted data, along with an analysis of the system’s output in the literary domain.