PoKi: A Large Dataset of Poems by Children

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 1578–1589 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 1578 PoKi: A Large Dataset of Poems by Children Will E. Hipson1 and Saif M. Mohammad2 1Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 2National Research Council Canada williamhipson@cmail.carleton.ca, saif.mohammad@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Abstract Child language studies are crucial in improving our understanding of child well-being; especially in determining the factors that impact happiness, the sources of anxiety, techniques of emotion regulation, and the mechanisms to cope with stress. However, much of this research is stymied by the lack of availability of large child-written texts. We present a new corpus of child-written text, PoKi, which includes about 62 thousand poems written by children from grades 1 to 12. PoKi is especially useful in studying child language because it comes with information about the age of the child authors (their grade). We analyze the words in PoKi along several emotion dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance) and discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, joy). We use non-parametric regressions to model developmental differences from early childhood to late-adolescence. Results show decreases in valence that are especially pronounced during mid-adolescence, while arousal and dominance peaked during adolescence. Gender differences in the developmental trajectory of emotions are also observed. Our results support and extend the current state of emotion development research. Keywords: Emotion, Sentiment analysis, Development, Children, Corpus Linguistics 1. Introduction Adults, adolescents, and even young children use language to make sense of their feelings and to share them with oth- ers (Lindquist et al., 2015). Language is thus seen as a window into multiple aspects of emotion, such as our ap- praisal of objects and situations (e.g., I hate Mondays), our emotional expressions (e.g., Off to the beach - woohoo!!), and our emotional experiences (e.g., I feel appreciated). Children live rich and varied emotional lives. Over the course of development, the way children express, experi- ence, and communicate their emotions changes (Bailen et al., 2019; Thompson, 1991). Understanding these changes is instrumental in promoting healthy socio-emotional func- tioning across all stages of development. Children are also a vulnerable and protected section of the society. Thus several policies and laws are in place to protect their privacy and protect them from on- line manipulation/abuse. For example, children are pro- hibited to register on social media websites such as Twit- ter and Facebook. One of the implications of this is that it is difficult for researchers studying child language to ob- tain large amounts of text written by children. Among the few corpora available for research are the Child Lan- guage Data Exchange System (CHILDES) (MacWhinney, 2014) and, in French, E-CALM (Doquet, 2013). How- ever, these datasets are somewhat limited in quantity and age range (e.g., CHILDES includes child-parent conversa- tions for children ages 1-5) or quantity of text (E-CALM is limited to elementary school children). Our research goal is to seek a better understanding of the emotional development of children from early childhood to late teens. The …

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