Do There Exist an Emotion Trend in Scientific Papers? PRO-VE Conference as a Case.

Abstract

Scientific writing aims for formality and objectivity, yet emotions are integral to human communication, decision-making, and collaboration, all of which are fundamental to scientific progress. Existing research on emotion detection has mainly focused on datasets from social media and online platforms, where emotional expressions are abundant. However, scientific texts pose unique challenges due to their formal language and the rarity of explicit emotional words, necessitating specialised investigation. This study investigates the presence and nature of emotions in scientific texts, specifically analysing the abstracts from the PRO-VE conference series from 2012 to 2022. Two emotion detection methods are employed: a lexicon-based approach and a hybrid machine learning-based approach. The lexicon-based approach utilises the NRC Emotion Lexicon to identify and quantify emotions within the PRO-VE abstracts, while the hybrid approach integrates Word2Vec for word embedding generation and a Random Forest classifier for emotion prediction. The findings reveal a predominance of positive emotions, such as trust, anticipation, and joy, in the PRO-VE abstracts, consistent with the objective nature of scientific writing. In light of the PRO-VE conference series' 25th anniversary, an analysis of trends and patterns in the detected emotions offers insights into the emotional landscape of this prestigious conference series. The study also critically examines the limitations of the experiments, including the dataset size and the prevalence of positive emotions.