Behind the Dystopian Sentiment: a Sentiment Analysis of George Orwell’s 1984

摘要

Recent daily political events returned the focus of the general public to a fictional work of art that may yet prove to be one of most influential through the use of its concepts and language - George Orwell's 1984. The language of Orwell's novel, specifically its terminology, has been proven by linguists and other researchers to be in common use in media speech and writing. The author's intent, in which he unanimously succeeded, was to create a dystopian world reminiscent of totalitarian regimes, through the careful use of style and language. Could this intent be somehow investigated and measured by using precise natural language processing methods? Basing this research on related work, the aim of this paper is to evaluate if it is possible to observe how the dystopian atmosphere of the Orwellian concept is created in the novel by applying sentiment analysis on the sentence level, and by exploiting a polarity lexicon as well. Moreover, can a computer by utilising a classification technique based on the Bayes' theorem demonstrate Orwell's intention of creating a dystopian atmosphere? In addition, this paper tries to highlight the possible applications of sentiment analysis of fictional work of art in academic curricula.