International database of short texts rated for emotionality and plot structure

What is it about?

This paper introduces a set of 250 short texts originally written in six different languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish), which were translated into English. Both original texts and the English translations were rated for emotionality and comprehensibility. Also the plot structure was analysed for each text, and readability indexes were calculated for languages for which the formula was available. The database contains the texts, and emotionality and comprehensibility ratings, readability scores and plot structure ratings for each text. It is openly available for academic research in Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/9tga3/

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Photo by Nguyen Thu Hoai on Unsplash

Photo by Nguyen Thu Hoai on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our text database allows researchers to examine a variety of research questions related to the role of emotions in text comprehension. As each text is available in two languages (the other being always English), IDEST also serves researchers interested in cross-linguistic comparisons.