Public Apologies in I ndia - Semantics, Sentiment and Emotion (2018)

Abstract: This paper reports a pilot study related to public apologies in India, with reference to certain keywords found in them. The study is of importance as the choice of lexical items holds importance which goes beyond the surface meaning of the words. The analysis of the lexical items has been done using interlinked digital lexical resources which, in future, can lend this study to computational tasks related to opinion mining, sentiment analysis and document classification. The study attempts an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of whether the apology conveys a sincerity of intent or is it a mere ritualistic exercise to control and repair damage.

## introduction public apologies, as a tool to repair damage and manage reputation, have been used by organizations and individuals frequently the world over. the dynamics of speech act of apologizing are very different from that of written apologies. written apologies are not supported by the nonverbal elements of communication. the remorse on the face, the earnestness in the voice, the intent in the gestures are all absent in the written apologies. the words stand alone to convey the guilt, remorse, regret and forbearance. the tone and tenor of writing can thus play an important role in either leading the customers to take a forgiving stance to the organization or rejecting it as a ritualistic gimmick. communication researchers agree that the oral and written language differ significantly in their communication impact. while the speech act has been analyzed in detail, not much attention has been paid to the written word. specifically, in the indian context, there is very little research on public apologies. this paper aims at making a analysis about the semantics, sentiment and emotion of written apologies delivered digitally in india by using three inter-linked digital lexical resources, namely, wordnet foot_0 , sentiwordnet foot_1 and wordnet-affect foot_2 respectively. the paper limits itself to the analyses of a set of selected keywords found in these apologies. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study. our hypothesis is that the choice of lexical items plays an important role in conveying the intent of the writer in a public apology and the sentiments and emotions associated with an apology expression can go beyond the surface meaning of the word. ## related work linguistic analysis of social discourse, using digital lexical resources and related software, has been an upward trend in the recent past. wordnet has been used for marking the event profile of news articles as a function of verb type @xcite ). an adversary-intent-target (ait) model has been developed which is based on an ontology for the analysis of terrorist attacks @xcite . diction 5.0 text analysis master variable, certainty has been used to analyze top management language for signals of possible deception @xcite . a viable approach to sentiment analysis of newspaper headlines has been developed by using linguistic techniques and a broad-coverage lexicon @xcite . from the point of view of communication study, most of the research on public apologies is focused on apology as a speech act (e.g. @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . the studies are based on two perspectives. the first is from the point of view of the offended party @xcite and the second sees apology from the point of view of the offender @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . although an emphasis has been laid on the different nature and aspects of written and spoken discourse (halliday @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite , not much attention has been paid to the written word. moreover, research on the written apology delivered via the digital medium needs further analysis. ## apologies in the digital media the practice of tendering an apology as a means of acknowledging and compensating for failure is an ancient one. etymologically, the word apology is derived from the greek apo (away, off, absolve) and logia (speech) and should be differentiated from the word apologia. corporations the world over have used public apologies effectively for multiple purposes -as a tool for damage control, for defending their position in a particular situation and also for conveying their commitment to all stakeholders. due to the advent of e-commerce companies and the increasing reach of the social media companies have their finger on the pulse of public sentiment constantly. minor events and lapses go viral within a few minutes. the word of mouth is now faster than it was ever before. the digital medium differs from ordinary face to face communication in many ways: it requires a select choice of words to express the apology, it can be stored and retrieved at a later date, and, it becomes a quasi-legal document. the art of apologizing is a powerful marketing tool that can induce trust on the one hand and fuel mistrust on the other, if poorly managed. ## methodology the research design is qualitative and is based on an analysis of a self-built corpus. the following steps were followed as part of the methodology. ## analysis a three-fold analysis of the selected keywords was done. the semantics of the words was studied by using wordnet. in dialogue acts such as apologizing, thanking, or expressing sympathy, affective language is often employed to represent and convey psychological attitudes @xcite . also, there is what is called a 'heartfelt apology' as against 'routine apology @xcite . hence, it was decided to further explore the sentiments and emotions associated with the keywords. the sentiments were studied using sentiwordnet and the emotion labels were determined through wordnet-affect. the analysis and conclusions thus drawn are presented below. ## discussion in this paper we have studied a few selected keywords related to apologies, using the interlinked lexical resources, namely, wordnet, sentiwordnet and wordnet-affect. this has given us important insights into the semantics, sentiments and emotions attached with these words and has thrown up some interesting observations which are discussed below. it is seen that semantics alone is not sufficient to give the full import of the words. the related sentiment and emotion tags provide a deeper insight into the meaning and the communicative perspective of the keywords. first and foremost, we observed the fact that, due to a mix of factors such as greater media vigilance, and the viral nature of social media, there is certainly an increased willingness to issue public apologies in india @xcite . however, apologies available in the public domain are still limited, and so we cannot draw any generalizations from them. hence, we can put forth certain trends and suggestions which need to be tested further on a much bigger corpus. from the apology texts available with us, we posit that the written apology can be an effective tool for damage repair only when it crafted to communicate honest intent and a sincere tone. thus, the words chosen should effectively convey the writer's intent. the main observations drawn from our analysis of the keywords using wordnet, sentiwordnet and wordnet-affect are as follows: the reasons for its high occurrence in the written media in india needs to be explored further. it may be due to the very nature of the language use in social media interaction, or it could be because english is second language for indians and poses its own compulsions on users of this language in the country. nonetheless, the established convention incorporates a distancing from the offence. also, writers use apologies when they are apologising in a role (e.g. as the representative of an organisation). when speaking personally, they use other forms, typically sorry @xcite . another possibility is that use of the noun form enables the writer to avoid the personal pronoun, creating a distance between the writer and the responsibility for the offence (ibid). in our data, individuals have not used this form at all and of the seven occurrences of the noun form, six are by individuals as representative of an organisation. this co-relates to harrison's finding that the word apology/ apologies help the writers to distance themselves from the instance or event. of particular interest to us were the keywords apology (noun) and regret (verb). we compare the sentiwordnet scores and the wordnet-affect labels of these two keywords. while emotion is defined as a relatively brief episode of response to the evaluation of an external or internal event as being of major significance. (such as angry, sad, joyful, fearful, ashamed, proud, elated, desperate), a sentiment is the positive or negative orientation that a person expresses toward some object or situation @xcite . thus, we can posit that the word apology which has no emotion label, has no or weak emotional connect, which also aligns with our conclusion about the keyword apologize. in contrast, the verb regret helps to effectively communicate the emotion of repentance. looking at the sentiment associated with these words, we conclude that the mental attitude of the writer is more objective to the situation in using the verb regret while it is highly negative in the case of the usage of the word apology. this further implies that a high negative sentiment score means that the writer of the apology realizes the gravity of the transgression and to some extent admits to the wrong done. however, a high objective score implies the writer taking a neutral stance to the situation and not necessarily admitting to any wrongdoing. ## future work the future plan is to make a cross-cultural analysis of written public apologies. for this purpose, the dataset will be enhanced by adding apologies from a different culture. the idea is to explore whether the linguistic aspects are affected by culture and environment. also, we propose to validate our psycholinguistic analysis by mapping it to the readers' perception of these keywords. it will also be interesting to do a cross-lingual analysis by studying the lexical semantics of apology related words in native indian languages. further, we have come across words which are being more profusely being used in written communication which were earlier thought to be part of speech acts, notably the word sorry. we want to understand whether this is due to the very nature of the social media where they are being used or is it because of overuse that certain words traditionally used in written media have been bleached of the sentiments and emotions attached with them, hence giving space to other words. it is also proposed to make this study interdisciplinary by lending it to computational analysis. with an increased data set the study can be used to build a supervised sentiment analyzer using lexicons or for text categorization according to affective relevance, and opinion analysis.