Public Apologies in India - Semantics, Sentiment and Emotion

15 Pages·2017·0.75 MB·English

Public Apologies in India - Semantics, Sentiment and Emotion
Sangeeta Shukla, Rajita Shukla
Bennett University, Tech Zone 2, Greater Noida, (U.P.) India
sangeeta.shukla, rajita.shukla {@bennett.edu.in}

Communication researchers agree that the oral
Abstract and written language differ significantly in their
communication impact. While the speech act has
This paper reports a pilot study related to been analyzed in detail, not much attention has
public apologies in India, with reference to been paid to the written word. Specifically, in
certain keywords found in them. The study is the Indian context, there is very little research on
of importance as the choice of lexical items
public apologies. This paper aims at making a
holds importance which goes beyond the
analysis about the semantics, sentiment and
surface meaning of the words. The analysis of
emotion of written apologies delivered digitally
the lexical items has been done using
in India by using three inter-linked digital lexical
interlinked digital lexical resources which, in
resources, namely, WordNet1, SentiWordNet2
future, can lend this study to computational
tasks related to opinion mining, sentiment and WordNet-Affect3 respectively. The paper
analysis and document classification. The limits itself to the analyses of a set of selected
study attempts an in-depth psycholinguistic keywords found in these apologies. To the best
evidence of whether the apology carries of our knowledge, this is the first such study. Our
further liability or is it a mere expression of hypothesis is that the choice of lexical items
regret, holding no hope of reparation for the
plays an important role in conveying the intent
aggrieved party.
of the writer in a public apology and the
sentiments and emotions associated with an
Keywords: apology, sorry, regret,
apology expression can go beyond the surface
apologize, WordNet, SentiWordNet,
meaning of the word.
WordNet-Affect, corporate apologies,
corporate communication Roadmap
Section 2 deals with the related work. Section 3
1 Introduction
discusses apologies in the digital media and such
Public apologies, as a tool to repair damage and apologies in India. Section 4 outlines the
manage reputation, have been used by methodology followed in the study. Section 5 is
organizations and individuals frequently the presents the analysis with reference to WordNet,
world over. The dynamics of speech act of SentiWordNet and WordNet-Affect. Section 6
apologizing are very different from that of concludes the paper.
written apologies. Written apologies are not
supported by the nonverbal elements of 2 Related Work
communication. The remorse on the face, the
earnestness in the voice, the intent in the gestures Linguistic analysis of social discourse, using
are all absent in the written apologies. The words digital lexical resources and related software, has
stand alone to convey the guilt, remorse, regret been an upward trend in the recent past.
and forbearance. The tone and tenor of writing WordNet has been used for marking the event
can thus play an important role in either leading profile of news articles as a function of verb type
the customers to take a forgiving stance to the (Klavans, 1998). An Adversary-Intent-Target
organization or rejecting it as a ritualistic (AIT) model has been developed which is based
gimmick. on an Ontology for the Analysis of Terrorist

1 http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ 3 http://wndomains.fbk.eu/wnaffect.html
2 http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/
Attacks (Turner et al, 2011). DICTION 5.0 text it becomes a quasi-legal document. The art of
analysis master variable, CERTAINTY has been apologizing is a powerful marketing tool that can
used to analyze top management language for induce trust on the one hand and fuel mistrust on
signals of possible deception (Craig et al, 2013). the other, if poorly managed.
A viable approach to sentiment analysis of
newspaper headlines has been developed by 3.1 The Indian Context
using linguistic techniques and a broad-coverage
lexicon (Chaumartin, 2007).
Culturally, saying sorry does not come easy to
From the point of view of communication study,
Indians and more so to Indian business and
most of the research on public apologies is
political leaders. This hesitation can perhaps be
focused on apology as a speech act (e.g.
linked to the fact that in India a public apology-
Edmondson, 1981; Fraser, 1981; Holmes 1990;
is seen as an admission of guilt (Maddux et al,
Blum-Kulka et al.1989; Olshtain and Cohen
2012). On the other hand it is a common
1983; Owen, 1983; Trosborg, 1987). The studies
occurrence in countries like Japan and Hong
are based on two perspectives. The first is from
Kong, where the corporate apology is an
the point of view of the offended party (Lee &
expression of eagerness to repair damage and
Chung, 2012) and the second sees apology from
relationships and does not imply guilt (ibid). In
the point of view of the offender (Darby &
the past, the speech act of apology was almost
Schlenker, 1989; Goffman, 1971; Hearit, 1994,
absent from the repertoire of Indian corporates
1996, 1997, 2010; Schlenker & Darby, 1981).
and public figures (Kaul et al,2015). Even
Although an emphasis has been laid on the
written apologies were very few and were
different nature and aspects of written and
offered only when there was a strong demand
spoken discourse (Halliday (1989, 2007,
from different sections of society.
Tillmann, 1997, Aijmer and Stenström, 2004,
However, the new generation e-commerce
Wikberg, 2004, Nelson, Balass and Perfetti
companies seem to be heralding an attitudinal
2005, Biber, 2006, Miller, 2006, McCarthy and
change in this corporate practice. The reason for
Slade, 2007 and Wichmann, 2007, Chafe, 1992),
this shift in attitude could be due to the
not much attention has been paid to the written
increasing digital customer base for India Inc.
word. Moreover, research on the written apology
India’s internet user base has grown to 324.95
delivered via the digital medium needs further
million in September 2015, a 27.73% YOY
analysis.
growth (TRAI, 2016). On social media platforms

situations can escalate rapidly, breaking down
3 Apologies in the Digital Media
the traditional barriers of time, location, and
gatekeepers of information says Karen Freberg,
The practice of tendering an apology as a means Assistant Professor, Strategic Communications
of acknowledging and compensating for failure at University of Louisville USA (Kaul et al,
is an ancient one. Etymologically, the word 2015).
apology is derived from the Greek apo (away, Thus, in stark contrast to the past, we see a spate
off, absolve) and logia (speech) and should be of apology e-mails, tweets and blog posts being
differentiated from the word apologia. offered by e-commerce players (ibid). Since the
Corporations the world over have used public practice of offering a public apology is relatively
apologies effectively for multiple purposes - as a new for Indian businesses, it is to be understood
tool for damage control, for defending their that an apology not delivered effectively rather
position in a particular situation and also for than mitigating the damage, can escalate the
conveying their commitment to all stakeholders. damage done. In this context, it is important to
Due to the advent of e-commerce companies and analyze the lexical choice made in these
the increasing reach of the social media apologies and the implications thereof.
companies have their finger on the pulse of
public sentiment constantly. Minor events and 4 Methodology
lapses go viral within a few minutes. The word
The research design is qualitative and is based on
of mouth is now faster than it was ever before.
an analysis of a self-built corpus. The following
The digital medium differs from ordinary face
steps were followed as part of the methodology.
to face communication in many ways: it requires

a select choice of words to express the apology,
● Corpus Collection
it can be stored and retrieved at a later date, and,
● Keyword Selection technical glitches during their ‘The Big
● Determination of POS of keywords Billion Day’ sale on October 7.
● Determination of the correct sense of 4. Uber India ( Dec. 2014) - Days after it was
the keywords banned following the rape of a woman by an
● Analysis using WordNet, Uber driver, in New Delhi, India, the global
SentiWordNet and Wordnet-Affect. cab booking firm sent out apology mail to its
customer.
4.1 Corpus collection 5. Myntra 1 (2015) - Myntra, an e-commerce
company in India, apologised to its customers
The study uses a self-built corpus. Since the via e-mail for the technical glitches faced
phenomenon of public apologies is relatively during a mega-sale.
recent in India, we could only access a corpus of 6. ScoopWhoop (2015) - Editor-in-Chief of
15 apologies available in the digital public ScoopWhoop, an internet media and news
domain, offered during 2007-2017, comprising a company from India, apologised after it
total of 4,567 words. The corpus is in the English carried an insensitive article on a massive
language as it is the second official language in earthquake that hit parts of Nepal and India.
India. It is the lingua franca spoken amongst a 7. Lenskart (2015) - Bansal & Chaudhary, co-
wide proportion of the population and has about founders, Lenskart, apologised on the
125 million speakers, which is, country-wise, the company’s behalf, when the company sent out
second highest in the world, only below United an SMS offer which referred to the massive
States of America4. We employ a close reading earthquake that struck India and Nepal in poor
approach (Amernic et al., 2007) for the analysis. taste.
All apologies selected were delivered in India, 8. AIB (2015) - AIB (All India Bakchod
by Indians so as to understand any cultural Comedy Company), a comedy group of
implication of the communication. All of these India, offered an unconditional apology to the
were offered by senior executives of the Auxiliary Bishop of Bombay and the
company or prominent public personalities in community for any offence caused to the
India. Of these four were electronic mails, five christian community by their jokes.
were letters, three company blog posts, two 9. Myntra 2 (2016) - An apology was posted on
tweets related to the same event, and two Myntra’s blog by Shamik Sharma, CTO,
company website posts. The apologies selected Myntra, for inundating customers’ phones
have been assigned a code number for easy with notifications due to technical lapse.
reference. These apologies are listed below, with 10. Amazon India (2016) - Amit Agarwal,
the name of the company, the year and a short Vice President and Country Manager, Amazon
context. India, apologized to the Indian External Affairs
1. Infosys (2007) - Narayana Murthy, founder Minister for hurting Indian sentiment by selling
of one of India's leading technology doormats with Indian tricolour on them.
companies, Infosys, apologized after being 11. Axis Bank (2016) - After two Axis
accused of making rude comments about Bank managers in New Delhi were accused
India’s national anthem. of being involved in money laundering,
2. Satyam (2008) - Letter written by Ramalinga Shikha Sharma, CEO Axis Bank, sent an e-
Raju (the then chairman of India's IT mail letter by to all Axis Bank customers to
Company Satyam Computer Services) on 30 address the issue.
September to the board of directors of 12. PETA (2017) - PETA India CEO,
Satyam Computer Services Limited Poorva Joshipura wrote an apology to the
informing them about his company’s Indian actor, Suriya, when the latter issued a
corporate fraud. legal notice to PETA for calling his voice in
3. Flipkart (2014) - E-mail from Sachin Bansal favour of Jallikattu as a promotional strategy
and Binny Bansal founders of Flipkart, a for his upcoming film 'C3'.
leading retail e-commerce company in India, 13. Member of Parliament’s Apology
apologized to disgruntled shoppers after (2017) - A Member of Parliament, Ravindra
Gaikwad, courted controversy after thrashing

4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_
English-speaking_population
an Air India employee. He expressed regret To correctly determine the part of speech of the
in a letter to Civil Aviation minister. keywords, the sentences where they occurred
14. Tech Mahindra Layoff audio clip were put through an online Part-of-speech
controversy 1 (2017) - In an audio recording tagger5. This was found to be necessary as some
that went viral on social media, a female HR keywords could belong to more than one
executive of Tech Mahindra, a leading IT category. The output of the tagger marked the
company of India, was heard telling an words apology and regret as NN1 (singular
employee to resign by 10 am the next day. common noun), the words apologies and regrets
Shortly afterwards, Vice-chairman of Tech as NN2 (plural common noun), the words
Mahindra, Vineet Nayyar, apologized on the apologize and regret as VV0 (base form of
matter. lexical verb), the words apologizes and regrets
15. Tech Mahindra Layoff audio clip as VVZ (-s form of lexical verb), the word
controversy 2 (2017) - Following the Vice- apologizing as VVG (-ing participle of lexical
chairman’s apology, Mahindra Group verb) and the word sorry as JJ (general
Chairman, Anand Mahindra and Tech adjective).
Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani also came out to
apologize on Twitter on the same matter. 4.4 Determination of Keyword Senses

4.2 Keyword Selection For the determination of the correct sense of the
keywords, we put the sentences where the
After the selection of documents for analysis, a keywords occur in an online sense
list of keywords was prepared independently by disambiguator6. Sense determination was done
the authors and then compiled. It was decided to as the keywords were found to be polysemous.
conduct a focused analysis of words directly The senses thus determined were mapped to the
related to the act of apologizing. The four senses in English WordNet (3.1). The selected
keywords thus selected were - sorry, regret, senses are mentioned in the analysis of the
apologize (apologizes and apologizing) and keywords in section 5.
apology. These selected words were then marked
in the corpus. 5 Analysis
Figure 1 below shows the frequency of the
keywords in the selected apologies. As is evident A three-fold analysis of the selected keywords
from the Figure, the adjective sorry has the was done. The semantics of the words was
highest occurrence (12) as compared to the studied by using WordNet. Further, the
other three, keywords - apology, apologize and sentiments associated with the keywords were
regret, which are in the range of 5, 6 and 7 each studied using SentiWordNet and the emotion
respectively. labels were determined through WordNet-
Affect. The analysis and conclusions thus drawn
are presented below.

5.1 Semantic Analysis using WordNet

A semantic analysis of the selected keywords
was done using WordNet (3.1). We used
semantic relations such as hypernymy,
troponymy and entailment (Fellbaum, 1998) to
find the implications that the keywords may
have, as far as their communicative goals are
Figure 1: Keywords- Frequency concerned.

4.3 Determination of POS of Keywords

5 Free CLAWS WWW tagger, accessed January 15, 2017, 6 http://babelfy.org/
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/trial.html., tag set C6.
5.1.1 Verb – Apologize and Regret modifiers and are unique to them (Miller et al,
1993). The selected sense of the adjective sorry
The main aspect of an apology lies in the verb
in WordNet has the gloss as feeling or
that the tenderer chooses to use. We do an
expressing regret or sorrow or a sense of loss
analysis of the two verbs, apologize and regret,
over something done or undone. The see also
using WordNet. The selected sense of the verb
relation for this is the adjective penitent,
apologize is defined as -to acknowledge faults or
repentant, which means feeling or expressing
shortcomings or failing. Its semantic relation of
remorse for misdeeds. Thus the underlying
entailment is admit, acknowledge, which means
semantic connotation of the word restricts it to a
to declare to be true or admit the existence or
feeling or an emotional state.
reality or truth of. The superordinate concept of
The word sorry bears the emotional or the
this chain is the verb think, cogitate, cerebrate
affective load in a communication (Novielli et al,
which is defined as- to use or exercise the mind
2013). Also, an apology may or may not be
or one's power of reason in order to make
heartfelt, i.e., a person may apologize without
inferences, decisions, or arrive at a solution or
feeling remorseful. On the other hand, saying I
judgments. Thus, it is clear from the semantic
am sorry is usually seen as being what is called
hierarchy that to apologize is to undergo a
a heartfelt apology as it touches an emotional
logical thought process, the natural entailment of
chord. An example of this is the sentence in the
which is to admit to a wrong. Once the
apology number 3 which states- We are truly
wrongdoing is admitted the natural consequence
sorry for this and will ensure that this never
should be to take responsibility and offer
happens again.
amends. For instance, apology number 2 says- I
In our dataset, out of the 15 communications, 7
sincerely apologize to all Satyamites and
have the use of sorry. In these 7 letters it is used
stakeholders. This is a clear admission of
12 times.
wrongdoing.

The selected concept of the verb regret is
5.1.3 Nouns – Apology and Regret
defined as to feel remorse for, feel sorry for or
be contrite about. Its inherited hypernymy is to
The nouns are organized as an inheritance
feel, experience, which is defined as to undergo
system in WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). Under this
an emotional sensation or be in a particular
system there is a sequence of levels, a hierarchy,
state of mind. Thus to regret is to undergo a
in which the lower levels inherit the features of
feeling, or expressing what he feels about the
the top levels, plus have at least one
offended party, not bringing himself into the
distinguishing feature. The two semantic
picture as the offender. Logically speaking, the
relations of interest in the present study are
fault has not been admitted and there is no
hypernymy and hyponymy (Fellbaum, 1998).
intention of making reparations. Also, its
The selected sense of the noun apology has the
syntactic form also excludes it from the class of
gloss -an expression of regret at having caused
explicit performative verbs (Austin, 1975),
trouble for someone. It has acknowledgement as
unlike the verb apologize, which is an explicit
its direct hypernymy, which is defined as a
performative. The expression of regret sidesteps
statement acknowledging something or
the central issue of fault and does not satisfy the
someone. From the communicative perspective
aggrieved party. For example, in apology
this acknowledgment is a precursor to the
number 10, the Amazon India letter states- To
expectation of some sort of reparation or
the extent that these items offered by a third-
compensation on the part of the offended. In the
party seller in Canada offended Indian
corpus, the apology number 7, has the sentence,
sensibilities, Amazon regrets the same. Here the
We would like to tender an unconditional
word regret seems to be carefully crafted to
apology to the society at large and especially to
avoid liability and an effort to be seen as humble
the affected families and to everyone whom we
without going so far as to admit fault.
have offended. This is an unequivocal expression

of apology and shows that tenderers do not want
5.1.2 Adjective – Sorry
to make any excuses for their wrongdoing.
The gloss of selected sense of the noun regret
Adjectives are primarily used for modification of is sadness associated with some wrong done or
nouns. They have lexical organization and some disappointment. The direct hypernymy of
semantic properties that are not shared by other this is the concept of sadness which is emotions
experienced when not in a state of well-being.
Apologize/ 0 0 1
This is followed by the concept of feeling or the
Apologise
experiencing of affective and emotional states.
(Verb)
Thus the hypernymy relation makes it clear that
regret is a kind of feeling associated with
Table 1: SentiWordNet Scores of Keywords
sadness. From a communicative point of view, it

is simply an expression of an emotion on the part
In the analysis of the sentiments associated with
of the tenderer of the apology and stops short of
keywords, of particular interest are the objective
any further liability. For example, in apology
scores. The verb apologize has the highest
number 13, the Member of Parliament states, I
objective score (1.0). Its negative and positive
write to convey my regrets for the unfortunate
scores are zero. The high ObjScore (Objective
incident that took place on 23rd March 2017 in
Score) of one (1.0) implies that this verb does not
the Air India flight No. AI 852, seat No.1F.
convey any sentiment. In a public apology act,
Given that the writer only uses the noun regret,
this could entail that when an organization or
it is clear that the intent is more to get out of a
person renders an apology it distances itself from
sticky situation than to express sincere remorse.
the event or issue and takes an objective position.

Similarly the next highest ObjScore is for regret
5.2. Keywords in SentiWordNet
as a verb (0.75). Thus, both verbs - apologize and

regret- do not connect with the negative
The study of the sentiment associated with the
sentiments associated with the act of an apology.
keywords is done using SentiWordNet (3.0), a
The highest NegScore (Negative Score) is for
lexical resource which assigns to each synset of
the adjective sorry (0.75), followed by the noun
WordNet three sentiment scores: positivity,
regret which has a NegScore of 0.625. The
negativity, objectivity (Stefano et al, 2010). The
strong negative connotation of the adjective
task of finding the sentiments of the words in an
sorry could help the writer to convey his genuine
apology as expressed in online forums can be put
feeling of remorse and hence should be preferred
to a rich set of applications (Esuli and Sebastiani,
by the writer to connect with the reader at an
2007). As for public apologies these tasks can
emotional level. Since adjectives are the words
range from tracking readers’ opinions about the
that carry the most notions of sentiment, their use
sincerity of the communication to customer
in the apology can carry the sentiment most
relationship management.
effectively. This implies that the adjective sorry
The selected synsets of the keywords were
carries the highest sentimental load to convey the
searched for in SentiWordNet. The sentiment
feeling associated with act of apology.
scores of each of them were recorded and the
Interesting is the comparison between the verb
results were analyzed. Table 1 shows the
regret and noun regret. While the verb regret has
sentiment scores for positivity, negativity and
a high objective sentiment (0.75); the noun
objectivity for each of the keywords.
regret has a high NegScore (0.625). Thus, ‘I

regret’ and ‘with deep regret’- can have very
Keywords PosScore NegScore ObjScore different sentimental connotations. The verb
[0,1] [0,1] [0,1] implying neutral sentiments of the apology giver
and not connecting to remorse, guilt or
Sorry 0.125 0.75 0.125
culpability; the noun implying a strong
(Adjective)
sentiment connect.

Apology 0.375 0.5 0.125 5.3 Keywords in WordNet-Affect
(Noun)
We analyzed the results related to the keywords
Regret 0.25 0 0.75 in WordNet-Affect (Strapparava & Valitutti,
(Verb) 2004; Strapparava et al., 2006)), a linguistic
resource for the lexical representation of
Regret 0.125 0.625 0.25 affective knowledge. In this the affective
(Noun) concepts representing emotional state are
individuated by synsets marked with the a-label
EMOTION. There are also other a-labels for
those concepts representing moods, situations
eliciting emotions, or emotional responses.
Using version 1.1, we searched for the
keywords in the resource named a-synsets and
found out its corresponding affective category in
a-hierarchy. The presence of the word implied
an emotion and the absence implied the lack of
it. Table 2 shows the output for the keywords

Keyword WN-Affect 1.1

a-synsets / a-hierarchy
Diagram 1. Sub-tree of negative emotion sorrow
from WordNet Domains 3.2
sorry <adj-syn id="a#01102326" noun-
(adj) id ="n#05602279" caus- Thus it is clear that the emotion of the keywords
stat="stat"/> / found in WordNet-Affect are related to negative
<noun-syn id="n#05602279" emotion via sadness and sorrow.
categ="regret-sorrow"/>
6. Conclusion and Future Work
regret <verb-syn id="v#01225879"
(verb) noun-id ="n#05602852" caus- Due to a mix of factors such as greater media
stat="stat"/>/ vigilance, the viral nature of social media, there
<noun-syn id="n#05602852" is certainly an increased willingness to issue
categ="repentance"/> public apologies in India (Kaul et.al, 2015).
However, the public apologies available in the
Regret <noun-syn id="n#05602279"
public domain are still limited. Hence no
(noun) categ="regret-sorrow"/>/
generalizations can be drawn from this limited
<categ name="regret-sorrow"
corpus. This study aims to only suggest a
isa="sorrow"/>
direction for future studies on a much bigger
corpus.
From the apology texts available in the Indian
Apologiz no result
context, we posit that the written apology can be
e
an effective tool for damage repair only when it
crafted to communicate honest intent and a
apology no result
sincere tone. Thus, the words chosen should
Table 2. Output of Wordnet-Affect 1.1 effectively convey the writer’s intent.
The main observations drawn from our analysis
Since the words sorry, and regret (both as noun of the keywords using WordNet, SentiWordNet
and verb) are present in the resource we conclude and WordNet-Affect are:
that these words bear emotion. The affective ● Apologize (verb) – it is an act of
category of the adjective sorry is regret-sorrow cogitation, with a high objective score
via the noun (n#05602279) and regret-sorrow is and no emotion label, it can be used in
a sorrow. The verb regret has its affective formal communication where
category as repentance via noun (n#05602852), emotionally laden words are to be
which in turn is a compunction. The noun regret avoided.
has the affective category regret-sorrow which ● Regret (noun) – is a kind of sadness,
is a sorrow. Both the adjective sorry and the verb with a high negative score and has the
regret are stative, which means that the emotion emotion label of sorrow. However, it is
related to these words are owned or felt by the stative, hence expresses the feeling of
speaker. The keywords apology (noun) and the tenderer and holds no further
apologize (verb) were not present in WordNet- promise.
Affect and hence they can said to be devoid of ● Sorry (adjective) – is a kind of feeling,
any emotion. with a high negative score and emotion
label of repentance. This keyword has
the highest emotional load and can be by mapping it to the readers’ perception of these
effective in situations where emotions keywords. It will also be interesting to do a
and sentiments are strongly involved. cross-lingual analysis by studying the lexical
● Apology (noun) – is a kind of semantics of apology related words in native
acknowledgement, which has a high Indian languages.
negative sentiment but no emotion It is also proposed to make this study
label. interdisciplinary by lending it to computational
● Regret (verb) – is a kind of feeling, analysis. With an increased data set the study can
which has a high objective score but an be used to build a supervised sentiment analyzer
emotion label of repentance. using lexicons orfor text categorization
Of particular interest to us were the keywords according to affective relevance, and opinion
apology (noun) and regret (verb). We compare analysis.
the SentiWordNet scores and the WordNet-
Affect labels of these two keywords. While
emotion is defined as a relatively brief episode Acknowledgement
of response to the evaluation of an external or
internal event as being of major significance. We thank Dr. Sridhar Swaminathan, post-
(such as angry, sad, joyful, fearful, ashamed, doctoral fellow at Bennett University, India, for
proud, elated, desperate), a sentiment is the his help in accessing WordNet-Affect.
positive or negative orientation that a person

expresses toward some object or situation
(Scherer, 2000). Thus we can posit that the word
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