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Proverbs or Pythian Oracles? Sentiments and Emotions in Greek Sayings

Proverbs are among the most fascinating language phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. Yet, much of the global landscape of proverbs remains underexplored, as many cultures preserve their traditional wisdom within their own communities due to the oral tradition of the phenomenon. Taking advantage of the current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we focus on Greek proverbs, analyzing their sentiment and emotion. Departing from an annotated dataset of Greek proverbs, (1) we propose a multi-label annotation framework and dataset that captures the emotional variability of the proverbs, (2) we up-scale to local varieties, (3) we sketch a map of Greece that provides an overview of the distribution of emotions. Our findings show that the interpretation of proverbs is multidimensional, a property manifested through both multi-labeling and instance-level polarity. LLMs can capture and reproduce this complexity, and can therefore help us better understand the proverbial landscape of a place, as in the case of Greece, where surprise and anger compete and coexist within proverbs.