Literary critics often attempt to uncover meaning in a single work of literature through careful reading and analysis. Applying natural language processing methods to aid in such literary analyses remains a challenge in digital humanities. While most previous work focuses on "distant reading" by algorithmically discovering high-level patterns from large collections of literary works, here we sharpen the focus of our methods to a single literary theory about Italo Calvino's postmodern novel Invisible Cities, which consists of 55 short descriptions of imaginary cities. Calvino has provided a classification of these cities into eleven thematic groups, but literary scholars disagree as to how trustworthy his categorization is. Due to the unique structure of this novel, we can computationally weigh in on this debate: we leverage pretrained contextualized representations to embed each city's description and use unsupervised methods to cluster these embeddings. Additionally, we compare results of our computational approach to similarity judgments generated by human readers. Our work is a first step towards incorporating natural language processing into literary criticism.
Most previous work within the NLP community applies distant reading @cite_1 to large collections of books, focusing on modeling different aspects of narratives such as plots and event sequences , characters , and narrative similarity . In the same vein, researchers in computational literary analysis have combined statistical techniques and linguistics theories to perform quantitative analysis on large narrative texts , but these attempts largely rely on techniques such as word counting, topic modeling, and naive Bayes classifiers and are therefore not able to capture the meaning of sentences or paragraphs . While these works discover general patterns from multiple literary works, we are the first to use cutting-edge NLP techniques to engage with specific literary criticism about a single narrative.
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While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g., written in an unknown alphabet) is compatible with a natural language and to which language it could belong. The approach is based on three types of statistical measurements, i.e. obtained from first-order statistics of word properties in a text, from the topology of complex networks representing texts, and from intermittency concepts where text is treated as a time series. Comparative experiments were performed with the New Testament in 15 different languages and with distinct books in English and Portuguese in order to quantify the dependency of the different measurements on the language and on the story being told in the book. The metrics found to be informative in distinguishing real texts from their shuffled versions include assortativity, degree and selectivity of words. As an illustration, we analyze an undeciphered medieval manuscript known as the Voynich Manuscript. We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts. We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it. Because we were able to identify statistical measurements that are more dependent on the syntax than on the semantics, the framework may also serve for text analysis in language-dependent applications. In this volume, Matthew L. Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societ al linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture. Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections. Traditional approaches to the task of ACE event extraction primarily rely on elaborately designed features and complicated natural language processing (NLP) tools. These traditional approaches lack generalization, take a large amount of human effort and are prone to error propagation and data sparsity problems. This paper proposes a novel event-extraction method, which aims to automatically extract lexical-level and sentence-level features without using complicated NLP tools. We introduce a word-representation model to capture meaningful semantic regularities for words and adopt a framework based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to capture sentence-level clues. However, CNN can only capture the most important information in a sentence and may miss valuable facts when considering multiple-event sentences. We propose a dynamic multi-pooling convolutional neural network (DMCNN), which uses a dynamic multi-pooling layer according to event triggers and arguments, to reserve more crucial information. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. There is a small but growing body of research on statistical scripts, models of event sequences that allow probabilistic inference of implicit events from documents. These systems operate on structured verb-argument events produced by an NLP pipeline. We compare these systems with recent Recurrent Neural Net models that directly operate on raw tokens to predict sentences, finding the latter to be roughly comparable to the former in terms of predicting missing events in documents.