Casting Light on Invisible Cities: Computationally Engaging with Literary Criticism

04/17/2019
by   Shufan Wang, et al.
0

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.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/26/2019

City2City: Translating Place Representations across Cities

Large mobility datasets collected from various sources have allowed us t...
research
02/24/2022

From Natural Language to Simulations: Applying GPT-3 Codex to Automate Simulation Modeling of Logistics Systems

Our work is the first attempt to apply Natural Language Processing to au...
research
08/05/2019

Thoth: Improved Rapid Serial Visual Presentation using Natural Language Processing

Thoth is a tool designed to combine many different types of speed readin...
research
07/11/2022

Learning Mutual Fund Categorization using Natural Language Processing

Categorization of mutual funds or Exchange-Traded-funds (ETFs) have long...
research
01/15/2021

Nowcasting Gentrification Using Airbnb Data

There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed g...
research
06/18/2021

All You Can Embed: Natural Language based Vehicle Retrieval with Spatio-Temporal Transformers

Combining Natural Language with Vision represents a unique and interesti...
research
12/19/2012

When you talk about "Information processing" what actually do you have in mind?

"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning i...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset