5 research outputs found

    Identifying Textual Clusters with Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Slides)

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    Slides for a guest lecture given for Peter Gurry's New Testament Textual Criticism class. The talk covers the approach and results of the paper "Biclustering Readings and Manuscripts via Non-negative Matrix Factorization, with Application to the Text of Jude," Andrews University Seminary Studies 57.1 (2019) as well as some unpublished results obtained with a different dataset

    Biclustering Readings and Manuscripts via Non-negative Matrix Factorization, with Application to the Text of Jude

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    The text-critical practice of grouping witnesses into families or texttypes often faces two obstacles: the methodological question of how exactly to isolate the groups, given the chicken-and-egg relationship between “good” group readings and “good” group manuscripts, and contamination in the manuscript tradition. I introduce non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as a simple, automated, and efficient solution to both problems. Within minutes, NMF can cluster hundreds of manuscripts and readings simultaneously, producing an output that details potential contamination according to an easy-to-interpret mixture model. I apply this method to Wasserman’s extensive collation of the Epistle of Jude, showing that the resulting clusters correspond to human-identified textual families and their characteristic readings ccorrectly divide witnesses into their groups. Due to its demonstrated accuracy, versatility, and speed, NMF could replace prior state-of-the-art classification methods and find fruitful application in a number of text-critical settings
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