Combining quantitative narrative analysis and predictive modeling - an eye tracking study

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (Jacobs et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2017), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning- based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials (cf. Jacobs, 2015c)

The Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus: Exemplary Quantitative Narrative Analyses

This paper describes a corpus of about 3,000 English literary texts with about 250 million words extracted from the Gutenberg project that span a range of genres from both fiction and non-fiction written by more than 130 authors (e.g., Darwin, Dickens, Shakespeare). Quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) is used to explore a cleaned subcorpus, the Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus (GEPC), which comprises over 100 poetic texts with around two million words from about 50 authors (e.g., Keats, Joyce, Wordsworth). Some exemplary QNA studies show author similarities based on latent semantic analysis, significant topics for each author or various text-analytic metrics for George Eliot’s poem “How Lisa Loved the King” and James Joyce’s “Chamber Music,” concerning, e.g., lexical diversity or sentiment analysis. The GEPC is particularly suited for research in Digital Humanities, Computational Stylistics, or Neurocognitive Poetics, e.g., as training and test corpus for stimulus development and control in empirical studies

Comunicación publicitaria: construcción de potencial de significado a través de la gramática disyuntiva

Communication through language, irrespective of the model of its structure and deployment, entails the making of meanings. The ways that advertisers produce meaning through disjunctive grammar is the concern of this study. Thus, the analysis considered twelve advertisements for examination for meaning deductions. The Hallidayan ‘below the clause’ was the conceptual facilitator of meanings in texts. With the application of technological tools of the table and graph, the study drew a conclusion that nominal group (NG) is the most employed device to fascinate readers to consumption. Having observed that advertisers utilize health matters, beliefs and values, monetary gifts, contents of commodities, etc. to persuade consumers, the study suggests that advertisements could assist in revealing the true contents of the advertised products for proper decision making on the products to patronize. Such behavior could also sensitize the public from being recalcitrant to reading advertising artifacts which is a gain to advertisers themselves. Qualquer que seja o modelo que guie sua estrutura e desenvolvimento, a comunicação por meio da linguagem implica a criação de significados. Os publicistas parecem entender que a criação de significado na comunicação com o público-alvo não precisa depender da cláusula ou da oração. As produções de significado podem ser mordazes e com estruturas fragmentadas; com isso, o estudo que deu origem ao presente artigo interessou-se pela forma como os especialistas em publicidade produzem significado por meio da gramática disjuntiva. Analisaram-se doze anúncios de bebidas e telecomunicações, a fim de explicar os significados. O conceito de “cláusula dependente”, estabelecido por Halliday, foi o facilitador conceitual dos significados nos textos. O uso de ferramentas tecnológicas como tabelas e gráficos ajudou a calcular as frequências das instalações disjuntivas dos textos. Chegou-se à conclusão de que a frase nominal é o dispositivo mais empregado para interessar os leitores no consumo. Tendo-se observado que os anunciantes utilizavam assuntos de saúde, crenças e valores, presentes monetários, conteúdos de produtos básicos, globalização etc. para persuadir os consumidores, o estudo sugeriu que os anúncios poderiam seguir empregando construções com signos de pontuação para revelar os verdadeiros conteúdos dos produtos anunciados, de tal forma que tomassem as decisões adequadas ao favorecê-los. Tal comportamento de implantação disjuntiva também poderia levar o público a ler materiais publicitários no lugar de recusá-los, portanto, de uma maneira ou de outra, convencer o público é o objetivo real da persuasão na publicidade.Cualquiera que sea el modelo que guíe su estructura y desarrollo, la comunicación a través del lenguaje implica la creación de significados. Los publicistas parecen entender que la creación de significado en la comunicación con el público objetivo no necesita depender de la cláusula o dea la oración. Las producciones de significado pueden ser mordaces y con estructuras fragmentadas; con esto, el estudio que dio origen al presente artículo se interesó por la forma en que los expertos en publicidad producen significado a través de la gramática disyuntiva. Se analizaron doce anuncios de bebidas y telecomunicaciones, en aras de explicar los significados. El concepto de “debajo de la cláusula”, acuñado por Halliday, fue el facilitador conceptual de los significados en los textos. El uso de herramientas tecnológicas como tablas y gráficos ayudó a calcular las frecuencias de las instalaciones disyuntivas de los textos. Se llegó a la conclusión de que la frase nominal es el dispositivo más empleado para interesar a los lectores en el consumo. Habiéndose observado que los anunciantes utilizaban asuntos de salud, creencias y valores, regalos monetarios, contenidos de productos básicos, globalización, etc. para persuadir a los consumidores, el estudio sugirió que los anuncios podrían seguir empleando construcciones con signos de puntuación para revelar los verdaderos contenidos de los productos anunciados, de tal forma que se tomaran las decisiones adecuadas al favorecerlos. Tal comportamiento de despliegue disyuntivo también podría llevar al público a leer materiales publicitarios en lugar de rechazarlos, en tanto que, de una manera u otra, convencer al público es el objetivo real de la persuasión en la publicidad.https://revistas.udem.edu.co/index.php/anagramas/article/view/215

Guess who? Multilingual approach for the automated generation of author-stylized poetry

This paper addresses the problem of stylized text generation in a multilingual setup. A version of a language model based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network with extended phonetic and semantic embeddings is used for stylized poetry generation. The quality of the resulting poems generated by the network is estimated through bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), a survey and a new cross-entropy based metric that is suggested for the problems of such type. The experiments show that the proposed model consistently outperforms random sample and vanilla-LSTM baselines, humans also tend to associate machine generated texts with the target author

Using genetic algorithms to create meaningful poetic text

Work carried out when all authors were at the University of Edinburgh.Peer reviewedPostprin

The poetry as reliable evidence of linguistic phenomena

Many linguists refuse to believe that poetic and especially metrical - texts can provide reliable evidence of linguistic phenomena. In this article, I show that the Medieval Greek poetry represents an exception. By means of a case-study I demonstrate that the metre of the does not constitute a straitjacket for the language, but actually presents a flexible system: a comparison of the distribution of the object clitic pronouns (OCP) in the two parallel manuscripts in which the 14th century Chronicle of Morea has been preserved not only confirms the established rules for OCP distribution but also reveals that the allows many rephrasing possibilities on all levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax)

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)