Literary and Linguistic Computing - Advance Access

CETA in the Context of the Coruna Corpus

Crespo Garcia, B., Moskowich-Spiegel Fandino, I. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:09:24 PST

The Coruña Corpus (CC): a Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing is a project on which the MUSTE group has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruña (Spain). It has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines (excluding medicine) between 1650 and 1900. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation at all linguistic levels, although, in principle, phonology is not included among our intended research topics. At the same time, we believe that the CC is an excellent tool for the study of scientific register/style at particular moments in history: it also offers the researcher the chance to analyse how this ‘specific English’ behaves from a synchronic point of view. To allow for socio-linguistic research using these scientific texts, we have included, when possible, some personal details about the author of each sample and, even, about the work from which the sample has been extracted in a separate file. From a technical point of view, all the texts have been keyed in following the Text Encoding Initiative conventions and saved in the XML format. The use of an extended mark-up language will make wide distribution and exploitation possible. Moreover, in order to retrieve information from the compiled data, we have decided to create a corpus management tool. Loosely speaking, the Coruña Corpus Tool is an Information Retrieval system, where the indexed textual repository is a set of compiled documents that constitutes the CC.

What's In A Word-List? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction. Dawn Archer (ed.).

Hendrickx, I. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:11:07 PST

Quantitative evidence for a hypothesis regarding the attribution of early Buddhist translations

Hung, J.-J., Bingenheimer, M., Wiles, S. — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:07:17 PST

This article provides quantitative evidence for a hypothesis concerning fourth-century translations of Indian Buddhist texts from Prakrit and Sanskrit into Chinese. Using a Variable Length n-Gram Feature Extraction Algorithm, principal component analysis and average linkage clustering we are able to show that 24 sutras, attributed by the tradition to different translators, were in fact translated by the same translator or group of translators. Since part of our method is based on assigning weight to n-grams, the analysis is capable of yielding distinctive features, i.e. strings of Chinese characters, that are characteristic of the translator(s). This is the first time that these techniques have successfully been applied to medieval Chinese texts. The results of this study open up a number of new directions for the lexicographic and syntactic study of early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts.

Old spellings, new methods: automated procedures for indeterminate linguistic data

Craig, H., Whipp, R. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:46:34 PDT

The authors have worked over several years on a software tool to make word counts from an archive of old-spelling early modern English plays and poems. In this article we present the outcome, a computational model for dealing automatically with variant spelling, implemented in an application which we call an ‘Intelligent Archive’. We also reflect on the perspective on Early Modern English, and on the probabilistic aspect of language in general, gained from working through the practical problems which arose in establishing the model.

Etymological trends in the Sanskrit vocabulary

Hellwig, O. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:59:59 PDT

The article examines how the etymological composition of the Sanskrit lexicon is influenced by time and whether this composition can be used to date Sanskrit texts automatically. For this purpose, statistical tests are applied to a corpus of lexically analyzed texts. Results reported in the article may contribute to the diachronic lexicography of Sanskrit and help to develop computational methods for analyzing anonymous and undated Sanskrit texts.

Mining a corpus of biographical texts using keywords

Conway, M. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:36:59 PDT

Using statistically derived keywords to characterize texts has become an important research method for digital humanists and corpus linguists in areas such as literary analysis and the exploration of genre difference. Keywords—and the associated concepts of ‘keyness’ and ‘key-keyness’—have inspired conferences and workshops, many and varied research papers, and are central to several modern corpus processing tools. In this article, we present evidence that (at least for the task of biographical sentence classification) frequent words characterize texts better than keywords or key-keywords. Using the naïve Bayes learning algorithm in conjunction with frequency-, keyword-, and key-keyword-based text representation to classify a corpus of biographical sentences, we discovered that the use of frequent words alone provided a classification accuracy better than either the keyword or key-keyword representations at a statistically significant level. This result suggests that (for the biographical sentence classification task at least) frequent words characterize texts better than keywords derived using more computationally intensive methods.

Research portals in the arts and humanities

Brown, S., Greengrass, M. — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:37:42 PDT

There has been dramatic growth in information communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure for the arts and humanities research community in recent years in the UK and elsewhere. No domain-wide survey of how researchers are using ICT and what they perceive their future needs to be has been undertaken previously and consequently what is needed in terms of a generic ICT infrastructure to support arts and humanities research is not well understood. The RePAH (Research Portals for the Arts and Humanities) Project is an AHRC funded study into the user needs for information portals to support research in the Arts and Humanities. It uses a combination of questionnaires, focus groups and Delphi opinion gathering, combined with server log-analysis data, to identify users’ information discovery strategies, Internet usage patterns, awareness and attitudes towards current services and technologies and responses to what future portal developments can deliver. Responsibility for funding this kind of infrastructure is split between a number of different agencies. This makes sector-wide information gathering for strategic planning and development difficult. The results of this study may help providers to understand where the priorities lie for the arts and humanities research community and help users to appreciate some of the possibilities within their grasp.

TreeForm: Explaining and exploring grammar through syntax trees

Derrick, D., Archambault, D. — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:01:56 PDT

Linguists studying grammar often describe their models using a syntax tree. Drawing a syntax tree involves the depiction of a rooted tree with additional syntactic features using specific domain conventions. TreeForm assists users in developing syntax trees, complete with movement lines, coreference, and feature association, in order to explore their syntactic theories and explain them to their colleagues. It is a drag-and-drop alternative to LaTeX and labelled bracket notation tools already available, which many linguists find difficult to use. We compare the output of TreeForm to those existing tools and show that it is able to better respect the conventions of the domain. We assess how easily linguists learn to use TreeForm through a series of cognitive walkthroughs. Our reviews find that TreeForm is a viable alternative to existing tools.

Two tough nuts to crack: did Shakespeare write the 'Shakespeare' portions of Sir Thomas More and Edward III? Part II: Conclusion

Elliott, W. E. Y., Valenza, R. J. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:10:56 PDT

Part I of this series, [doi:10.1093/llc/fqp029], applied our ‘new-optics’ methodology to the ‘Shakespeare’ scenes in STMO and concluded that it had too much Shakespeare discrepancy to fit comfortably into the Canon. We considered it an improbable, but not impossible Shakespeare ascription for the 1600s and placed it for now in the High Apocrypha. We thought it extremely improbable that the whole of STMO could be by Shakespeare, or that the ‘Shakespeare’ parts could have been written in the 1590s. Part II, published here, addresses the ‘Shakespeare’ scenes of Edward III. Taken separately, four of the five ‘Shakespeare’ blocks of Edw3 fall inside our Shakespeare ballpark. So does a sixth block, scenes 4.05–4.09. If we followed the consensus strictly, all five Shakespeare blocks, taken as a group, would not make a probable solo Shakespeare ascription. However, if we switched 4.04 to ‘non-Shakespeare,’ and 4.05–4.09 to ‘Shakespeare,’ the revised Shakespeare blocks would be a plausible Shakespeare ascription even as a group, justifying the inclusion of Edw3 in the Canon as partly Shakespeare's: 1.02; 2.01–2.02; and 4.05–4.09. The odds that the ‘non-Shakespeare’ scenes, collectively, or individually (except for 4.05–4.09) could be his are vanishingly low. The full article may be found online at http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/facultysites/govt/FacMember/welliott/UTConference/2ToughNuts.pdf

Two tough nuts to crack: did Shakespeare write the 'Shakespeare' portions of Sir Thomas More and Edward III? Part I

Elliott, W. E. Y., Valenza, R. J. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:10:55 PDT

Using ‘new-optics’ stylometric measures of comparative Shakespeare discrepancy we calculate the odds that the ‘Shakespeare’ scenes in STMO and Edw3 could have come by chance from a person of Shakespeare's writing habits. For STMO, if written in the 1600s, the ‘Shakespeare’ Hand D-plus verse portion is seven to twenty-six times less likely to be Shakespeare's than Shakespeare's own farthest-outlier baseline threshold block. Shakespeare authorship for it in the 1600s seems to us improbable but not impossible. In STMO were written in the 1590s, it would be ten times less probable, and not such a close call. The odds that Shakespeare could have written the entire play at any time are vanishingly low. In terms of Shakespeare discrepancy, we would say that Hand D-plus belongs more in the high Apocrypha than in the Canon. Taken separately, four of the five ‘Shakespeare’ blocks of Edw3 fall inside our Shakespeare ballpark. So does a sixth block, scenes 4.05 to 4.09. If we followed the consensus strictly, all five Shakespeare blocks, taken as a group, would not make a probable solo Shakespeare ascription. However, if we switched 4.04 to ‘non-Shakespeare,’ and 4.05-.09 to ‘Shakespeare,’ the revised Shakespeare blocks would be a plausible Shakespeare ascription even as a group, justifying the inclusion of Edw3 in the Canon as partly Shakespeare's: 1.02; 2.01–2.02; and 4.05–4.09. The odds that the ‘non-Shakespeare’ scenes, collectively, or individually (except for 4.05–4.09) could be his are vanishingly low. This is the first of a two-part series, addressed to Shakespeare's hand in Sir Thomas More. Part II, on Shakespeare's hand in Edward III, will appear in the next issue. The full article may be found online at http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/facultysites/govt/FacMember/welliott/UTConference/2ToughNuts.pdf