“Shakespeare in the Vectorian Age” – An evaluation of different word embeddings and NLP parameters for the detection of Shakespeare quotes

Bernhard Liebl, Manuel Burghardt


Abstract
In this paper we describe an approach for the computer-aided identification of Shakespearean intertextuality in a corpus of contemporary fiction. We present the Vectorian, which is a framework that implements different word embeddings and various NLP parameters. The Vectorian works like a search engine, i.e. a Shakespeare phrase can be entered as a query, the underlying collection of fiction books is then searched for the phrase and the passages that are likely to contain the phrase, either verbatim or as a paraphrase, are presented in a ranked results list. While the Vectorian can be used via a GUI, in which many different parameters can be set and combined manually, in this paper we present an ablation study that automatically evaluates different embedding and NLP parameter combinations against a ground truth. We investigate the behavior of different parameters during the evaluation and discuss how our results may be used for future studies on the detection of Shakespearean intertextuality.
Anthology ID:
2020.latechclfl-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Stefania DeGaetano, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCHCLfL
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
58–68
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.latechclfl-1.7
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Cite (ACL):
Bernhard Liebl and Manuel Burghardt. 2020. “Shakespeare in the Vectorian Age” – An evaluation of different word embeddings and NLP parameters for the detection of Shakespeare quotes. In Proceedings of the 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 58–68, Online. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Shakespeare in the Vectorian Age” – An evaluation of different word embeddings and NLP parameters for the detection of Shakespeare quotes (Liebl & Burghardt, LaTeCHCLfL 2020)
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https://aclanthology.org/2020.latechclfl-1.7.pdf